In the good ol' days--that is, before the age of the Internet, daily blogging and 24-second-long news cycles--you could chew on a news event for a few days and then comment upon it. Such punditing no longer seems to be in fashion. Still, I've been pondering since last Thursday a remark George W. Bush made at a press conference that morning:

So I've told people that if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.

The remark got some attention--mostly for Bush's reference to World War III. Appearing on NPR's The Diane Rehm Show the following day, Tony Blankley, the conservative columnist who until recently ran the editorial page of The Washington Times, noted that it was inadvisable for a president ever to refer to a possible Third World War.

But what struck me was how Bush appeared to lower the bar for an attack on Iran. He asserted that Iran had to be prevented from obtaining the knowledge needed to build nuclear weapons--not the capacity to produce such weapons. Yet that knowledge is already freely available and presumably already in the hands of scientists and engineers in Iran--as well as in most countries of the world. Remember that in 1979, The Progressive magazine published the design for a hydrogen bomb. So if Bush wants to make knowledge the standard for blasting Iran, Iran is toast.

Of course, Bush probably did not mean what he said, and he has no intention of attacking Iran if he can prove that a yellowing copy of The Progressive is in a government filing cabinet somewhere. But, in a way, this makes his statement worse. It shows how sloppy Bush can be. And if he wants to convince the world he is a serious and somber-minded leader--particularly when it comes to matters of war--this is not the way to do so.

Careless rhetoric can be read as an indicator of careless thinking or careless policy. Bush has already persuaded much of the globe that he is not to be trusted, that he prefers war to diplomacy, that he does not understand (or care about) the complexities of the world. Saying that he is willing to attack Iran if it has the "knowledge" to build nuclear weapons (and he said it twice at the press conference) was an act of profound neglect. It showed the U.S. commander in chief is willing to rattle a saber without paying mindful attention to the facts. Bush is lucky the U.S. media quickly moved on. Imagine if a remark such as this one was truly allowed to sink in.

Posted by David Corn at October 24, 2007 11:35 AM