September 1, 2004, Best make a few calls... maybe they'll hold off until after the election...
Hey, boys and girls... remember "yellowcake", or uranium hexaflouride, one of the key ingredients in the recipe for enriched uranium which can either power a nuclear power plant or a nuclear bomb? Well, Iran seems to be on the verge of having enough of it to actually generate some enriched uranium... enough fissionable material to make up to five nuclear bombs.
If we add that to the between two and seven nuclear devices in the hands of North Korea, we get our aggregate "Axis of Evil TM" scorecard:
Axis of Evil Member Number of Nuclear Bombs
Iran...........................................Up to 5
Iraq...........................................None
North Korea.............................Up to 7
While I'm certainly troubled by the typical Democratic appeasement deal proposed for Iran, painfully similar to what we once did with North Korea (trade things for "peaceful" atomic energy programs), the above chart should certainly demonstrate to us just how grave a threat Iraq presented to us, and just how much George W. Bush has made this nation safer from anything, let alone our most likely threats.
The thing is, we probably have options besides World War III and outright appeasement; we could, for example, strong-arm our buddy Pooty Poot (who seems to be up to his elbows in his own Islamic terrorist problem, albeit one he exacerbated with his heavy-handed approach to Chechnya) into cutting off Iran-- at least from nuclear technology-- by making a better deal with Russia. And we could, of course, try to engage Iran, for better or worse, or at least to do a better job of isolating it if we did not engage it.
We may be heading for a very embarassing situation, as Israel (remember them?) may decide to repeat its maneuver at Osirak, Iraq from 20 some years ago, and solve our little Iranian nuclear problem for us. Were this to happen, I would describe the likely results as "unpredictable"; Israel is already passing out iodine pills to people in or near Dimona (the Negev site of Israel's unconfirmed nuclear arsenal, believed to number in the hundreds of devices).
It's good to know that if we re-elect George W. Bush, given the facts as I've laid them out, we can take comfort in knowing that he will solve the menace and threat to us that is... Syria? I daresay it will be a bit harder to blame the Iranian nuclear arsenal on Clinton than usual...