Dubya's Latest "Terra, Terra, Terra" Bombast

In his commencement address at the United States Coast Guard Academy in New London, CT yesterday, President 31 Percent “Mandate” (remember how he and Deadeye Dick said they had one in November 2004?) cherry-picked more intelligence stating that al Qaeda had contacted their operatives or sympathizers in Iraq to plot more attacks in this country.

The absurdity is almost too painful at this point.

This is more “just shut up and assume we know what we’re doing” rhetoric that the vast majority of this country stopped believing long ago. And besides, al Qaeda wasn’t even in Iraq under Saddam Hussein – they showed up after we blew the place to bits (and I realize that sentence could cause the 101st Keyboard Kommandos to lurch into action, rehashing badly sourced information – rumor, actually – that Hussein knew al-Zarqawi was in his country somehow before we invaded…so, soo tired by now).

Party because I thought there absolutely had to be something more interesting than this in the speech by President Brainless, I actually read a good portion of what he had to say (including repeating that moronic joke about how George Washington’s friends use to call him “George W.” that Shrub uttered to mass adulation at the Repug National Convention in 2000). Among other things, I found that he kept repeating the phrase, “To help stop new attacks on our country,” ad nauseum, once again, believing that his audience is as dumb as he is (far from it).

I also found this…

A coalition of more than 90 nations -- nearly one-half of the world -- is working together to dry up terrorist financing and bring terrorist leaders to justice. We launched the Proliferation Security Initiative, a vast coalition of nations that are working to stop shipments of weapons of mass destruction on land, at sea, and in the air. With our allies, we have uncovered and shut down the A.Q. Khan network, which had supplied nuclear-related equipment and plans to terrorist states, including Iran and North Korea. With Great Britain, we convinced the leader of Libya to abandon his country's pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. The key components of Libya's nuclear program are now locked up in a storage facility right here in the United States. And today the world is safer because Libya is out of the nuclear weapons business. (Applause.)

The first thing I wondered was why he was attacking Libya; after all, aren’t we supposed to be friends with them now? Why bring up bad memories from the past with a new "ally"?

I also wondered what the heck the Proliferation Security Initiative was, so I started looking a bit, and according to the article from this link, dated in the spring of 2004….

In keeping with the Bush administration’s preference for assembling informal coalitions to address international problems, as opposed to building new multinational institutions, the PSI was launched with a small group of trusted allies. President George W. Bush personally unveiled the initiative, and it has remained a high-level, high-visibility political effort ever since.

The article then goes on to mention how former U.N. Secretary John Bolton personally headed delegations to plenary-level PSI meetings, which of course doesn’t fill me with confidence (sounds like an organization made up of some participating U.N. members that was trying to act outside the U.N., an organization Bolton never thought of highly anyway).

In the excerpt from Dubya’s speech yesterday, he noted “stopping Libya’s nuclear program” and “shutting down the A.Q. Khan network.” I don’t believe the second statement about Khan, since if he had, he would have made such an announcement with other world leaders, including Tony Blair (and according to this article, he hasn't). And as far as moving against Libya, it seems that he was referring to this excerpt from the article…

…The most recent publicized case involved the interdiction of a shipment of nuclear centrifuges bound for Libya. As a result of penetration of the Pakistani A.Q. Khan network, American and British intelligence identified the shipments of advanced centrifuge parts.

But here is something to note about the centrifuges (from this story)…

...Rekindling debate on how close Libya actually came to acquiring a nuclear bomb, a private arms-control group says the Bush administration overstated the number of devices the country had for making uranium fuel.

The group, the Institute for Science and International Security, based in Washington, said yesterday that the administration had given an inaccurate briefing to reporters last week at the Energy Department's nuclear weapons lab in Oak Ridge, Tenn. At that briefing, officials displayed a dozen uranium centrifuges from what they said was a cache of about 4,000 that Libya had obtained before agreeing in December to dismantle its nuclear weapons program.

The institute, which has done extensive research on uranium centrifuges, said its own inquiries, including interviews with federal and overseas experts, found that Libya had obtained 4,000 casings for centrifuges, but that few if any had the finely tooled rotors that are the machine's heart.

…

(David) Albright (president of ISIS) said the administration had papered over a huge gap between centrifuge theory and practice. "It would take the Libyans a long time to learn how to make the sophisticated components," he said. "They might have failed because some of them are extremely difficult to make. The bottom line is that what they had was a far cry from a large number of working machines."

Was it good that the centrifuge casings were caught? Absolutely, and those responsible should receive credit. But don’t portray the episode as something that prevented Libya from posing an imminent nuclear threat, particularly since Libya had purchased them before signing the agreement to end the program anyway.

And here’s another thought; just call me old fashioned, but couldn’t something like this have been accomplished by – oh, such a relic of a concept for Bushco, I know – DIPLOMACY??!! (especially since that had just worked with that country?)

And as noted from this linked story…

The PSI is an informal grouping of states without an organizational framework, treaty, or permanent staff.

…

Initially, critics charged that the voluntary PSI lacks a legal framework and might violate existing laws on international transportation. Subsequently, in April 2004, the United Nations provided some legal support for the PSI by adopting Resolution 1540, which obligates all member states to work to bar non-state actors from transferring WMD-related materials. Also, the International Maritime Organization added the 2005 Protocol to the Suppression of Unlawful Acts Against the Safety of Maritime Navigation, outlawing the transportation of WMD materials.

These are good baby steps towards legal compliance, if you will, but the fact is that the nations participating here are doing so on a voluntary basis. And as the Center for International Trade and Security article notes, some U.N. member countries, China and Russia in particular, have expressed concerns about the initiative (suppose they decide that they don’t want their ships to be boarded, let’s say – they’re legally covered because they’re not participating, but the boarding country wouldn’t be because this initiative doesn’t have a framework).

So what we have here is more “cowboy diplomacy” that could easily blow up in our faces, all because Dubya and John Bolton thought it was too inconvenient to set this up properly through the U.N.

Finally, in this February 2005 press briefing after Dubya’s State of the Union address that year, you have counselor Dan Bartlett saying this about the initiative, in response to a question from Masa Ota with the Japanese Kyodo News service…

“(The PSI) can be only of the highest national security importance of not only this country but free countries all over the world and will be a topic of conversation for many meetings to come.”

Until today, I’d never heard of the Proliferation Security Initiative. And I have a feeling that I’ll never hear of it again for the rest of Dubya’s wretched presidency.