There's a reason I keep touting the McClatchy Washington bureau -- they keep writing excellent stories like this one, which states unequivocally in its lede that "experts in and out of government say there's no conclusive evidence that Tehran has an active nuclear-weapons program." (The accompanying FAQ is also very useful.) There's a reason these guys got Iraq right and almost everyone else got it wrong.
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November 04, 2007
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I am the James O. Freedman Presidential Professor in the Department of Government at Dartmouth College. I received my Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science at Duke University and have served as a RWJ Scholar in Health Policy Research and a faculty member in the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. I am a co-director of Bright Line Watch. Previously, I contributed to The Upshot at The New York Times, served as a media critic for Columbia Journalism Review, co-edited Spinsanity, a non-partisan watchdog of political spin, and co-authored All the President's Spin. For more, see my Dartmouth website.
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The phrase, "there's no conclusive evidence" sounds like double talk. About the only truly conclusive evidence would be if some utterly trustworthy witnesses had observed the program. One could equally well say that there's no conclusive evidence that Israel has nuclear weapons, since they have never officially admitted having them.
In fact, there's a great deal of evidence that Tehran has an active nuclear-weapons program. Most people believe this to be the case.
Posted by: David | November 04, 2007 at 09:06 PM
@ David: "A great deal of evidence" sounds to me a lot like "no conclusive evidence."
I don't like to take my politics from cartoons, but with Iran, maybe we should take a hint: there was something on South Park to the extent of "The terrorists have discovered our greatest vulnerability. We must destroy our imagination."
It's my suspicion Iran is developing nuclear weapons. I suspect that this is a side-project and that their primary intent is to develop nuclear power so they can burn uranium, rather than oil their only export product (a distant second is cotton) for electricity. It's my informed opinion that their ability to deliver these hypotehtical weapons in any threatening way is nearly zero, though there are plenty of idiots willing to spin out plotlines for "24" knock-off TV programming who will somehow pass said plotlines off to the media as "credible threats". "Ohmigod the '"terrorirst"' have a [woefully ineffectual] '"dirty" bomb!'"
Posted by: some guy | November 05, 2007 at 10:39 AM
The McClatchy article is still repeating some questionable Bush propaganda about Iran's nuclear program - for example suggesting that since Iran has oil then it can't possibly need nuclear power except to make bombs. This has been proven false, repeatedly. Read more at IranAffairs.com
Posted by: hass | November 05, 2007 at 04:29 PM