Iran Looms on the Horizon: (Speaking of Smokers)

Not that Scott Ritter has any special insight into Bush's brain, but in a speech in Durham, North Carolina, the former UN weapons inspector says that the President is already planning for another war. From Chris Outcalt in the Portsmouth Herald:

The United States is going to war with Iran, according to Scott Ritter, former chief weapons inspector for the United Nations.

"He says all options are on the table," said Ritter, "but the president has already made up his mind."...

According to Ritter, President Bush's use of weapons of mass destruction as a reason to invade Iraq is now happening with Iran.

"We're doing it all over again," he said. "The policy in regard to Iran is regime change; a nuclear weapons program is simply an excuse to rally support around the confrontation of Iran."

Ritter again stressed the importance of education at the end of his talk.

"We are collectively grasping for solutions in Iraq when we haven't the foggiest idea what we're doing in Iraq," he said. "Don't believe the BS that you get out of Washington. Be good citizens; a good citizen thinks for his or herself."

What's especially ironic about this is a line that Mort Zuckerman used to praise Bush before the war with Iraq:

We are fortunate to have in George W. Bush a president who recognizes the forces of darkness for what they are. For him, the war on terrorism is an intrinsically moral cause. As he put it, "Evil is real, and it must be opposed." This is the only tolerable response in a world where the enemy is not merely unrestrained by civilized values but glories in their debasement...
The first target in the war's next phase, clearly, will be Iraq. The West's lackluster efforts at nonproliferation have done little more than delay the inevitable-a Baghdad with nuclear weapons. So Bush and his team are determined to rid the world of Saddam Hussein. This, after all, is a man who uses poison gas on his own people, invades his neighbors, and dabbles with weapons of mass destruction. He is as close to a psychopath as we have ruling any country in the world today. The late Hafez Assad of Syria, no slouch of a dictator himself, once compared the tyrant of Baghdad to a chain smoker: "He cannot help lighting another one before he has finished the first. Only with Saddam, it is wars, not cigarettes."

Let's see...Bush started the war with Afghanistan, and before that was over, he started a war with Iraq, and before that is over, he's thinking about war with Iran. So who's the chain-smoker here?