Rubin, Biden And Iran

By Cernig

Another neocon failure gets his say in the WaPo's op-ed pages and boy what a waste of ink it is. If this is the best they can muster, Biden's got them worried as hell.  Ilan Goldenberg - who doesn't have a track record that includes the the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, the Office of the Secretary of Defense as an advisor to Rummie, political adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority and unpaid hack for propaganda articles produced by the Penaton's PR firm, the Lincoln Group - offers an analysis of what passes for logic in neocon circles.

Rubin makes a convoluted and non-sensical argument that A.  Joe Biden supported engagement with the reformist Khatami government of Iran during the late 1990s and first half of this decade.  That B.  During that time trade between Iran and the EU increased.  That C.  A National Intelligence Estimate found that Iran had stopped working on its nuclear weapons program in 2003.  From this he deduces that it's Biden's fault that Iran has moved ahead on its nuclear weapons program because it used increased trade with Europe to fund a nuclear weapons program.  What???

... Rubin basically takes a bunch of unrelated facts and uses them to conclude that Iran must have spent 2000 to 2003 working furiously on its nuclear weapons program and that it did it with money from Europe that somehow Joe Biden was responsible for.  Yup, putting those rigorous analytical skills that he learned that the Office of Special Plans to work.

Rubin also forgets to mention little details.  Like the fact that under this Administration trade with Iran has actually increased ten-fold and is at its highest levels since before the Iranian revolution.  Or the fact that the 2007 NIE concluded that Iran did in fact stop working on its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and was still years away from building a bomb.

Rubin then claims that Biden's vote against Kyl-Lieberman was partisan politics because Biden said that he didn't trust this Administration.  Ummm.... Trying to prevent war with Iran is not exactly a partisan activity.  It's not partisan to fear that an administration that has a track record of escalating conflict and misleading the American public might do it again.  That is in fact the exact opposite of partisan if you believe that war with Iran is against America's interests.

Of course, neocons like Ed Morrisey are lapping it up. Ed argues that Biden's “engagement” strategy  has failed to oust Iranian hardliners - and seems to want to ignore the Iranian Ayatollah's own remarks confirming that its the bellicose rhetoric of the neocons that has saved Ahmadinejhad's political neck. Go figure.

Update: Matt Duss with a zinger:

Given that Biden has, for five of the last seven years, been a member of the minority in the Senate, how dumb is it to blame him for the fact that President Bush has no coherent Iran policy? Monumentally dumb? Or just profoundly dumb?

Comments

[tp]

Shortened version of Rubin's article in one sentence:

Biden is bad because he won't bomb Iran like Israel demands.