Lies lies lies, yeah...

You know, it's too bad the Stones were at the football game thingy the other day and not the Who, 'cause we could really use a chorus of "Won't Get Fooled Again" right about now:

WASHINGTON (AP) - Iran used negotiations with the European Union to play for time and has now achieved the ability to both develop nuclear weapons and deliver them, a senior Bush administration official said Monday.

At a news conference at the Foreign Press Center, Robert G. Joseph, the undersecretary of state for arms control, cited "tremendous resources" as well as a "very sophisticated, a very advanced scientific and technical community" as helpful to Iran.

Here we go again. In spite of the CIA evaluations that Iran is, at best, five years minimum from even being capable to build nuclear weapons (more like TEN years, according to last year's National Intelligence Estimate), we're now going to get fed the line that Iran is on the verge of CONQUERING THE WHOLE WORLD with their massive nuclear arsenal if WE DON'T DO SOMETHING RIGHT NOW. In other words, much the same line of BS we were fed on Iraq.

I'm not arguing that a nuclear armed Iran would be a good thing. I'm agin' nuclear weapons; it's just too tempting to use them, and they're useless from a military standpoint anway. But the idea that, much as we went through fifty-some-odd years of nuclear standoff with the Soviets with the Constitution relatively intact only to be now told that small bands of men with IEDs and boxcutters demand an Imperial Preznitcy and police-state-like powers, we're being told that one country with nuclear weapons will be a threat to the ENTIRE WORLD, regardless of the nuclear retaliation that the U.S., Israel, France, Britain, Russia etc. could deliver on it. (Of course, we'll be told Iran will give nuclear weapons to terrorists, ignoring the fact that they're still able to possibly purchase relatively sophisticated ready-made warheads from Russia, given the half-assed attempt the U.S. has made to assist Russia in controlling its nuclear arsenal.)

(Credit to Attaturk at Rising Hegemon for the article reference.)

(And yes, I know the Thompson Twins reference doesn't fit with the Who reference in the first paragraph. I plead literary license. See, I've got my literary license in my wallet here, right next to my library card...)