That was the message coming from Capitol Hill on Tuesday
following a meeting of the Senate Intelligence Committee (an oxymoron of a name
if there ever was one), where US intelligence chief Gen. James Clapper (ret.)
was grilled on the current standoff with Iran over that country's supposed
nuclear weapons program.
According to Clapper, there is no credible intelligence of
Iranian plans to stage terror attacks within the United States, yet the
takeaway from the Committee meeting was that Iran has plans to stage terror
attacks within the United States. The
one item offered as proof of Iranian subterfuge within the United States was
last year's comically bad alleged plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in
Washington DC. If you recall, this was
the plot that used an Iranian-American used car dealer with a sketchy past to
hire a hitman from Mexico's Zetas drug cartel to blow up a DC restaurant where
the Saudi ambassador was dining. The
plot was discounted by most experts as not being an official Iranian operation
simply because it sounded like the plot of a bad spy movie and because the
Iranian intelligence agencies pride themselves on being a professional and
efficient organization.
Still, that didn't stop the Senate Intelligence Committee
from buying into in on Tuesday. They
presented the specter - based on no credible information - of a network of
Iranian sleeper cells waiting in America, ready to launch terror attacks if the
US followed through on threats of military action against Iran's nuclear
research sites. The threat of
retaliatory terror attacks was then used as evidence in favor of
military action against Iran.
And at this point my head really starts to spin at the
circular logic being employed by our esteemed Senators. To quote the great Yogi Berra, this is really
starting to seem like deja vu all over again.
It all recalls the tortured logic that led up to the invasion of Iraq in
2003. Then we were told we had to act
because of the threat of a “mushroom cloud” erupting over an American
city. Even though there was no evidence
that Iraq had a nuclear program (and after the war we learned definitively that
they did not), the Iraqis could not prove that they did not have a
nuclear program, which to our leaders at the time was proof enough of a
threat. Once again we are tying
ourselves up in logical knots as we rush headlong to what would be our third
war in the region in just over a decade.
Considering that we've arguably gone 0-2 in regional conflicts, you'd
think we wouldn't be in such a hurry.
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