Sunday, February 11, 2007

Yet more examples of Democratic Party hypocrisy

As is well known, liberal Democrats have excoriated the Bush administration for falsely claiming that Iraq was an imminent threat to the United States in order to justify the 2003 war to depose Saddham Hussein.

For the sake of argument, let's assume that this charge was true. That is, let's assume that only a nation that poses a truely imminent threat to another nation can be preemptively attacked in response. Such a criterion would certainly apply to Iran with regards to United States: USAToday has reported that Iran is arming Iraqi militias, for example. An ongoing plot on the part of Iran to kill Americans and Iraqis in Iraq is, by its very nature, an imminent threat to American and Iraqi lives. You would thus assume that, insofar as it could be shown that a military attack on Iran would remove an imminent and ongoing threat to American and Iraqi lives, Democrats would conceed that the United States would be fully justified to act in self-defense by doing so.

Of course, you'd be dead wrong. The Democratic Party's response is that the United States cannot attack Iran preemptively to counter an imminent threat:
Kerry, the 2004 presidential candidate, said despite the evidence, the United States must try to engage Iran diplomatically.

"Ultimately, they want an Iraq that is stable. They want influence. They want to be players in the region. And we need to recognize that and engage in a kind of diplomacy that the Iraq Study Group recommended," Kerry told ABC's "This Week."
The Democratic Party has even begun manufacturing absurd conspiracy theories over Iran:
Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., said the administration could be laying the groundwork for an attack on Iran and that "I'm worried about that. That's how we got into the mess in Iraq," by relying on what Dodd called "doctored information."
This accusation of doctored information is not entirely true given that Senator Kerry himself stated in the first 2004 presidential debate that:
we got weapons of mass destruction crossing the border every single day, and they're blowing people up. And we don't have enough troops there.
Perhaps Senator Kerry might wish to explain why the United States should negotiate with a country that is actively trying to murder Americans in order to force the United States to negotiate with it.