My Boy Pat

Is speaking sense again. Once a year it happens, and I guess this is it, but something tells me that as a true conservative he will make more sense all year long than the neocons.

Another Undeclared War?: "
'There is only one thing worse than ... exercising the military option,' says Sen. John McCain. 'That is a nuclear-armed Iran. The military option is the last option, but cannot be taken off the table.'

Appearing on CBS's 'Face the Nation,' McCain said Iran's nuclear program presents 'the most grave situation we have faced since the end of the Cold War, absent the whole war on terror.'

Meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Bush employed the same grim terms he used before invading Iraq. If Iran goes forward with nuclear enrichment, said Bush, it could 'pose a grave threat to the security of the world.'

McCain and Bush both emphasized the threat to Israel. And all the usual suspects are beating the drums for war. Israel warns that March is the deadline after which she may strike. One reads of F-16s headed for the Gulf. The Weekly Standard is feathered and painted for the warpath. The Iranian Chalabis are playing their assigned roles, warning that Tehran is much closer to nukes than we all realize.

But just how imminent in this 'grave threat'?

Thus far, Tehran has taken only two baby steps. It has renewed converting 'yellowcake' into uranium hexafluoride, the gaseous substance used to create enriched uranium. And Iran has broken the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) seals at its nuclear facility at Natanz, where uranium hexafluoride is to be processed into enriched uranium. But on Saturday, the foreign ministry said it was still suspending 'fuel production.'

However, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has declared, 'There are no restrictions for nuclear research activities under the NPT,' the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Iran has signed.

Here, Iran's president is supported by his countrymen and stands on the solid ground of international law. Yet Secretary of State Condi Rice said last week, 'There is simply no peaceful rationale for the Iranian regime to resume uranium enrichment.'

Is Condi right?

Unlike Israel, Pakistan and India, which clandestinely built nuclear weapons, Iran has signed the NPT. And Tehran may wish to exercise its rights under the treaty to master the nuclear fuel cycle to build power plants for electricity, rather than use up the oil and gas deposits she exports to earn all of her hard currency. Nuclear power makes sense for Iran"

Then he really goes off (for him).

Congress thus has the time to do the constitutional duty it failed to do when it gave Bush his blank check to invade Iraq at a time of his choosing.

Few today trust "intelligence reports," War Party propagandists or the word of exiles anxious to have us fight their wars. Congress should thus hold hearings on how close Tehran is to a nuclear weapon and whether this represents an intolerable threat, justifying a preventive war that would mean a Middle East cataclysm and a worldwide depression. Then it should vote to declare war, or to deny Bush the power to go to war.

The "Bush Doctrine" notwithstanding, if Congress has not put the "military option on the table," neither George Bush nor John McCain can put it there. That is the Constitution still, is it not?

Umm, I think the true conservatives are waking up and realizing that they have been had.

Tags: Pat Buchanan, Iran, Constitution,