Disarm

I read this article and it seems as though Dick Cheney is threatening people again. He gave a speech making sure Iran knows that he'll shoot them in the face if they take another step toward that nuclear missile.

A couple of things about this story got me. The first was when did Cheny start making speeches again? I thought he was hiding in a secret bunker attached to a defibrilator, only taking breaks to pepper his buddies with life-threatening buckshot.

The next was this: Can other countries take our threats of military force seriously? They can turn on the news and see how poorly Iraq is going and how overextended we are. I think it's pretty much common knowledge that the administration doesn't have the support from the public or the sheer manpower in the military to take on Iran. And wouldn't the political situation in Iraq become even more strained by moves against Iran? Iran is dominated by Shiites that are quite friendly with the majority of the Iraqi government.

It just seems as though moving agianst Iran with military force is ill-conceived.

On top of that, there's the hypocrisy behind the "NPT" reasons the administration is giving. How can we hold countries to Iran to a standard of "No New Nuclear Weapons" when this administration has spent considerable amounts of time trying to develop "Nuclear Bunker Busters?" How can we have credibility in the negotiations when we ourselves are violating the Non-Proliferation Treaty?

Jimmy Carter set his administration to a goal of "Zero-Nuclear Weapons." I think Bush would get alot further with the Iranians with this sort of rhetoric. He's been taking pages out of Carters playbook, this is a page he should look at. I think Iran would respond a lot better to us offering to dismantle a nuclear bomb aimed at their country for every concession they make about the nuclear power.

And is there any proof that they're even developing nuclear weapons? The administration is negotiating on one big hypothetical.

It sounds dangerous.