Sorry Guys, Iran Has No Nukes

The recent NIE report confirming Iran's dormant nuclear weapons program has done more than just expose the Bush administration as disengenuous fear-mongers; it has created a "vacuum," as Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank so eloquently put it on Hardball w/ Chris Matthews. It had created an issues vacuum, which the GOP candidates must scramble to fill with gay marriage bans, flag burning amendments, and the like. Iran was always the ace in the hole for these candidates, and now the NEI has taken that from them.

On the December 4th broadcast of Hardball, Milbank summed up the GOP's 2008 election strategy:

The playbook sort of seems to be about 2002, pushing measures through congress, whether it was the authorization for war, basically creating something of a drumbeat, putting pressure on the Democrats to be strong on national security. This [NIE report] makes it very, very difficult to go back to that same playbook.

The leading Republican candidates have been eerily silent on Iran since this report was made public this week. Unfortunately, they are already on the record with regard to the Iranian nuclear threat. Since the United Nations had already determined that Iran had no nuclear weapons program, the NIE report is nothing new. All it does it put a final nail in the coffin of the GOP's 2008 Iran strategy. Now that Iran is clearly not going nuclear any time soon, that drumbeat will soon fall upon deaf ears. This solidifies Iraq, not Iran, as the dominant national security/foreign policy issue in the next election, and that is not good news for the Republican candidates.

Here are a few of the ways these guys have already been using the non-existent Iran situation to build a 2008 election platform:

"If for some reasons they continue down their course of folly toward nuclear ambition, then I would take military action if that's available to us." - Mitt Romney, 10/07

"... the military option is not off the table and the Iranians should understand that, that America will not allow them to become a nuclear power.... Their regime is too irresponsible. The world would be in too much danger" - Rudy Giuliani, 10/07

“The theocrats ruling Iran need to understand that we can wield the stick as well as the carrot, by undermining popular support for their regime, damaging the Iranian economy, weakening Iran’s military, and, should all else fail, destroying its nuclear infrastructure.” - Rudy Giuliani, 8/07

"I know that our liberal friends shake their head when a conservative talks of a nuclear Iran.... But for conservatives like me, facing reality is not a source of fear. It is a source of confidence." - Mitt Romney, 6/06

"Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran." - John McCain, 4/07, to the tune of The Beach Boys' "Barbara Ann"