Endorsing Neo-Craziness?

On the eve of the election, our media elite are belatedly deluging us with important information. However, much of it is being delivered with neo-crazy 'spin'.

For example, the Washington Post tells us:

"In the tumultuous first year after Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush confronted a deluge of classified threat reports about the spread of nuclear weapons technology to unfriendly hands.

"An atomic black market, operating on three continents, was funneling bomb-making equipment to Libya – and to customers unknown. Iran had made unexpected strides toward a weapon along a route concealed for more than a decade. North Korea, judged in June 2002 to be years away from domestic uranium enrichment, was discovered a month later to be on the brink of it. The National Intelligence Council assessed that there was 'undetected smuggling' of 'weapons-grade and weapons-usable nuclear materials' known to have been stolen in Russia on four occasions between 1992 and 1999.

"The profusion of threats laid competing demands for Bush's attention in a climate of uncertainty and rapid change.

"Like the 'war on terrorism,' which it often intersected, Bush's efforts against nuclear proliferation followed many paths."

(Emphasis mine.)

But as the Post surely knows, those "classified threat reports" turned out to wrong. There is no evidence that anyone has funneled "bomb-making equipment" to Libya or anyone else. There is no evidence whatsoever that Iran has a nuclear weapons program. No convincing evidence that North Korea has a uranium enrichment program. And if the "smuggling" of fissile materials out of Russia was "undetected," how did the NIC "assess" that it had occurred?

Consequently, the "many paths" Bush followed to prevent nuke proliferation were nearly all wrong. Many counterproductive. Some even crazy?

Soon after Bush took office, three dozen analysts gathered for a full-day, top-secret conference to address the question "how and where could al-Qaeda get a nuke?"

"'We thought the highest probability of their getting anything would be to buy a weapon "full up" from corrupt or ideologically allied insiders in the chain of custody in a nuclear weapons state,' said Richard A. Clarke, who organized the intelligence summit as Bush's national coordinator for counter-terrorism. 'We assumed the place most likely to supply that would be the former Soviet Union.'"

So, Bush should have immediately joined President Putin in fully supporting the Non-Proliferation Treaty proliferation prevention regime administered by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), in general, and in ensuring that all Russian-deployed nukes – as well as the excess Soviet nukes Russia was in the process of dismantling with U.S. assistance – were safeguarded and secure.

"Bush took a different view. In the State of the Union address of Jan. 29, 2002, the president declared he would keep 'the world's most destructive weapons' from al-Qaeda and its allies by keeping those weapons from evil governments. Much later – after applying that doctrine in Iraq – he told a campaign audience in Pennsylvania, 'We had to take a hard look at every place where terrorists might get those weapons and one regime stood out: the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein.'"

Now, that's crazy.

In order to obtain a Gulf War cease-fire, Saddam had unconditionally accepted UN Security Council Resolution 707, which required Iraq's full cooperation in the "destruction, removal or rendering harmless" – under IAEA supervision – of "all nuclear-weapons-usable materials, all potentially related subsystems or components, and all potentially related research, development, support, and manufacturing facilities."

By 1996 the IAEA could report that "nothing remained" of Saddam's stillborn nuke program.

Nevertheless, in March 2003, Bush told Congress he had intelligence that Saddam would soon have nukes to give to al-Qaeda. But IAEA Director General ElBaradei contrarily reported to the Security Council that, "As of 17 March 2003, the IAEA had found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq."

To the dismay of our former European allies, Russia, and the whole Islamic world, Bush applied the Bush Doctrine to Iraq, anyway.

Now the whole world is watching, waiting to see whether we give Bush a chance to launch a preemptive attack against Iran, yet another country the IAEA has declared to be nuke-free.

As investigative reporter Sy Hersh put it in a recent interview:

"The Europeans so far give us a pass on the grounds that, well, you've got these crazy leaders and they do crazy things. But if we reelect them, then it's not just the president they're mad at. They're going to be mad at all of us."