The Associated Press reported today that Mohammed ElBaradei, the Chief UN Weapons Inspector for Nuclear Weapons and head of the International Atomic Energy Agency says in effect that the Iranians need to come clean on their Nuclear Weapons programs or lack of them. When Mr. ElBaradei says these things, I trust him and listen. He is the same Inspector who said in a lengthy report from on the job inspection that Iraq no longer had a Nuclear Weapons program. That was three weeks before we attacked Iraq. The Bush administration ignored him then as they ignored Hans Blix who reported no Chemical or Biological weapons had been found in Iraq prior to the war. The US and the Bush administration has been paying the price for that in international trust and prestige ever since. We are about to pay another way.
With our troops bogged down in Iraq and our supplies stretched thin, we have no practical way to deal with this impending situation with Iran if diplomacy fails and the Iranians know it. Nor do we have any reasonable means of dealing with North Korea or China should either country pull any foolishness. They know it too. We would have to resort to means beyond the practical and reasonable if we wanted to respond militarily to another serious conflict. That of course means using Nuclear weapons.
Iran, by the way, has unwittingly done three things that increased the possibility of us using nuclear weapons against them if we perceive that they are on the brink of joining the nuclear club. First, they elected a radical Islamic leader. Second, they dispersed their nuclear research and their ballistic missile sites throughout their country such that surgical strikes would have little chance of removing the threat of Iran's burgeoning nuclear capability. Third, the leader of Iran has suggested that another nation-state, one within range of Iran's existing ballistic missile arsenal, should be wiped off the face of the earth and the capability to commit such mass murder would be in his hands if Iran became a nuclear power.
