THE WALTER REED STORY IS ABOUT YOU!

You probably haven't been following this story carefully. Perhaps you should. An investigative reporting team from The Washington Post investigated conditions at the Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington .. particularly the outpatient facilities. What they found was deplorable. There was mold, there were rats, and there was no small amount of grime and filth. Our injured soldiers were waiting interminable lengths of time for the most basic services. In short, the place was a mess. In the aftermath of the investigation the General in charge of Walter Reed resigned .... followed by the Secretary of the Army. Let's dispense with the PC language here. They didn't resign. They were fired. The American people won't tolerate this type of shabby treatment for our injured soldiers.

President Bush is going to appoint a commission to investigate all of this. Whoopee. Another government commission. Can't wait.

While they're cleaning up this mess at Walter Reed ... here's what you need to know. This treatment that was being delivered to our injured soldiers is the future of your health care. This is what you, if you're somewhat young, and most certainly your children have to deal with as the United States moves inexorably toward socialized medicine. Government health care.

A recent poll shows that three-fourths of all Americans want Universal Health Insurance. That's right .... the people conducting the poll actually capitalized Universal Health Insurance.

Let's dispel something right now. It's not insurance these people want, it's a medical payment plan. The purpose of insurance is to reimburse you for unexpected losses. The cost of regular health care, and this includes the normal costs associated with a pregnancy, are not unexpected. We should budget for these costs just as we would budget for the expenses of owning a home or a car.

No .. it's not health insurance the American people want. What they truly want is for someone else to step forward to foot the bill. Their goal is to pay about $500 out of their own pockets every year, and then have someone else, either their employer or the taxpayers, be responsible for everything else. Another recent survey revealed that young Americans would rather pay their cell phone bill than use that money to buy insurance. These young workers said that they will just wait to get health insurance until they get a job where it is included in a benefits package. In other words, they make a conscious decision not to get health insurance ... and then fully expect the taxpayers to step up and fill in the financial gaps if anything serious happens.

The American people are going to get what they're asking for. Socialized medicine is inevitable in the U.S. The politicians want it because of the degree of power it will give them over the lives of their constituents. The people want it because they have been programmed to believe that their health care is the responsibility of either their employer or the government.

It's coming ... and it's going to be ugly as hell. The long waits for simple diagnostic tests that have become commonplace in Canada will become the norm here. It may come to the point ... most likely it will come to the point that you will be assigned to a doctor just as your child is assigned to a school. Remember Hillarycare? Under that system if you decided to take your own money and go hire your own doctor outside of the Hillarycare scheme (somewhat like taking your child out of a government school and putting him in a private school) you could be charged with a crime. It may be necessary to adopt that policy again after people discover what a disaster their precious "universal health care" is going to be.

Take a look at Walter Reed. Go visit your local Veterans Hospital. Check out a Social Security office. It's coming folks. You asked for it. You couldn't handle the responsibility yourself, and the politicians damned sure weren't going to present you with private sector free market options unless you demanded them.

Oh .. and by the way. That "universal health care" tag? That's just something the left came up with to avoid using the S-word. Socialist.

NEWSFLASH: GOVERNMENT RUN HEALTH CARE SUCKS

By Michelle Malkin

The Washington Post is back today with another story about the pitfalls of the military health care system. Like I said when the WaPo series was launched, these failures are damnable--and nothing new. David Bernstein at The Volokh Conspiracy adds:

If private companies had mismanaged outpatient care for veterans the way the V.A. system has, there would be strong calls from all the usual quarters for a government takeover, and proclamations of how we can't trust "greedy" for-profit companies to take care of veterans. Funny how this thought process doesn't seem to work in reverse, except among "free market ideologues," who have been criticizing the V.A. for years.

Will the Bush-bashers join with free-market critics to effect real change and help the troops who need and deserve better care?

We'll see.

***
Previous:

Taking care of the troops
Milbloggers on WaPo series: Broken system, biased report

THE COMING BACKLASH AGAINST THE CLINTONS

By George Will

In the 1920s, the Brooklyn Dodgers finished in sixth place seven times in eight years. Late in that unfortunate period, a droll sportswriter, noting the team's listless play, wrote, "Overconfidence may yet cost Brooklyn sixth place."

