Here we go again

[E]very congressperson knew ''or should have known'' that Saddam was not actively seeking a nuclear weapons capability. Just days before Bush invaded Iraq, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director-General ElBaradei had reported to the Security Council that "after three months of intrusive inspections, we have to date found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq."

[...]

The IAEA's safeguards regime was to be transformed, thereby, from a quantitative system ''focused on accounting for declared materials and monitoring of declared activities'' to a qualitative system, capable of forming a comprehensive picture of a state's nuclear and nuclear-related activities, including all nuclear-related imports and exports.

Each Additional Protocol also provides the IAEA the authority to visit any of the signatory's facilities to investigate questions about - or inconsistencies in - the signatory's nuclear declarations.

Iran signed an Additional Protocol to its Safeguards agreement and immediately invited the IAEA to conduct the exhaustive two-year inspection of Iran's nuclear and nuclear-related activities just completed.

Result?

As was the case with Iraq in the months immediately preceding Bush's invasion, the IAEA has found no evidence that NPT-proscribed materials have been stolen or diverted, nor that Iran is engaged in any NPT-prohibited activity. In particular, there is no evidence that Iran has been enriching uranium in the facilities it has constructed or is constructing.

[...]

[If] Bush-Cheney can get the Security Council to impose sanctions on Iran - or worse - in spite of the no-nuke report by the IAEA, the NPT-IAEA nuke proliferation-prevention regime may be dealt a fatal blow.

This week retiring Secretary of State Colin Powell appeared to be developing a rationale for launching - or condoning - a Bush preemptive attack against Iran, just as he did just before Bush launched his preemptive attack against Iraq.

  AntiWar article

Powell trying to prove himself a loyal Bushite before he leaves? Hoping for another appointment somewhere else in the second administration? We already knew he's a whore to power.

The machinery marches on.