Only one single day after the announcement that Al Qaeda terrorist/murderer/thug Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had met his maker at the hands of an American F-16 fighter jock and a pair of 500-pound U.S. bombs, our little buddies next door in Iran once again begin enrichment of Uranium.

An Iranian official has confirmed that the country has stepped up its nuclear activities, following a report from the UN atomic agency that said Iran has accelerated uranium enrichment.

“Iran has started another stage of injecting hexafluoride gas into centrifuge machines,” the student news agency ISNA quoted an unnamed official as saying on Friday.

“Iran is also pursuing a plan to have a 3,000-centrifuge cascade by the end of the current year (March 2007),” he noted, adding that all the material used in uranium enrichment facilities has been produced domestically.

A report from the International Atomic Energy Agency obtained by AFP on Thursday said that Iran had accelerated uranium enrichment on June 6, the same day world powers asked it to halt the work and open talks to guarantee it will not make nuclear weapons.

Kinda reminds ya of Gopher Bash now, don’t it? In the LA Times (admittedly fair) coverage of Zarqawi’s death, they showed that the first bomb was a laser guided type — must have been Seals or Delta Force or Recon on the gound, good and close, to target the house-that-is-there-no-more. I think that ol’ Mahmoud Ahmadinejad better watch his back — ’cause if he sees a red-dot, he’s toast! Or, at the very least, the U.N. could vote for meaningless sanctions.

President George W. Bush said on Friday that Iran has “weeks not months” to respond to a U.S.-backed offer aimed at containing Iran’s nuclear ambitions and said Tehran needs to suspend uranium enrichment.

At a joint news conference with Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Bush said that if Iran does not suspend enrichment, “there must be a consequence.”

“We’ve given the Iranians a limited period of time — you know, weeks not months — to digest a proposal to move forward. And if they choose not to verifiably suspend their program, then there will be action taken in the U.N. Security Council,” Bush said.

As I promised yesterday, I read all the articles and opinions in today’s LA Times. Admittedly, I did skim a lot of it, most of the info, all actually, I read online yesterday. I was looking for the defeatism and left-biased denunciation that Hugh Hewitt is finding so prevalent in the MSM coverage of this event. Aside from concentrating a bit on the Zarqawi is gone but the violence will continue meme a bit heavy, I didn’t find what I was expecting — pure Leftist bias and Bush bashing. This quote from an unsigned editorial was most unexpected:

Symbolically, his death may be more significant. As Bush said: “The ideology of terror has lost one of its most visible and aggressive leaders.” The question is not whether there will be others to replace him; there will be. Nor is it whether the violence will pause; it won’t. But the attack should give an important psychological boost to U.S. troops in Iraq. Zarqawi had been taunting Americans at every turn, leaving some Iraqis to wonder about the efficacy of U.S. military might. His death will serve as a reminder to foreign terrorists and Iraqi insurgents that they can be extinguished at any moment.

But, just to make sure that we were reading the LA Times, the Rosa Brooks column tries to lay the blame for the alleged murders of Iraqi civilians at Haditha directly at the feet of President Bush.

But let’s not let the Bush administration off the hook. It’s the duty of the government that sends troops to war to create a context that enables and rewards compassion and courage rather than callousness and cruelty. This administration has done just the opposite.

Our troops were sent to fight an unnecessary war, without adequate resources or training for the challenges they faced. At the same time, senior members of the administration made clear their disdain for the Geneva Convention’s rules on war and for the principles and traditions of the military. Belated and halfhearted investigations into earlier abuses sent the message that brutality would be winked at — unless the media noticed, in which case a few bad apples would be ceremoniously ejected from the barrel, while higher-ups would go unpunished.

If we’re talking about apples, we should also keep another old proverb in mind: The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

Gotta keep that Bush Derangement Syndrome machine all revved up and ready to go — if the House becomes a Democrat majority body, Impeachment’s comin’! I hear the words of Rodney King in my head — “Can’t we all get along?” — Nope! (db)

Technorati Tags: al-Zarqawi, Iran Nuclear Enrichment, George Bush, Iraq, Iran, Los Angeles Times

This entry was posted on Friday, June 9th, 2006 at 9:11 am and is filed under Iran Threat, Iraq War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.  |   Print This Post  |   Email This Post

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