On the plus side, the U.S. intelligence community can acknowledge a foolish mistake and reverse its position when necessary. As Emanuele explained yesterday, the outrageous NIE report on Iran from last year has finally found its way into the dustbin. And now it’s official:
[R]etired admiral Mike McConnell, later said it had been a mistake to make public the key judgements of the intelligence assessment because it suggested Iran was no longer pursuing nuclear weapons. Asked about it at a Senate hearing, Blair acknowledged it was a difficult question to deal with in a public setting. “I can say at this point that Iran is clearly developing all the components of a deliverable nuclear weapons program — fissionable material, nuclear weaponizing capability and the means to deliver it,” he said.
The problem is President Obama’s national intelligence director, Admiral Dennis Blair, didn’t promise much in his annual threat assessment to Congress. Will Iran’s program be stopped? It’s not up to the international community – or to America – to decide whether Iran develops nuclear weapons or not, Blair explained. It’s up to Iran. And while nobody wants Iran to go nuclear, Blair can’t say if international effort (and “engagement”) has any chance of advancing this cause: “Whether they take it all the way to nuclear weapons and become a nuclear power will depend a great deal on their own internal decisions,” he said.
Internal decisions – namely the outcome of Iran’s election? Blair didn’t say. But even in the event that Muhammad Khatami becomes Iran’s president, it’s hard to imagine a change of heart on the nuclear issue – as even the most enthusiastic cheerleaders of the so-called reformist leader will admit. As Blair put it:
They are, to be sure, a hard people to deal with, suspicious of others (the Americans and British once staged a coup against a duly elected Iranian president), and prickly about their pride. They want a nuclear program and, quite likely, a nuclear weapon, and there isn’t much that will stop them.
And that’s just a subtle way of saying that we shouldn’t try too hard.
The best news — if it can even be called that — is what has not happened in the last eight months. There have been neither homicide bombings nor any shooting rampages in Israel’s capital.
It is not for lack of trying. Credit Shabak and the other agencies that have worked to thwart the nevrending attempts by the animals who seek nothing other than the death of jews.
A civilian packing heat actually thwarted the attack before it escalated. The Israeli security services secured the situation immediately after.
This is better than their responses to the earlier bulldozer attacks, in which their first police responders on the scene were too timid. Last year’s massacre of high school students at Mercaz HaRav also had a feeble first response.
However, too little has been done to keep potential terrorists off bulldozers in the first place.
If it’s not bulldozers, it will be cars.
A small subaru plowing into a bus stop can do a lot of damage too.
The problem is not with the vehicles or weapons they have access to, for almost anything can be turned into a lethal weapon.
The problem is what is in these peoples’ minds- genocidal hatred.
They must be separated from their potential victims.
All the solutions along those lines are politically incorrect, however, and may have to wait till other western nations come to similar conclusions for their own problems.
Don’t hold your breath
A bulldozer has tracks like a tank. THey go very slow, fast walk, but are VERY powerful. A tractor has rubber tires and can go 15 mph or so. They can lift 10% of what a bulldozer can lift. A vehicle can easily evade a bulldozer but a tractor can be on you in an instant.
Bulldozer vs Tractor is a critical distinction!
The use of the term “bulldozer” to refer to any piece of construction equipment is part of the continuing enstupidation of the press. I don’t know which equipment was used in the latest case, but a rubber-tired front end loader was used in the last episode. This can move quite a bit faster than a tracked tractor or bulldozer. We see a similar phenomenon when we see on tv that some building has been evacuated because of possible exposure to “a chemical”, but we never hear what chemical, or if there was a chemical at all. I wonder if the lordly news-reader thinks that the rabble won’t understand the distinctions, or if she doesn’t know them herself.
However, the point remains that a murderous person can use a car as a weapon if he can’t get a tank; a box-cutter will serve if he can’t get a gun.