Thursday, January 19, 2006

Well, He Was Asking For It

Janinsanfran notes that Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the latest Axis of Evil leader being groomed as a madman, really didn't say that Iran has the right to build nuclear weapons. We all heard the first Ahmadinejad quote, but how many heard about the correction?

CNN has admitted a mistranslation of the leader's remarks: "In fact, he said that Iran has the right to nuclear energy. He added that 'a nation that has civilization does not need nuclear weapons and our nation does not need them.'"

Bradblog found CNN also has had trouble keeping Iranian and Korean nuclear facilities straight. The real question is whether Bush & Co. can keep this bit of WMD intelligence straight — and out of the yellowcake column.

A year ago, I wrote about Graham Allison's book, Nuclear Terrorism, which argues that our antiterror policy has lost sight of the original and achievable goal of preventing further catastrophic terror attacks on U.S. soil. He says the most workable strategy is to denying access to nuclear weapons, secure nuclear material that could be used in making bombs, and not adding any new nuclear weapons states.

I'm not crazy about nuclear anything in Iran because I'm not sure this regime — or any other they're likely to come up with — can be trusted not to try to develop weapons or to deal with terrorists. But please, let's focus on controling the material and not let mistrust, misunderstanding and mistranslation get us into another dumb ass military conflict.

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