Hillary Clinton's campaign did not display overconfidence when it directed the recent fusillade at Barack Obama. Her campaign's rhetorical megatonnage was in response to a prominent Obama contributor saying rude things about her. Her overreaction was one of several developments that have clarified the Democratic contest.

Bill Clinton has said, regarding presidential candidates, that Republicans like to fall in line and Democrats like to fall in love. Which explains the Clinton campaign's palpable panic: Democrats have fallen in love, but not with her.

Republicans tend to nominate the next person in line: Vice President Richard Nixon, not Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, to follow President Dwight Eisenhower in 1960; Vice President George H.W. Bush, not Sen. Robert Dole, to follow President Ronald Reagan in 1988; Dole rather than Lamar Alexander or any other contender in 1996; Gov. George W. Bush, whose dynastic lineage propelled him past Sen. John McCain in 2000.

There is a Republican tinge to Sen. Clinton's campaign: She is next in line. That fact -- combined with the Clintons' (how often the plural is pertinent) money machine, combined with the Clintons' earned reputation for ferocity -- is supposed to impart to her an aura of inevitability.

But such an aura annoys voters by telling them that they really have no choice. And that can provoke them to play the game that G.K. Chesterton called "Cheat the Prophet": The players listen politely to explanations of what is inevitable, then they make something else happen, which defeats boredom.

Boredom, the sociologist Robert Nisbet wrote, is among the universal and insistent forces driving human behavior. Mankind's nervous system evolved during millions of dangerous years (saber-toothed tigers, etc.). Now, however, mankind has suddenly, in a few millennia, encountered the monotony of orderly life, which bothers human brains formed by and for hazardous circumstances.

Among the cures of boredom that Nisbet listed are war, murder, revolution, suicide, alcohol, narcotics and pornography. He might have added presidential politics. Memo to the Clinton campaign: Inevitability is boring.

So is a narrow range of choices. Democrats have many interesting candidates, but governors often are the most plausible candidates to be the nation's chief executive and only one remains in the Democratic race -- New Mexico's Bill Richardson. Three former governors -- Virginia's Mark Warner, Indiana's Evan Bayh and Iowa's Tom Vilsack -- have left the field.

Vilsack said the demise of his candidacy was determined by " money and only money." Well, yes, but there were reasons, political and ideological, why he could not find buyers for what he was selling. Nevertheless, his statement triggered the usual laments about the determinative role of money in politics. This year we are told to be horrified by the fact that by November 2008 the presidential contest will have cost $1 billion. Which means that the two-year process will cost half as much as Americans spend every year on Easter candy.

Candidates do have to spend too much time raising money. But that is because the government, by banning large campaign contributions, has transformed a huge American surplus -- money -- into an artificial scarcity. The government began to do this for anti-competitive purposes.

The modern drive for campaign finance "reforms" is usually said to have been initiated by Democrats in response to Watergate. Democrats did start it, but before Watergate, in response to their traumas of 1968.

That year, Sen. Gene McCarthy's anti-Vietnam insurgency disturbed the Democratic Party's equilibrium by mounting a serious challenge to the renomination of President Lyndon Johnson. McCarthy was able to do that only because a few wealthy people gave him large contributions. Democrats also were alarmed by former Alabama governor George Wallace's success in 1968, and they mistakenly assumed that Wallace, too, was mostly funded by a few very large contributions.

According to John Samples of the Cato Institute (in his book " The Fallacy of Campaign Finance Reform"), congressional Democrats began the process that culminated in criminalizing large contributions -- the kind that can give long-shot candidates, such as Vilsack, a chance to become competitive. Yes, the initial aim of campaign "reforms" was less the proclaimed purpose of combating corruption or "the appearance" thereof than it was to impede the entry of inconvenient candidates into presidential campaigns. In that sense, campaign reform is a government program that has actually worked, unfortunately.

georgewill@washpost.com

RETURNING THE GOP TO CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLES

by Sen. Mitch McConnell

The following remarks were delivered by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R.-Ky.) on March 1, 2007 at the 34th annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C.

