This past week, Iran announced that it possessed Uranium that was intended to fuel the rogue-state’s first nuclear power plant. The response from Washington: silence, and for good reason. America already has the prospect of three-front war.
The Bush Administration has tried to convince the American public and the world that Iraq and Al-Qaeda are in some way linked. That “some way” has yet to be clarified. The Czech government disavowed any intelligence report that pointed to an Iraqi intelligence officer meeting with an Al-Qaeda operative in Prague, sometime in the summer preceding the 9-11 attacks on America. So, we are left with no concrete evidence of a tie, just the Bush Administration’s claim that Saddam Hussein could be hosting terrorists within Iraqi territory.
Then, there is North Korea. Many point to Kim Jung-Il’s regime as the real threat to international stability. We know that North Korea, a state that we have no treaty with, only a cease-fire truce, possesses at least two nuclear missiles. Both weapons are reported to be able to reach California. Adding fuel to this fire, we know that North Korea has the intention to make more warheads and, as former president Bill Clinton confided to Larry King in a recent CNN interview, has the intention to sell to any parties willing to pay.
This past week Americans have received warnings of impending terrorist strikes from Al-Qaeda cells operating within our borders. Our State Department has tried vainly to assemble a war coalition against Iraq, a country that continues to plead innocence to the world and has committed no act of violence against America. Finally, we have heard more threats from Pyongyang (N. Korea’s capital) of consequences for any U.S. or U.N. provocation.
We have no recourse but to conclude that the Bush Administration is wrongfully disguising its true intentions for war with Iraq. All this war propaganda suggests that if we were really interested in taking down rogue states for the promise of a safer world, then we would extend this stance to North Korea and treat the Al-Qaeda threat as a separate issue from Saddam Hussein. However, the Bush administration understands that to do so would mean losing face, as well as confessing that we could be fighting a three-front war, which would alarm the public. And Mr. Bush knows that alarming the American people is not the key to a second term.
Gunnar Heinrich is a visiting Politics & International Relations major from the University of Aberdeen, King’s College in Scotland. He can be contacted at gunnarheinrich@hotmail.com.