Posted on 06/10/2008 12:27:50 PM PDT by pissant
From Barr 2008:
Washington is filled with rumors of pending American or Israeli military action against Iran, says Bob Barr, the Libertarian Party candidate for President. But “an attack on Iran would be unnecessary, counterproductive, costly and dangerous,” he warns.
Our own intelligence services tell us that Iran is not actively working to build a nuclear bomb and is years away from having nuclear weapons capability. “There is no imminent threat, and only an imminent threat can ever justify a preemptive strike,” insists Barr. “The tragedy in Iraq demonstrates the counterproductive consequences of initiating war without any compelling justification.”
Although Sen. John McCain claims to want diplomacy to work, he has joked about attacking Iran, singing “Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” to the old Beach Boys’ tune Barbara Ann. Sen. Barack Obama has raised the issue of talking with hostile regimes essentially at any time and any place with any hostile regime, but nevertheless pointed to the possibility of military action when he spoke to AIPAC. “Neither Sen. McCain nor Sen. Obama can be trusted to keep the peace,” says Barr.
The potential consequences of war, Barr explains, “include attacks on our troops stationed in Iraq, threats to the Gulf oil trade, terrorist attacks around the world, subversion of friendly Arab and Muslim governments, destruction of the democracy movement within Iran, and enduring hostility towards America throughout much of the world.” To risk paying such a price without attempting to deal directly with the Iranian regime “would be counterproductive, costly, and dangerous. Even as our hand-picked and supported Prime Minister Maliki in Iraq talks with Iranian leaders, and even as the Olmert government in Israel talks with the Assad regime in Syria, the Bush Administration refuses to engage one of the largest and most important countries in that part of the world – Iran. This makes no sense.”
Moreover, notes Barr, a former House member, “the power to declare war on Iran lies with the Congress, not the president.” Unfortunately, presidents have routinely abused their role as commander-in-chief of the military. “The president is to direct any war, but the Constitution vests the power to decide if there will be a war in the legislative branch,” emphasizes Barr.
Defusing the confrontation with Iran will not be easy, notes Barr, “but any nonproliferation strategy must begin with diplomacy and include a willingness to address the other side.” In this way President George W. Bush has failed, and Sen. McCain is set to follow in his footsteps. Sen. Obama may be more inclined to try a new approach, but “he is a weather vane, pushed around by the lightest political breezes,” says Barr. “We need new leadership that is both strong and thoughtful to meet today’s many serious foreign policy challenges, such as Iran.”
Barr represented the 7th District of Georgia in the U. S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003, where he served as a senior member of the Judiciary Committee, as Vice-Chairman of the Government Reform Committee, and as a member of the Committee on Financial Services. Prior to his congressional career, Barr was appointed by President Reagan to serve as the United States Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, and also served as an official with the CIA for eight years. He has graduate and undergraduate degrees in international relations and has lived in both Iran and Iraq.
Since leaving Congress, Barr has been practicing law and has teamed up with groups ranging from the American Civil Liberties Union to the American Conservative Union to actively advocate every American citizens’ right to privacy and other civil liberties guaranteed in the Bill of Rights. Along with this, Bob is committed to helping elect leaders who will strive for smaller government, lower taxes and abundant individual freedom.
Could have looked at him more closely....if he wasn’t partnered with the ACLU.
Barr conjures up images of Tiger-Lily to me. :)
Reminds me of Lyndon LaRouche as in nutty and unelectable.
That may be true on Ragel 5, but on Earth the Iranians are actively attempting to build a nuclear device and have proclaimed the imminent destruction of Israel and the US.
Is this the same diplomacy that didn’t stop North Korea from getting nukes?
"Potential threats"? Seems to me that all these are current conditions.
Looks to me like Barr has lost it. Iran has NOT stopped the pursuit of the Bomb. He really needs to read Mark Steyn's "America Alone"
He’ll choose Ron Paul as his running mate.
MCain will kick this crazy to the curb without a blink.
Iran poses no threat to Israel, he's just full of hot air like Saddam saying he had WMDs, huh Bob?
He's a damn, freaking, naive kook if he believes that. And guess what? He does! What an idiot!
Plus that National Intelligence Estimate was widely shown to be very misleading and flat out wrong.
Irrational pacificism, indicating a complete lack of historical understanding, is one of the major reasons I ended up smoking my Libertarian party membership card in a bong, some years ago.....
“Our own intelligence services tell us that Iran is not actively working to build a nuclear bomb ... insists Barr.”
Yes, our intelligence services which are widely reviled for their performance on Iraq WMDs. Incompetent or not?
Anyone who believes the Iranian program is peaceful is living a life of self-delusion, IMO. Too bad it means betting cities full of people one way or the other...
Which hasn't happened since what, 1942? Barr has a point here, but the globalists don't want to hear it. If we had insisted on a formal war declaration against AlQueda and the Taliban, so many domestic political problems we have today wouldn't exist.
But declarations of war aren't the current fad. Instead of demanding that Congress DO THEIR JOB, we rush off to the flaccid UN to get their permission. Has McCain expressed any objection to this sorry condition? nope.
“He’s a damn, freaking, naive kook if he believes that. And guess what? He does! What an idiot!”
Haha, wait ‘til you see Obama’s position on the same subject. I’m sure he’s a NIE believer... :-P
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1936780/posts
. . . the fact is that the latest National Intelligence Estimate on Iran never really said what many in the media (and antiwar camp) claimed it said — that Iran was out of the nukes game, had been for at least four years.
And the NIE’s implication that the flaming Islamic state had foresworn nukes altogether was equally absurd.
“In fact, the report contains the same sorts of flaws that we have learned to expect from our intelligence agency offerings,” wrote two nuclear proliferation experts in The New York Times opinion pages on Thursday, Dec. 6.
“It, like the report in 2002 that set up the invasion of Iraq, is both misleading and dangerous,” wrote Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, and Valerie Lincy, editor of the nonpartisan group’s Web site, Iranwatch.org.
The Iranians are plunging ahead with 3,000 gas centrifuges, they pointed out, which could produce weapons-ready enriched uranium in a year.
The regime is also building a heavy water reactor, which “is ideal for producing plutonium for nuclear bombs, but is of little use in an energy program.”
Why does oil-rich Iran need nuclear energy anyway?
NY Times of November 13, 2005:
In mid-July, senior American intelligence officials called the leaders of the international atomic inspection agency to the top of a skyscraper overlooking the Danube in Vienna and unveiled the contents of what they said was a stolen Iranian laptop computer.
The Americans flashed on a screen and spread over a conference table selections from more than a thousand pages of Iranian computer simulations and accounts of experiments, saying they showed a long effort to design a nuclear warhead, according to a half-dozen European and American participants in the meeting.
The documents, the Americans acknowledged from the start, do not prove that Iran has an atomic bomb. They presented them as the strongest evidence yet that, despite Iran’s insistence that its nuclear program is peaceful, the country is trying to develop a compact warhead to fit atop its Shahab missile, which can reach Israel and other countries in the Middle East.
Why I don’t vote Libertarian even though I recognize alot of their beliefs.
Change is just around the corner. All we need is a little more talk.
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