Thanks Ed [Feulner] for that kind introduction. Few people have done more for the conservative movement than Ed. Conservatives were in the wilderness when the Heritage Foundation opened its doors in 1973. But in the three decades that Ed’s been there, Heritage has become the biggest think tank in town and a big part of the reason conservatives now drive just about every policy discussion in America.

And I’m not just saying that because my wife used to work there. If Heritage gets any bigger, it’s going to have a higher gas and electric bill than Al Gore. Ed, thanks for your commitment to the conservative cause and, especially, for doing so much to train the next generation of conservative leaders. Many of them, I’m sure, are here. Thank you.

It’s great to be here, but I won’t keep you long. I don’t want to be like the Englishman that Winston Churchill once described as having “a great gift … for compressing the largest amount of words into the smallest amount of thoughts.”

But I do want to share a few thoughts with you, thoughts about the importance for this country of a strong and energized conservative movement and the direction I think the Republican Party needs to be moving in to ensure that conservative principles continue to animate our government and our laws.

A great statesman once said that “many people occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time they just pick themselves up and carry on.” I know that after the November elections a lot of Democrats hope, and a lot of conservatives fear, that Republicans in Congress are going to do just that, just keep on making the same mistakes that put us in the minority. Well, I’m here to tell you we learned our lesson.

But that’s not to say that Republicans in the Senate haven’t accomplished anything in the last two months. I like to point out that the Republican Minority can do two things: we can shape laws and we can block them. And ladies and gentlemen, I can tell you this: thanks to 41 Republicans in the U.S. Senate, not a single bad proposal has made it to the President’s desk.

Republicans are serious about a return to conservative principles. And the only argument we need to remind ourselves of the importance of that pledge is the way the Democrats have responded to the President’s new strategy in Iraq. I’ve been calling it the “Goldilocks” approach, because it seems like they’ve been trying to come up with something that’s hot enough for the anti-war base but cool enough for folks who worry about the consequences of precipitous withdrawal.

They’re trying to split the difference, and the problem, of course, is that none of the plans they’ve come up with is just right for everybody. To most of the folks in my conference, this whole issue is very simple: if the Senate doesn’t support the mission in Iraq, it should cut the funds for it. That’s the Senate’s constitutional role.

But the Democrats seem to be intent on doing just about everything except that. They’ve talked about denying reinforcements for the troops, and even deauthorizing a war resolution that we passed by a bipartisan vote. This is what happens when a political party lets a small group of folks who don’t represent the majority, let alone the mainstream of its supporters, take the whiphand.

But we can’t just sit back and watch all this play out. We need to learn a lesson from it instead, about the importance of unity. Conservatives are always best off when we stick together. Because when we don’t, when we fight among ourselves, the Democrats are always the ones who benefit most. That’s what happened in 1910, when feuding factions threatened to tear the Republican Party apart.

Teddy Roosevelt, who was still pretty popular at the time, thought he’d solve the problem by giving what turned out to be a pretty famous speech in Kansas on the true meaning of the Republican Party. Well, his attempt to heal the rift exposed its ugliness instead, and it helped Democrats take control of Congress in the mid-term elections that fall. After that, Roosevelt decided to challenge his own handpicked successor, William Howard Taft, for the presidential nomination. He ended up splitting the vote and ensuring that a Democrat won the White House in 1912.

Something similar happened back in 1992, when Ross Perot took the mantle of limited government away from Republicans and split our vote. Well, we’re still seeing the consequences of that … I think she’s on a listening tour of Iowa at the moment.

Teddy Roosevelt meant well. And while it might not have turned out well for the party, the message he brought to Kansas still resonates today. He said the greatest threat to self-government are those who would “twist the methods of free government into a machinery for defeating the popular will.”

He was talking about the small groups, the special interests, that even then were trying to turn America into a place where most of us wouldn’t want to live.

Well, I think Americans are being reminded right now about the power these kinds of groups have over our friends in the Democratic Party. It’s tearing them up at a time when we need clarity and unity of purpose from our congressional leaders.

Republicans have an opportunity and even an obligation right now to offer a contrast to the disarray we see in the Democratic ranks, and I’d like to think we’ve been doing a pretty good job of that over the last two months in the Senate.

I know a lot of Republicans are still gloomy about the November elections. And Republicans will have to continue to prove, not just say, that we’re recommitted to limited government and fiscal restraint if we’re going to win back the majority.

