Iran - And The Democratic Party

This is almost enough for me to hang up my keyboard, look forward to summer and then football and pretend it's all just a bad dream.

As rhetoric builds, Democrats in Congress lie low on Iran. Most aides refused to speculate whether Democrats might support a military operation in Iran. Several aides acknowledged, however, that some Democrats in Congress could support a military strike . . . Any military action Democrats supported, one aide said, would not include the use of nuclear weapons.

The only reason I know it isn't a bad dream and can't hang up the keyboard is because we have been here before. In fact the nightmare is still going on, getting worse

The U.S. government is now spending nearly $10 billion a month in Iraq and Afghanistan, up from $8.2 billion a year ago, a new Congressional Research Service report found. Annual war costs in Iraq are easily outpacing the $61 billion a year that the United States spent in Vietnam between 1964 and 1972, in today's dollars.

I think a nuclear Iran with Iraq as its client state is a serious threat to global economic stability, but I am also sure that Iran believes honestly that it must acquire nuclear deterrent to stave off US imperialistic aspirations, after all they are now surrounded on all sides by the US military which is under than command of the decider in chief - not someone who has shown much proclivity for diplomacy. It's the shoot first plan later gang, as Thomas Friedman wrote

If these are our only choices, which would you rather have: a nuclear-armed Iran or an attack on Iran's nuclear sites that is carried out and sold to the world by the Bush national security team, with Don Rumsfeld at the Pentagon's helm?
I'd rather live with a nuclear Iran.

While I know the right thing is to keep all our options open, I have zero confidence in this administration's ability to manage a complex military strike against Iran, let alone the military and diplomatic aftershocks.

As someone who believed — and still believes — in the importance of getting Iraq right, the level of incompetence that the Bush team has displayed in Iraq, and its refusal to acknowledge any mistakes or remove those who made them, make it impossible to support this administration in any offensive military action against Iran.

I look at the Bush national security officials much the way I look at drunken drivers. I just want to take away their foreign policy driver's licenses for the next three years. Sorry, boys and girls, you have to stay home now — or take a taxi. Dial 1-800-NATO-CHARGE-A-RIDE. You will not be driving alone. Not with my car.

This is the fundamental problem. The administration has nothing other than propaganda (Clap louder!) and spin. We saw it with Iraq and had an encore with Katrina, even Afghanistan is falling apart.

So it is against this backdrop of repeated failure and incompetence we face these serious foreign policy and national security challenges. In a sane world Democrats would be offering the leadership and the solutions in the absence of grown ups in the Republican party who still continue to rubber stamp the administration and forego any semblance of oversight.

But it appears we are well and truly through the looking glass now.

In a White House known for both defiance and optimism, yesterday's senior staff changes represent a frank acknowledgment of the trouble in which President Bush now finds himself. They are also a signal of how starkly Bush's second-term ambitions have shifted after a year of persistent problems at home and abroad.

This second term collapse has been brought about by the American people and Democrats have passively sat by waiting for the administration and congress to put another bullet in the foot.

It's well past the time the Democratic Party took the gun away from these children, grew a spine and helped guide America and it's people out of this bad dream. It's what the American people want - what they don't want is this bad dream to turn into a nightmare.

Now, about those radiologists...