Rhetoric vs. Reality on Preventing Nuclear Terrorism

I am certainly not a fan of the New Republic. But with progressive-basher Peter Beinart on leave from his post as the New Republic's editor, I decided to take a look to see if the magazine had anything better to offer than its standard fare - and, surprisingly, it did.

A new article by acting editor Peter Scoblic takes a sobering look at how the Bush administration's claim that democracy will stop terrorism is really being used as a way to mask the fact that the administration is doing nothing concrete to ACTUALLY stop the most dangerous kind of terrorism - nuclear terrorism.

This isn't to undervalue America's need to support democratic reforms where we can throughout the world (and frankly, here at home too by supporting public financing of elections to fix our own system of legalized bribery). But the fact is, Bush's pro-democracy rhetoric is both false on its face, and no substitute for short-term, concrete steps to seriously address the threat of nuclear terrorism.

We know it is false everytime we see Bush genuflect to the Saudi or Egyptian governments (or any other of a handful of dictators Bush seems so comfortable with). And it should be obvious why high-faluting rhetoric about "freedom" is no substitute for making sure that vulnerable nuclear material is better secured throughout the globe - a priority the Bush administration has ignored.

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