Wednesday, September 06, 2006

Can’t Win for Losing   [John Hood]

If greenhouse-gas emissions are powering a dangerous global-warming trend, one rather-obvious policy response would be to shift to nuclear-power generation. Moreover, since even draconian, costly changes within America alone would fail to change projected emissions all that much, the policy would have to encompass developing countries that promise to emit a great deal over the next 50 years. It turns out that the Bush administration is promoting the civilian use of nuclear power in many of these countries — and, of course, the Left thinks it is outrageous:

"It gives countries, under the guise of civilian nuclear programs, the ability to make one of the key ingredients for a nuclear bomb - plutonium," said Joseph Cirincione, senior vice president for national security and international policy at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning Washington think tank. "And they can stockpile it in large quantities. How are you going to tell Iran that they can't do this if you're promoting it yourself?"

I’ll go out on a limb here and suggest that because Iran is run by a disgusting cabal of terrorism sponsors and Holocaust deniers, telling its dictators that their nuclear program won’t be tolerated is not all that difficult. This is the kind of moral-equivalence mentality, if translated into political campaigns about national security, that could lead Democrats to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

09/06 09:00 AMShare