January 16, 2011

Stuxnet: It's Bush's fault!

By James Lewis

It's called "an admission against interest" in legal circles. Example: When the New York Times says something good about George W. Bush. It was George W. Bush's fault, the NYT just confessed, that the Stuxnet computer worm ended up destroying 984 Iranian uranium centrifuges over the last year or so. Bush got the Stuxnet program started in cooperation with Israel and other countries in the last years of his presidency.

Of course the Times buries the truth half-way down its long story on Stuxnet computer worm, instantly saying that when Obama found out about it he made the program speed up. But no matter. It's a confession from the New York Times, which is not prone to confessions. In fact, it was the New York Times that denied the Iranian nuclear threat for years and years during Bush's tenure. It is the New York Times that published and promoted the plainly false National Intelligence Estimate of 2006, dumped by the intelligence bureaucracy to undermine George W. Bush. The left as represented by the NYT and WaPo, the Guardian and Der Spiegel, has a lot on its tiny little conscience.

The Israelis were working hard on Stuxnet, of course, and they tested it on their own versions of the Iranian nuclear centrifuges. There are broad hints that the Germans may have helped, and the Brits. It's quite possible that this was a massive effort with cooperation from many sources, because no sane country or regime in the world wants Iran's current regime to have nukes. So the Saudis could have leaned on the Pakistanis, who had the original centrifuge design (stolen by the infamous AQ Khan from the Dutch). The Saudis are fifty miles away from the Bushehr nuclear plant, and they really would rather not have that fallout cloud float across the Gulf to their side. So dozens of saner countries wanted the Iranian program stopped; today it is only partly slowed down.

One question we must ask is why the New York Times would now tell the truth about a program that is still going on. After all, telling the truth when it favors George W. Bush is not exactly its normal operating procedure. It was only in 2008, three years ago, that the NYT claims that the CIA published the technical control vulnerabilities of those centrifuges. That means the world almost tipped over to total nuclear proliferation in the last 24 months or so.

Without Stuxnet the Iranian nuclear program would be going full blast -- literally -- right now. If you thought 9/11/01 was bad, consider an Iranian martyrdom team like the 9/11 hijackers exploding a nuke in Manhattan. Even Mayor Bloomberg might take notice.

So the saner fraction of the world has to be working frantically behind the scenes, to stop the North Koreans and the Iranians, the Syrians and, yes, even the bloody Burmese tyranny, which desperately needs some nukes for some inexplicable reason.

Whatever. Let the Arabs join the Israelis, the Russians and Germans, the Americans and the Pakistanis to postpone the end of civilized life as we know it. That is one thing we should be able to unite on.

There's no way things should ever have been allowed to even get close to this stage. If Iran had gotten the bomb, and if the Israelis, who have good intelligence sources in Iran, had information of an imminent attack, they would not have waited for the last ten minutes. A nuke in the hands of a fascist suicide regime would justify preemptive nuclear attack, and let the bad PR be damned. When Ahmadinejad talks about bringing about the return of the Mahdi, the Twelfth Imam, along with Armageddon for the infidels, he might have succeeded at the cost of immense and needless suffering to his own people.

That is insane. Allowing it to get even close to that is insane.

So Stuxnet has saved us from falling into a new Dark Age. The civil aviation industry might have crashed as soon as somebody exploded a nuclear weapon in anger. International trade and even domestic traffic would grind to a halt while the TSA would be trying to inspect more than your grandmother's underwear. We would be descending into a police state at best.

Why are we even this close to Armageddon? What are the saner nations of the world, and Obama, doing to ensure that the world gains a much, much bigger margin of safety? What are we doing to punish China, for example, for supporting the North Koreans along with their nuclear program?

When will we get serious? Are today's politicians even capable of getting serious? Do you think that Harry Truman and FDR, famous liberals both, would allow things to get this close to disaster?

Obama and the New York Times have some questions to answer, and if the GOP has any guts, they will insist on those answers for all of us. Now that the organs of the left have finally confessed how close we came to disaster they must plead guilty to gross, no insane, irresponsibility during the Bush years when all they did was cover up. If Watergate was bad, what do you call Armageddongate?