Robert Scheer: Bush's Nutty Nuclear Braggadocio

[Jack Rabbit]

From TruthDig.com
Dated Tuesday April 18

Bush's Nutty Nuclear Braggadocio
By Robert Scheer

There is one clear standard by which President Bush has asked, over and over, to be judged: his ability to keep us safe from rogue nations or terrorists armed with weapons of mass destruction. Unfortunately, by any rational definition of that standard, his five-year administration has been an abysmal failure.

The quandary in which Bush finds himself regarding Iran's apparent quest for nuclear weapons is only the latest example in an astonishing series of national security blunders.

First, he vacationed while a crescendo of intelligence warnings of imminent terrorist attack blossomed into the spectacle of Sept. 11, 2001. Then, he allowed the mastermind of those attacks, Osama bin Laden, to escape while diverting U.S. resources into Iraq to save the world from Saddam Hussein's nonexistent WMDs. Now, tied down in Iraq’s civil strife, Bush holds no high cards in a dangerous poker match with Iran.

A once swaggering president, who so convincingly wielded a bullhorn and modeled a flight suit, now has assumed the pretzel pose of a supplicant attempting to cajole our old enemy in Tehran into dropping its nuclear ambitions while simultaneously initiating talks with Iran aimed at bailing us out in Iraq. After the fiasco of using the blunt instrument of military force to "democratize" Iraq, Bush now resorts to mild talk of U.N. sanctions on Iran, the very weapon he had derided in relation to quarantining Hussein. Bush’s nutty nuclear braggadocio on Tuesday — "all options are on the table" — was a sign of weakness, not strength, hobbled as he is by various self-created impediments.

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