Don't Buy The Left's Spin On Iran

This has never been a very political administration. To a fault, President Bush has consistently done what he believes to be the right thing to do rather than the popular thing.

His poll numbers have tanked and he doesn't really seem to care.

Despite the fact that he has been attacked mercilessly by Democrats in an unprecedentedly vile fashion for the last eight years, he never fires back or uses the opposition's vitriol in order to gain politically.

Gone is the take no prisoners, win by any means, political style of the Clintons, although it’s trying to make a comeback.

I like Bush's style. A good President is supposed to stay above the political in order to focus on....you know.....the nation's problems and stuff.

The NIE report on Iran released last week however, gave the president the political equivalent of a massive club with which to bludgeon his political foes over the head. Repeatedly. But Bush missed it.

The fact that Iran suspended its nuclear weapons program in the fall of 2003 shows us that the invasion of Iraq has had incredibly positive repercussions on the Middle East and by default on the world.

One of the key goals of the invasion--to deter nations run by brutal totalitarian regimes from even thinking about buying or making WMD's--has worked perfectly.

At this point, every crazy dictator in the world knows that if he so much as acquires a weapon of mass destruction in a dream, he runs the risk of having his government toppled or having billions in nuclear technology blown up by the United States.

For all of you liberals out there: This is good. We want this kind of thing to happen, because it prevents nukes and horrible chemical weapons from being put in the hands of terrorists. It also prevents Israel being completely destroyed.

Libya.
North Korea.
Iran.

Like dominoes, the nations that we worry most about actually using an apocalyptic weapon have had to give up their dreams of holding their respective areas of the world hostage by threatening to lob a nuke into neighboring countries.

The principle of preemption has worked.

Democrats, of course, would never admit this but the increasingly positive news coming out of Iraq means that they will be unable to deny it forever. There is an incredible transformation underway in the Middle East.

The sour taste over Iraq remains in the mouths of much of the American electorate and this has allowed the Democrats to spin the NIE report as a negative. They say it is a further indictment of Bush's credibility and the sad state of our intelligence gathering abilities.

As usual, the "Bush lied" argument will never go anywhere. It's bogus. And while some will believe it now due to far-left sites that peddle misinformation, the accusation that Bush misled the American people either now or in the lead up to the Iraq war will never survive in the scope of history.


But some still don't get it. Liberal columnist Matthew Yglesias was allowed to throw this

gem

onto the pages of Saturday’s L.A. Times:

"The problem with the Bush preemption doctrine isn't merely that it's been applied when the intelligence was lacking but that the underlying idea is unsound. By casting America as the threatening aggressor, it encourages countries to acquire weapons of mass destruction to defend themselves, as it undermines the sort of international cooperation that's necessary to halt the spread of those weapons. On some level, Democrats seem to recognize this, but if they're politically too timid to rule out the failed policy of preemption, they can't offer a coherent rationale for an alternative approach. Instead, they sometimes seem to be offering more of the same, only a bit less so. Thanks to the latest intelligence, preemption is moot for the short run."

Clearly this is bass ackwards. By casting America as the "aggressor",rogue nations appear to be encouraged to stop in their attempts to acquire weapons of mass destruction? Like in Iran? The nation that you're talking about in the article you're writing, Matt? Right? Wait.....did I miss something?


We attacked Iraq. A couple of months later, their neighbor, who policy minds were incredibly worried about in the wake of 9/11, stopped making their nuke. That seems like a fairly simple scenario that anyone familiar with the concept of "cause and effect" should be able to grasp.

The reason that the Democrats won't rule out the policy of pre-emption is because they know it works. It's like ruling out the policy of brushing your teeth as a preemptive strike against cavities.

Yglesias also claims that the discovery of the recent intelligence"....signals that the hawks inside the Bush administration have lost. No U.S. airstrikes will be forthcoming."

Who? What hawks in the Bush Administration wanted to bomb Iran's nuke facilities? Does Matthew Yglesias have some sort of inside information about what Dick Cheney was recommending the President do about the Iran situation?

Does his position as associate editor of Atlantic Monthly allow him access to that type of inside information? I doubt it.

The incresingly partisan Joe Klein makes the same accusation in this week's Time Magazine, yet he provides no evidence to back up his claim.


Making an assumption based on guesses as to what is going on in the White House and then presenting it as fact is bad journalism. I expect that kind of thing from Yglesias, but not from a respected journalist like Klein.

Bush should have launched a pre-emptive strike on liberals like Yglesias as soon as the NIE report was released in order to connect the absence of Iran's nuke program to the absence of Saddam Hussein’s vicious regime.

The modern left has a long history of being wrong on foreign policy matters and then being incapable of admitting their mistakes once they’re evident.

Many liberals are still incapable of conceding that Ronald Reagan was instrumental in the collapse of the Soviet Empire.

Their refusal to acknowledge the success of the President’s surge strategy would be laughable if it wasn’t so depressing. In my favorite surge delusion, some liberals imply that the only reason that the civilian death toll in Iraq has dropped so dramatically over the past few months is because most of the Iraqi’s are already dead.

The fact that guys like Yglesias were so quick to spin the NIE's conclusions into a negative, in addition to the administration’s unwillingness to explain to the American people the likely reasons why Iran suspended its nuclear program in 2003, will probably allow for some short term political gains for the Bush haters and those against the use of military force for any reason whatsoever.

However, those of us who are able to separate the reality from the pathological spin of the left wing media, are becoming increasingly confident in the knowledge that history will cast the decision to topple the government of Iraq in a positive light and that so-called “cowboy diplomacy” has worked far more efficiently than most in the media are willing to admit.

- Dan Joseph

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