But as important as these two principles are to our identity, they’re not enough. A small government can still subvert the purposes of a free people. A thrifty legislature can still stifle our ability to speak freely or to associate as we wish.

A more fundamental duty for conservatives right now, as I see it, is the one Roosevelt spoke about in Kansas, the duty to make sure we’re united in the effort to protect the majority of Americans from those who use government to subvert the popular will.

This is a constant battle in virtually every area of public life, from the way we conduct foreign policy, to the way we run political campaigns. Republicans have always stood firmly on the side of constitutional principles and the rule of law, while our opponents seem to favor the judgments of an elite.

The most obvious example of this is the courts. For decades, groups that haven’t been able to bring about social change through elected representatives have sought to do so through activists on the bench. I know this battle firsthand. For more than a decade, I’ve led the fight against so-called Campaign Finance Reform.

I brought my case all the way to the Supreme Court, and lost. I found it hard to believe that the justices who were now calling for limits on political speech were the same ones who disapproved of any limits at all on virtual child pornography and the dissemination of illegally intercepted communications.

But you always get a second chance in this country, and the battle to reverse Campaign Finance isn’t over. Three years ago, Wisconsin Right to Life challenged the law after it was blocked from running ads opposing a Senate filibuster of judicial nominees. They won the case, it’s headed back to the Supreme Court, and I have to tell you, I’m looking forward to the fight.

Another affront to free speech is the system of taxpayer-financed presidential campaigns. Every year Americans are asked to check a little box on their tax returns to indicate whether they want to send a few dollars to the national campaign fund. Last time they checked, 91% of us held back our pencils.

Yet even as nine out of ten taxpayers say they don’t like the system, some lawmakers want to expand it. That little box? It used to ask for $1. Now it asks for $3. The proposed reform would drive it up to $10. Never mind that nine out of ten of us oppose it, or that the money is diverted from important public services like schools and defense.

But this is standard operating procedure for the activists who seem to control the Democratic Party. And the power they enjoy in Washington should be clear to anyone who’s been following the legislative calendar.

It’s no secret that plaintiff’s lawyers favor Democrats. More than 95% of the money their political action committee contributed in the last election cycle went to Democratic candidates. And they’re expecting something in return. One of their lobbyists put it pretty bluntly in a recent issue of “National Journal.” He said, “We’re in attack mode now.”

Well, Republicans understand the dangers of a legal culture that tries to replace the democratic process with a regime of regulation through litigation. That’s why we passed three long-stalled civil justice reforms in the last Congress: class action reform, bankruptcy reform, and gun manufacturer’s liability reform.

President Bush understands the danger, too. And while it will be much harder to enact legal reform in the current Congress, he’s committed to restoring sanity in the courts by appointing commonsense conservative judges who will exercise judicial restraint, but who will be unrestrained in throwing out frivolous lawsuits.

Big Labor showed up in the Senate this week too. Just yesterday, we took up the 9/11 bill that Democrats on the campaign trail said would “fully implement” the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission.

What they didn’t say is that Republicans had already implemented 37 of the Commission’s 39 recommendations, and that the backbone of their bill is a proposal to give collective bargaining rights to airport security screeners.

Well, we’ve been down this road before. We had a huge debate in Congress over collective bargaining when we created the Department of Homeland Security in 2002. Americans didn’t like the idea of labor slowdowns among security personnel then; they said so at the polls; two Democratic senators lost their seats over it. And voters would be shocked to know that the Democrats are at it again.

They’d be shocked to know there’s a bill on the floor of the Senate right now that would make our last line of defense against another airline bombing more like the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Everybody knows security personnel need to be flexible if we’re going to be able to respond quickly to threats. Two years ago, we trained about 40,000 airport screeners on explosives detection in under three weeks. Under collective bargaining, the same training would take two to six months. The 9/11 bill should be focused on improving our security. Period.

And we’re not going to let it through unless it is. The President has said he’ll veto any 9/11 bill that includes collective bargaining. We have the votes to sustain that veto. Ladies and gentlemen, this bill will not become law as long as this dangerous provision is in it.
But that’s not the only thing that Big Labor’s after. The House just took up “The Employee Free Choice Act” of 2007. It’s tough to remember a bill that was more deceptively named. This bill doesn’t increase employee choice — it limits it, by lifting the requirement that votes to unionize take place by secret ballot.

