Iranian nuke threat ignored because of debt crisis?

The news is full of stories about where the United States is headed if we don’t do something quickly about the debt ceiling. Leaders of both political parties warn that a failure to raise the ceiling will result in market instability and perhaps even government default. Many tea partiers are more concerned that our extreme debt problems, left unchecked, will drive us into third-world conditions within a generation. From either perspective, the sky seems to be falling all around us.

In reality, it may be, but for a different reason. An immediate, existential threat to our way of life may be under development in Ahmadinejad’s Islamic Republic of Iran. And the debt crisis severely compromises our ability and willingness to face that threat.

Now don’t think for a second that I am some sort of neocon. I cannot support what the internationalists and crony capitalists have done in the Middle East over the past 10 years at the cost of thousands of American lives. Building foreign infrastructure projects, setting up regimes and establishing near-permanent U.S. bases, all costing hundreds of billions of U.S. tax dollars, find little support in the Constitution. But even if intended by the founders, these foreign entanglements are bankrupting the country almost as fast as Obama’s expanding socialism.

And, to make matters even worse, the regimes we have propped up with the blood of U.S. soldiers have failed to guarantee the very freedoms enshrined in our own Constitution. Free speech is frequently accompanied by assassination in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Religious freedom is under vicious attack in both countries. All in all, the neocon approach is a fiscal, constitutional and moral failure.

But the problems with our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan do not justify turning a blind eye toward Iran. This increasingly advanced nation, awash in billions of dollars of oil revenue, is aggressively pursuing nuclear technology. This is despite its energy-rich posture with the third-largest proven crude reserves and second-largest gas reserves in the world. Energy independence is clearly unrelated to Iran’s nuclear program.

Although suspicions regarding Iran’s nuclear program are nothing new, a number of revelations within the last several weeks reflect how aggressively this enemy is moving toward acquiring nuclear weapons. Last month, Iran’s nuclear agency revealed that it is tripling production of enriched uranium, a substance not needed for its nuclear power program. Earlier this month, Iranian war games displayed the reach of a newly developed radar-evading missile with a range sufficient to hit most of Europe and U.S. bases in the Middle East. And last week, it was discovered that Iran’s nuclear enrichment program is being moved deep inside a mountain near the city of Qom.

Read more at World Net Daily HERE.