...I'm okay with being REALITY-based.




Monday, February 09, 2004
      ( 10:34 AM )
 
More WMDs Found

But not by us.

Today Haaretz is reporting that Al Qaida has tactical nuclear weapons - and has had them for a while. Supposedly, they haven't used them because of the damage they could cause, but now they are holding them out as a threat if the US pushes them too far. Though it's scary to hear such a report, the more interesting part of it is the following:

Several reports of the nuclear arsenal in the
former Soviet Union in the 1990s indicated
that a few dozen nuclear explosive devices
had disappeared.

Instead of using our power (and money) to help Russia locate these weapons and to make sure that this sort of thing couldn't happen, Bush actually withdrew most of our support and participation in the programs that were doing that. He instead, as we all know, risked the U.S.'s power, money and goodwill to go into Iraq. Even a few weeks ago, Cheney was still insisting in an inteview on NPR that there was a connection between Iraq and Al Qaida - continuing to declare that attacking and invading Iraq was part of our "war on terror" following 9/11. Meanwhile, Al Qaida has been quietly reforming, building its strength and obviously testing the waters, since we have had several recent incidents where flights from Europe have been cancelled. Oh, and did I forget to mention Osama Bin Laden?

This is the same old double-talk from the administration. While they try to change history and insist that it was worth going to war over the knowledge that Saddam "might" build a weapon - they try to get us to forget that they were scaring us with threats of imminent destruction from Saddam. In his interview on Sunday, Bush said that he just couldn't leave a madman in power. Well, what about North Korea? That place is definitely ruled by a madman, who really DOES threaten us and the world. The double standard is obvious, except that the entire "standard" was completely fabricated upon Bush's cronies' desire to get Iraq. It had nothing to do with a policy that would apply to the rest of the world.

So, in a nutshell - while our troops are being killed at a rate of 1 per day and thousands are severely wounded, and those over there are getting more and more bogged down in Iraq with no end in sight, tactical nukes have been trading hands around the former Soviet republics, North Korea continues to not only starve its own people to death, but threaten us and its neighbors with nuclear weapons, Pakistan takes no action upon the news that its top scientist sold and tried to sell nuclear secrets to all sorts of nefarious folks, and Pakistan and India, two nations that are not in the business of really helping their own citizens, have weapons pointed at each other that could go off in the blink of an eye. We have squandered our goodwill collateral with the rest of the world, and we are no safer (in fact, possibly less) than we were before 9/11.

Oh, and did I mention that John Kerry was okay with all of this until a few months ago?

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