What the union bosses want is for employees to publicly state whether they favor creating a union or not. This is a clear effort to bully workers who have the courage to speak out against a union. Those who want a union would be at risk too, of being bullied by employers.

Well, look: there’s a reason we’ve had secret ballots in this country for the last 200 years: and that’s to protect voters from intimidation. This is a bedrock principle of a free society, and a clear corollary to the First Amendment’s protection of free speech. And Republicans are not going to let that principle be violated.

About two hours from now, Democrats in the House are going to push this bill through on a party line vote. But I can assure you that it will meet a different fate when it gets to the Senate.

Now, the Democratic Leadership knows it runs the risk of appearing too cozy with liberal interest groups. That’s why they’ve made a point of distancing themselves rhetorically from the fringe over the last year or so. But in the age of YouTube and the blogosphere, many of them can’t help but get caught now and then.

We saw it recently when Congressman Murtha revealed the details of his “Slow Bleed” strategy to a group associated with MoveOn.Org. That clip is one of the reasons we’re seeing so much disarray among the Democrats right now. Because it put the Goldilocks Approach to Iraq in full view.

If you haven’t followed this closely, here’s a recap:

President Bush gave us a plan to secure Baghdad, and named the best counterinsurgency expert we have, General David Petraeus, to lead the mission. Democrats and Republicans approved General Petraeus without dissent.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the Democratic Leadership was working out the details on a plan to appease the Bush-bashing base while appearing to support the Petraeus Mission.

First, there was the Biden resolution, but that turned out to be too strong for some Democrats to take.

Then there was the Levin Resolution, which the anti-war activists didn’t think was strong enough.

Then we got the Pelosi Resolution, which denounced the surge but claimed to support the troops. It passed the House a couple weeks ago, even though a number of Democrats complained that it really didn’t amount to much.

And that’s when we heard about the Murtha plan to load up an appropriations bill with so many caveats and conditions that the Petraeus Mission would never work — even as U.S. soldiers continued to fight it out in Iraq.

This strategy was obviously radioactive to a lot of Democrats, so they started to talk about changing the original authorization, to unring the bell.

Well, as I’ve said, you can’t unring the bell. And the Democrats seem to realize that now. So they’ve decided now to back away from that one too.

The American people are right to demand common sense in Washington. They’re not getting it from Democrats: on Iraq, free speech, security, and a whole lot of other issues. And so far, I think Republicans in the Senate have done a pretty good job of keeping some of their worst ideas at bay.

Yesterday marked an anniversary … On February 28, 1854, about 50 opponents of slavery got together in a little white schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin, to form the Republican Party. It was a motley crew, a little bit like CPAC, actually. There were the Northern Democrats, the Whigs, and some folks from the Free Soil Party.

They had a lot of differences, this group. There weren’t very many of them. And Ripon, Wisconsin, wasn’t exactly the most visible place to launch a great political movement.

Yet they were united by a powerful idea. And in two short years, the new political party they formed had sent 92 congressmen and 20 senators to Washington. It put up a strong candidate in the next presidential election; and four years after that, it sent a lanky, one-term congressman from Springfield, Illinois, to the White House.

We know what happened next. Abraham Lincoln saved this country through an unbending commitment to unity and a deep reverence for the Constitution. He marshaled the disparate voices in that fledgling new political party; united them around a powerful ideal, and then brought the country along with him.

You and I are the heirs of Lincoln’s political legacy. We have a special duty to promote and defend the same ideals he did — to keep them alive in these challenging days and in the days ahead, and to bring our friends along with us. And we will. I know we will. When we stumble over the truth, we will not get up and carry on.

Thank you.

Mr. McConnell, a Republican, is the U.S. Senate minority leader. He represents the people of Kentucky.

IF IRAN GETS THE BOMB

By Caroline Glick

With the Bush administration now happily basking in the glory of positive coverage in The New York Times and enjoying the warm embrace of the James Baker/Brent Scowcroft wing of the Republican Party, it is hard to imagine that it will reconsider its decision to abandon the Bush Doctrine. That doctrine, named after President George W. Bush and most forcefully enunciated by him, eschewed appeasement of terror-supporting, weapons of mass destruction-proliferating enemies of the free world.

