Parallels

An article in today's New York Times is meant to be a hit piece on the Bush administration.

Aren't they all?

But this one was different. Rather than revealing supposed incompetence on the part of the administration, I think it provides support for the Bush Doctrine.

From The New York Times:

The power and sophistication of the missile and rocket arsenal that Hezbollah has used in recent days has caught the United States and Israel off guard, and officials in both countries are just now learning the extent to which the militant group has succeeded in getting weapons from Iran and Syria.

While the Bush administration has stated that cracking down on weapons proliferation is one of its top priorities, the arming of Hezbollah shows the blind spots of American and other Western intelligence services in assessing the threat, officials from across those governments said.

...“You have to acknowledge the obvious — we’ve seen a new capability in striking the naval vessel and in the number of casualties that have been sustained from the Hezbollah missile attacks,” a Bush administration official said.

“In the past, we’d see three, four, maybe eight launches at any given time if Hezbollah was feeling feisty,” the official added. “Now we see them arriving in large clusters, and with a range and even certain accuracy we have not seen in the past.”

The officials interviewed agreed to discuss classified intelligence assessments about Hezbollah’s capabilities only on condition of anonymity.

Once again, The Times is printing information on "classified intelligence."

It's like a sickness with them. Really.

While Iranian missile supplies to Hezbollah, either by sea or overland via Syria, were well known, officials said the current conflict also indicated that some of the rockets in Hezbollah’s arsenal — including a 220-millimeter rocket used in a deadly attack on a railway site in Haifa on Sunday — were built in Syria.

“The Israelis did forensics, and found several were Syrian-made,” said David Schenker, who this spring became a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy after four years working on Middle East issues at the Pentagon. “Everybody recognizes that Syria has played an important role in facilitating transshipment — but not supplying their own missiles to Hezbollah.”

Officials have since confirmed that the warhead on the Syrian rocket was filled with ball bearings — a method of destruction used frequently in suicide bombings but not in warhead technology.

“We’ve never seen anything like this,” said one Western intelligence official, speaking about the warhead.

But it was Friday’s successful launching of a C-802 cruise missile that most alarmed officials in Washington and Jerusalem.

Iran began buying dozens of those sophisticated antiship missiles from the Chinese during the 1990’s, until the United States pressured Beijing to cease the sales.

Until Friday, however, Western intelligence services did not know that Iran had managed to ship C-802 missiles to Hezbollah.

This is proof positive that hostile regimes like Iran and Syria provide sophisticated weapons to terrorist groups.

It indicates the necessity of taking a tough stand against sworn enemies of the United States and acting preemptively to prevent these countries from passing weapons to terrorists.

From the Oval Office on September 11, 2001, President Bush clarified his policy:

The search is underway for those who are behind these evil acts. I've directed the full resources of our intelligence and law enforcement communities to find those responsible and to bring them to justice. We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.

Those who harbor them, those who arm them -- THEY ARE OUR ENEMIES.

By detailing that there are dangerous blind spots in intelligence with potentially disastrous, deadly consequences, The New York Times lends support to the policy of acting preemptively, cutting off the flow of armaments via regime change.

Tyrants like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad act as suppliers to terrorists. Iranian weapons ended up in the hands of Hezbollah.

This evidence proves the existence of an alliance between the various entities, nations and terrorist militias, that want Israel annihilated and its supporters (the United States) attacked.

Sometimes I think that the tyrannical nutjobs and the loose cannon terrorists are more united in their philosophy and goals than Americans are. They are joined in their determination to destroy Israel and do as much harm as possible to the U.S.

Does anyone really doubt that Saddam Hussein's Iraq kept its weaponry solely within its borders? It's incredibly naive to assume that Saddam's Iraq didn't or wouldn't assist terrorists in their murderous mission.

Obviously, The Times is quick to print the leak that U.S. and other Western intelligence officials were allegedly caught off guard by the type of weapons that Iran and Syria are supplying to Hezbollah.

Would The Times now agree that taking out Saddam Hussein, in the name of our national security and the protection of the Free World, was an appropriate action?

Would The Times now agree that the Iraq war is grounded in a purpose that directly relates to ensuring our safety?

In some cases, "preemptive strikes" should really be referred to as "defensive strikes."