Just Askin’

You know, re-reading this characteristically incisive Mark Steyn column, it occurred to me that if we do wind up in a military confrontation of some sort with Iran’s new saber-rattling fanatic of a president, all the usual suspects on the Left are going to burst into a chorus of how you must believe Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and not George W. Bush, if Bush says that the Iranians are dangerously close to having a fully armed and operational nuclear arsenal.
Which brings to mind an important point about rounding up political support for the American position in such a confrontation. Many politicians in the Democratic party went on record, on the basis of their review of the applicable intelligence, as saying that Iraq had and/or was working on weapons of mass destruction. Now, of course, many of them want to disclaim those statements and say they don’t believe Bush, Clinton, Blair and the other heads of state who said Saddam had or was working on WMD.
Well, if the Democrats claim to be wiser now, they need to be asked point-blank: are the Iranians dangerously close to getting nuclear weapons in the next 2-3 years, or sooner? And they need to be willing to stand by their answers, knowing that if they say “no” and are proven wrong, they will have shown to the American people their willingness to err on the side of underestimating threats to national security, if that’s the posture they want to take.