Today, what Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice refers to as a "diplomatic initiative" aimed at appeasing terror-supporting, and weapons of mass destruction-proliferating Iran, and its terror-supporting, and weapons of mass destruction-proliferating Syrian colony is about to take off in Baghdad. So too, this week, the US began normalizing its relations with the terror-supporting, weapons of mass destruction-proliferating Stalinist dictatorship in Pyongyang.

Bush's traditional opponents are beside themselves with glee.

With regard to North Korea, these opponents are quick to note that there has always been great uncertainty about the level to which Kim Jung Il has advanced in his illicit uranium enrichment program. With regard to Iran, in an interview with the Times, former congressman Lee Hamilton warned that the Bush administration had better not think that the negotiations with the mullahs will lead anywhere quickly.

As the co-chairman of the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group which last November called for the president to appease Teheran and Damascus by forcing Israel to surrender the Golan Heights and Judea and Samaria explained, negotiations with the mullahs have to be open-ended. In his words, "You can't expect miracles here. There has to be a sustained effort. Successful diplomacy requires very careful preparation and very extensive follow-through."

For his part, Hamilton's partner, former secretary of state James Baker, ecstatically declared on Tuesday night, "America must be prepared to talk to our enemies."

What is lacking from both the media's reportage of the Bush administration's strategic about-face, and the administration's traditional detractors' praise for that sudden turn is an analysis of the likely downside of appeasing the mullahs. For instance, on Wednesday the Times ran a report on North Korea under the heading, "US Concedes Uncertainty on North Korean Uranium Effort."

The thrust of the article, which was based on interviews with administration sources, was that while North Korea's commitment to acquire nuclear weapons has never been in doubt, at no time has the US had certain knowledge of its actual capabilities. In light of the uncertainty relating to Pyongyang's capabilities, the Bush administration was wrong - the Times's sources clucked - to have confronted it over its intentions.

By the same token, those who applaud the administration's decision to engage the nuclear weapons-seeking mullahs in Teheran argue that the administration would be wrong to confront Iran for its stated intention to "wipe Israel off the map," and to bring about "a world without America," since US intelligence services are incapable of bringing unequivocal information regarding the state of Iran's nuclear weapons program.

Clearly there is something wrong with this analysis. If what is not in doubt is Iran's commitment to acquiring nuclear weapons, rather than base its policies on a best-case-scenario regarding Teheran's unknown capabilities, the US and its allies should be basing their policies on a calculation of the risks a nuclear armed Iran would constitute for global security.

BROADLY SPEAKING, there are three possible scenarios of how Iran would likely behave were it to become a nuclear power. In the most optimistic scenario, Iran would not attack Israel or any other country with its atomic arsenal, but would rather use it as an instrument of international and regional influence. In this scenario, Iran would reap economic advantage from its nuclear status by threatening oil shipping in the Persian Gulf and so jack up worldwide oil and gas prices. A massive economic dislocation in the oil consuming countries would no doubt ensue. In this state of affairs, all international economic sanctions against Iran would disappear and states would begin fighting with one another for the right to develop Iran's oil and gas fields and refining capabilities.

Operating under Iran's nuclear umbrella, terror groups like Hizbullah and Al-Qaida would feel free to attack at will throughout the world. The rates of terrorism - of both the organized and lone wolf variety - would increase exponentially.

Regionally, Iran would work to export its Khomeinist Shi'ite revolution. It would increase its interference in both Iraq and Afghanistan and so neutralize and defeat coalition and NATO efforts to stabilize those countries.

As to Saudi Arabia, there can be little doubt that Iran would seek to foment an uprising of Saudi Shi'ites who happen to live as a repressed minority on top of the Saudi oil fields.

Hizbullah's aim to overthrow the Saniora government in Lebanon would receive unprecedented Iranian assistance that would likely lead to the Shi'ite takeover of the country. So too, under the Iranian nuclear umbrella, Palestinian terrorism against Israel, and Syrian adventurism against Israel would rise steeply. The regimes in Egypt and Jordan as well as Saudi Arabia would be sunk into chaos, insurgency and war as they themselves entered a nuclear arms race the likes of which the world has never seen.

