Consult America—Before Iran War!

"To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war."

So Winston Churchill is widely quoted. Those words,
however,

were spoken in 1954, decades after Churchill`s voice
had been the most bellicose for war in

1914 and

1939, the wars that bled and broke his beloved
empire.

Yet, Churchill`s quote frames well the main question
on the mind of Washington, D.C.: Will President Bush
effect the nuclear castration of Iran before he leaves
office, or has he already excluded the war option?

One school contends that the White House has stared
down the gun barrel at the prospect of war with Iran,
and backed away. The costs and potential
consequences—thousands of Iranian dead, a Shia revolt
against us in Iraq joined by Iranian "volunteers,"
the mining of the Straits of Hormuz, $200-a-barrel oil,
Hezbollah strikes on Americans in Lebanon, terror
attacks on our allies in the Gulf and on Americans in
the United States—are too high a price to pay for
setting back the Iranian nuclear program a decade.

Another school argues thus: If Tehran survives the
Bush era without dismantling its nuclear program, Bush
will be a failed president. He declared in his 2002
State of the Union Address that no axis-of-evil nation
would be allowed to acquire the world`s worst weapons.
Iran and North Korea will have both defied the Bush
Doctrine. His legacy would then be one of impotency in
Iran and North Korea, and two failed wars—in Iraq and
Afghanistan—which will be in their sixth and eighth
years.

Those who know him best say that George Bush is not a
man to leave office with such a legacy. He will go to
war first, even if no one goes along.

But before America faces this question, two others
need answering.

Is Iran so close to a nuclear weapon that if we do
not act now, it will be too late? Or do we have perhaps
a decade before Iran has the capacity to build nuclear
weapons?

Early this year, Israel was warning that if Iran was
not stopped by March 2006, it would be too late. Iran
would by then have acquired the knowledge and experience
needed to build nuclear weapons.

The neoconservatives, too, have been demanding
"Action this day!" and were stunned by

Bush`s statement at the

United Nations that America does not oppose Iran`s
acquisition of peaceful nuclear power.

The other side argues that Iran is perhaps a decade
away from being able to produce enough fissile material
for a bomb, that the 164 centrifuges Tehran has are so
primitive and few in number it will take years even to
produce fuel for nuclear power plants.

While the International Atomic Energy Agency has

not given Iran a clean bill of health, it has never
concluded that Iran is working on a bomb.

Where does this leave America? With grave questions,
the answers to which should be given not by George Bush
alone, but by the American people through their
representatives in the Congress.

Lest we forget, it is not President Bush who decides
on war or peace. The Congress is entrusted with that
power in the Constitution. The Founding Fathers wanted a
clear separation between the commander in chief who
would fight the war and the legislators who would
declare it. They had had their fill of royal wars.

Congress, when this election is over, should return
to Washington to conduct hearings on how close Iran is
to a nuclear capacity, and place that information before
the nation. We do not need any more cherry-picked and
stove-piped intelligence to take us to war. But the
critical question that needs to be taken up in
congressional and public debate is this:

Even if Tehran is seeking a nuclear capacity, should
the United States wage war to stop her? Is a
nuclear-armed Iran more of an intolerable threat than
was a nuclear-armed

Stalin or

Mao, both of whom America outlasted without war?  

Today, Republicans and Democrats are competing in
calling Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a Hitler
who will complete the Holocaust, a terrorist with whom
we cannot deal. But the Iran he leads has not started a
war since its

revolution, 27 years ago, and knows that if it
attacked America, it will invite annihilation as a
nation.

Bismarck called pre-emptive war committing

suicide out of fear of death—not a bad description
of what we did in invading Iraq.

Today, President Bush does not have the
constitutional authority to launch pre-emptive war.
Congress should remind him of that, and demand that he
come to them to make the case and get a declaration of
war, before he undertakes yet another war—on Iran.

Before any air strikes are launched on Iran`s nuclear
facilities, every American leader should be made to take
a public stand for or against war. No more of these
"If-only-I-had-known" and "We-were-misled"
copouts.

COPYRIGHT

CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Patrick J. Buchanan needs


no introduction to VDARE.COM
readers; his book

State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and
Conquest of America,

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