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Put WWIII talk on hold - right?

Ellis Henican

December 5, 2007

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Better scratch that whole World War III thing. Iran isn't building nuclear weapons after all.

Any more than Iraq was hoarding WMDs. Any more than George W. Bush has been presiding over a foreign policy built on the concept of humility.

All of that was just words, dangerously divorced from the reality of an increasingly skeptical world. This time at least we learned the truth before we went to war.

Barely.

Ellis Henican Bio | E-mail | Recent columns

It was just six weeks ago that the president, eager not to learn any lessons from Iraq, was warning ominously about a nuclear-armed Iran. That would be intolerable, he said -- and could very well plunge humanity into a third world war.

So now the U.S. intelligence agencies have reversed themselves on that nation's nuclear threat. Despite the dire talk in Washington, Iran halted its nuclear-weapons program in 2003.

Oops!

And yet all along, Vice President Dick Cheney has been prepared to strike Tehran in, oh, how does 15 minutes sound?

"The worst outcome," the dark master of bellicose pretext told a Dallas audience Nov. 2, "would be a situation in which Iran is set, sort of set loose if you will in that part of the world with an inventory of nuclear weapons, prepared to be used against other nations in the region or to dominate that part of the globe and to threaten not only the United States but many of our friends and allies out there as well."

Yikes! That was close!

And not just because Iran has a nasty guy in charge, which it does. But also because the arguments for attacking Iran so closely resembled the ones that led us into Iraq.

"Regime change or the use of force are the only available options to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons capability, if they want it," John Bolton, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, was saying flatly during the summer.

Iraq, Iran: He could easily have recycled the quote from the last war, changing a single "q" to an "n."

Norman Podhoretz got his argument from the copy-shop as well. In "The Case for Bombing Iran," the neoconservative icon wrote in May: "In short, the plain and brutal truth is that if Iran is to be prevented from developing a nuclear arsenal, there is no alternative to the actual use of military force -- any more than there was an alternative to force if Hitler was to be stopped in 1938."

That should have been a tip-off right there. Whenever the facts on the ground don't support an argument for war, cite Hitler quick!

Bolton and Podhoretz weren't alone in the nuke-rattling. They got lots of cover from the media. "Sadly," the august Richard Cohen wrote Oct. 23 in The Washington Post, "it is simply not possible to dismiss the Iranian threat. Not only is Iran proceeding with a nuclear program, but it projects a pugnacious, somewhat nutty, profile to the world."

Never mind.

David Brooks was certainly psyched for another war in the desert. "There is scant reason to believe that imagined Iranian cosmopolitans would shut down the nuclear program, or could if they wanted to, or could do it in time," The New York Times columnist was already writing last year.

For such smart guys, they don't learn very fast.

But who's the slowest learner of them all? That's easy. The president. Even after getting the NIE -- is that for National Intelligence Error? -- his views on Iran are still the same.

"My opinion hasn't changed," the president said at his news conference yesterday.

Why learn from mistakes? Just forge ahead.

"Iran was dangerous, Iran is dangerous, and Iran will be dangerous if they have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon," Bush said. "What's to say they couldn't start another covert nuclear weapons program?"