In a moderate scenario, not only would all the events that would likely occur in a best-case scenario occur, Iran would also make indirect use of its nuclear arsenal. In this case, Iran would likely use one of its existing terror proxies in Sinai, Gaza or Lebanon, or invent a new terror group in one or all of these areas. Iran would transfer one or more nuclear weapons to its terror group of choice, which would then attack Israel and cause the second Holocaust in 70 years. Iran would deny any connection to the attack, although it would shower high praise on its perpetrators.

While Iran's leaders from Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on down have expressed a willingness to endure an Israeli nuclear second-strike, judging from the way in which the Western policy elites are treating Iran today, the Iranians can have every expectation that they can wipe Israel off the map and pay no price for their aggression, either from a destroyed Israel or from the US.

The New York Times and its counterparts will likely note that there is no absolute certainty that Iran was behind the attack. Even the skimpiest Iranian denials or vague allegations against countries like Pakistan or Russia or "rogue" scientists from the former Soviet Union or Pakistan will likely be seized upon as a justification for not responding to the attack. Israel, it will be said, had it coming anyway, because it refused to negotiate with the "militants" from Hamas, preferring instead to maintain its "occupation" of the Golan Heights and Jerusalem.

In the worst case scenario, not only would Iran implement the best case and the moderate case scenario, it would also widen its network of allies while neutralizing its competitors in the Muslim world in order to expand its exportation of the Khomeinist revolution worldwide. All this it would do in an effort to achieve its longstanding aim of destroying America. Here the Iranians would be operating under the reasonable assumption that Europe will be neutral in the conflict, and Russia and China would likely support them against the US - at least covertly.

In this scenario, the Iranians would strengthen their alliances with America-haters in Latin America like Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega and Cuban dictator Fidel Castro or his heirs. It could openly supply these countries with nuclear bombs or strengthen Hizbullah's foothold in South and North America. In the latter case, Iran could transfer nuclear weapons and delivery systems to its terror proxies and use these networks, which include Hizbullah cells that are already active in the US, to attack the US.

Most brazenly, Teheran could collaborate with its ally North Korea in developing intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of attacking US cities with nuclear weapons launched from Iran. At the same time, given the US's large nuclear arsenal and ICBM capabilities, it is less likely that the Iranians would attack the US directly.

IN LIGHT of this analysis it seems that in spite of the praise it is reaping from the policy jet-set, the Bush administration would do well to reexamine its new policy toward Iran. It should accept their criticism and revert to basing its policy toward the nuclear-proliferating, terror-supporting rogue state on what is known rather than on what is unknown.

Since Iran not only wants nuclear weapons, but has an active nuclear weapons program, the question that should be guiding policymakers is not whether Iran should be negotiated with, but rather, whether the US is willing to accept any of the likely scenarios of what will transpire if Iran does in fact acquire nuclear weapons. If the US is not willing to accept any of those scenarios, then it should be asking itself what must be done to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power.

While Europe may be willing to sit on the sidelines of this fight, just as it sat on the sidelines of the Cold War, and did little to prevent the Nazi conquest of the continent in World War II, Israel has no such luxury.

In light of this, it is deeply disturbing that this week the Olmert-Livni-Peretz government reacted to the US move toward appeasement by claiming that it will have no impact on Israel. Rather than trying to gloss over the dangers, Israel should be actively engaging the many forces in Washington and elsewhere who understand the dangers of a nuclear armed Iran. Together we should be working tirelessly to ratchet up support for a policy based on the understanding that the world cannot abide a nuclear-armed Iran.

AL GORE AND AIRPORT SECURITY

You've heard by now that some American Airlines employee helped OwlGore to go around the TSA security check at the Nashville Airport. Gore folks are saying that the violation was "inadvertent." Horse squeeze. Al Gore is the former Vice President of the U.S. He ran for president. He has this whole global warming thing all figured out. He has and Oscar ... all this and he doesn't know that everybody ... and that means Oscar winners ... must go through airport security when boarding a commercial flight? Sorry ... I'm not buying it. What we have here is just another politician -- and it's common to Democrats and Republicans -- trying to exercise their privileges. Glad he got caught.