http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/25/magazine/25WWLNlede.t.html?ex=1175832000&en=d6d498f2abbe46a0&ei=5070(BTW there is no nuclear program that is of any threat to anyone, within Iran at the moment. None. And none is really foreseeable. North Korea's "Nuclear Test" was widely considered a flop. They certainly do not have the capability to hit the US and neither would Iran.
Even in the unlikely case they were to have a nuclear arsenal it is almost certain they wouldn't use it because of Mutually Assured Destruction.
What no one wants to admit is: our own democratic candidates are manipulating our perception of Iran in order to facilitate public support for unnecessary and greed driven military aggression.) snip
......it is their positions on Iran’s nuclear program, a subject that is almost certain to bedevil whoever becomes president in 2009, that most strongly suggest that the foreign-policy differences between Democratic and Republican policy elites have been vastly overblown.
Earlier this year, Vice President Cheney insisted that the administration had not “taken any options off the table” as Iran continued to defy United Nations calls for it to abandon its nuclear ambitions. The response from Democrats was not long in coming. Senator Clinton helped lead the charge, reminding the president that he did not have the authority to go to war with Iran on the basis of the Senate’s authorization of the use of force in Iraq in 2002. But what Senator Clinton did not say was at least as interesting as what she did say. And what she did not say was that she opposed the use of force in Iran. To the contrary, Senator Clinton used virtually the same formulation as Vice President Cheney. When dealing with Iran, she insisted, “no option can be taken off the table.”
Speaking to a meeting of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), a lobbying group, on March 2, Senator Obama said pretty much the same: the Iranian regime was “a threat to all of us,” and “we should take no option, including military action, off the table.” John Edwards has been even more categorical. In a January speech in Israel, he said, “Under no circumstances can Iran be allowed to have nuclear weapons.” And he added, “We need to keep all options on the table.”
Members of the Bush administration can surely be excused for wondering why, when he uses such language, Cheney is accused of saber-rattling, whereas when the leading Democratic presidential candidates use the same language, there are virtually no complaints within the Beltway or on the major editorial pages, and there is widespread support from the Democratic Party’s foreign-policy elite. Indeed, the national-greatness conservatism advanced by neoconservative figures like William Kristol, and in large measure adopted by the Bush administration as it prepared for war in Iraq, finds its echo in a national-greatness liberalism among leading Democrats. National-greatness liberalism, the argument goes, was the foreign-policy signature of Democratic political predominance from Truman forward; any step away, toward more modest ambitions, is seen as McGovernite weakness destined for defeat.
In this context, and despite what many antiwar activists who voted Democratic in 2006 must have expected — they continue to challenge all the candidates, but especially Clinton, to sharpen their opposition to the Iraq war — the three front-running Democratic candidates seem to base their logic for a drawdown in Iraq not on the desirability of bringing troops home but of being able to deploy them elsewhere. They and their policy analogues (figures like Richard Holbrooke and Ivo Daalder) argue that Iraq is a distraction in the global fight against the jihadists and that leaving Iraq will free up forces to pursue that struggle more effectively elsewhere.
Iran seems, to Democratic leaders, to epitomize the need for continued American hegemony, though so does the wish to intervene more often on human rights grounds, above all in Darfur, or to protect allies like Israel and Taiwan. More broadly, however, the issue that is dividing the Democrats is that their leaders believe a muscular foreign policy is what the age of terrorism demands, while antiwar voters believe such a policy may only breed more disasters. The question is whether the party can seriously hope to regain the White House when it is so seriously divided against itself on what is, in the minds of many Americans, the central issue of our time.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/25/magazine/25WWLNlede.t.html?ex=1175832000&en=d6d498f2abbe46a0&ei=5070
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