Uber-liberal Sen. Chuck Schumer's colleagues and party have gone out of their way to criticize President Bush's and Vice President Cheney's backing of a pre-emptive war in Iraq, criticizing them for a unilateral "rush to war" based on lies and deceit about Iraq's WMD capabilities, including nuclear weaponry.
Interestingly, today's New York Post reports that Schumer is not opposed to a pre-emptive strike on Iran to keep them from having nukes. From the Post:
Iran is run by "a madman," and the United States shouldn't rule out military action to keep him from having his finger on the nuclear trigger, Sen. Charles Schumer said yesterday.
"This guy is just out of his mind," Schumer said of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
"And to allow the Iranian government to get weapons of mass destruction, the world will regret it," he said.
Is Schumer's statement of apparent willingness to back possible pre-emptive military strike against Iran a reaction to solid U.S. intelligence about Iran's nuclear capabilities? Not according to the Post story.
Schumer's comments, after a press conference with Mayor Bloomberg in Brooklyn, came a day after Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Iran was "months" away from being able to make a nuclear weapon.
Because Olmert said "Iran was 'months' away from being able to make a nuclear weapon," Schumer is willing to state that military action is an option. But he allows his party to freely call Bush a liar for basing the Iraq war on intelligence that CIA Director George Tenet asserted to the President was a "slam dunk." Interesting.
