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Bombed if you do, Bombed if you Don't
By Ron Paul
12/11/07 "ICH" -- -- The latest National Intelligence Estimate
has been greeted by a mixture of relief and alarm. As I have
been saying all along, Iran indeed poses no quantifiable
imminent nuclear threat to us or her neighbors. It is with much
alarm, however, that we see the administration continue to
ratchet up the war rhetoric as if nothing has changed.
Indeed nothing has changed from the administration's
perspective, as they have had this latest intelligence report
for some time. Only this week has it been made known to the
public. They want it both ways with Iran. On the one hand, they
discredit the report entirely, despite it being one of the most
comprehensive intelligence reports on the subject, with over
1,000 source notes in the document. On the other hand, when
discrediting it fails, they claim that the timing of the
abandonment of the weapons program, just as we were invading
Iraq, means our pressure must have worked, so we must keep it up
with a new round of even tougher sanctions. Russia and China are
not buying this, apparently, and again we are finding ourselves
on a lonely tenuous platform on the world stage.
The truth is Iran is being asked to do the logically impossible
feat of proving a negative. They are being presumed guilty until
proven innocent because there is no evidence with which to
indict them. There is still no evidence that Iran, a signatory
of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, has ever violated the
treaty's terms – and the terms clearly state that Iran is
allowed to pursue nuclear energy for peaceful, civilian energy
needs. The United States cannot unilaterally change the terms of
the treaty, and it is unfair and unwise diplomatically to impose
sanctions for no legitimate reason.
Are we to think that Iran hasn't noticed the duplicitous
treatment being received by so-called nuclear threats around the
globe? If they have been paying attention, and I think they
have, they would see that if countries do have a nuclear weapon,
they tend to be left alone, or possibly get a subsidy, but if
they do not gain such a weapon then we threaten them. Why
wouldn't they want to pursue a nuclear weapon if that is our
current foreign policy? The fact remains, there is no evidence
they actually have one, or could have one any time soon, even if
they immediately resumed a weapons program.
Our badly misguided foreign policy has already driven this
country's economy to the brink of bankruptcy with one war based
on misinformation. It is unthinkable that despite lack of any
evidence of a threat, some are still charging headstrong into
yet another war in the Middle East when what we ought to be
doing is coming home from Iraq, coming home from Korea, coming
home from Germany and defending our own soil. We do not need to
be interfering in the internal affairs of other countries and
waging war when honest trade, friendship, and diplomacy are the
true paths to peace and prosperity.
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