How quickly ...

We forget.

Diane Sawyer and ABC News this week:

...

"Respectable lady," [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad said, "this approach has failed... raising the stick of sanctions and then saying let's negotiate. It has failed. It's over. It's not repeatable." Ahmadinejad rejected evidence that Iran is working on a neutron initiator, a device which has no civilian uses but is the trigger for a nuclear weapon. It was first reported in the Times of London which cited an internal Iranian document. The plans for a neutron initiator has been described as the "smoking gun" that allegedly proves Iran's nuclear program is intent on building a bomb.

When Sawyer asked the Iranian president if he wanted to see the document, he waved it away.

"No, I don't want to see them at all. I don't," he said. "They are all fabricated bunch of papers continuously being forged and disseminated by the American government." White House Senior Adviser David Axelrod told ABC News the accusation that the U.S. fabricated documents was "nonsense."

...

You see, Diane, waving around a piece of paper purporting to be 'evidence' doesn't mean shit. Were we (the U.S. and U.K.) still in control of the moral high ground, it might mean something, but after this:

The Niger uranium forgeries refers to forged documents initially revealed by Italian Military intelligence. These documents purport to depict an attempt by the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq to purchase "yellowcake" uranium powder from Niger during the Iraq disarmament crisis.

On the basis of these documents and other indicators, the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom asserted that Iraq had attempted to procure nuclear material for the purpose of creating what they called weapons of mass destruction, referred to as WMD, in defiance of the United Nations Iraq sanctions.

...

Any credibility we might have had was flushed. Any 'documentation' we produce now has as much worth and use as toilet paper.

Let me posit this to the folks who now claim Iran is the next big, bad, bogeyman: Were there a limited (while destroying the better part of a city is a horror, in the big scheme of things it is nothing compared to what the Soviets could have done) nuclear detonation in the U.S. (or some other western nation, Israel included) by a terrorist group, don't you think, if Iran's (or North Korea's) complicity was determined, Iran (or North Korea) would be a smoking hole in the ground? Don't you think all those ICBMs we have stashed underground in the Dakotas and Montana and SLBMs on subs would be on their way minutes later? We kept the Soviets in check for 50 years with that threat; do you think the Iranians don't understand that little fact of life?

Listen to me, it's one thing for some retard on the street to blow himself up in a bus or in a market. There are more than enough of them to go around but do you think the Grand Ruling Council of Iran, or Mr. Ahmedinejad himself, are willing to martyr themselves? Of course not; they enjoy their power too much. If they gave a nuke to a terrorist, there would be nothing left; no nation to rule over, no holy sites, and certainly no Council. Don't you think we have their GPS coordinates programmed into at least one missile crew commander's console? I'll bet a paycheck they aren't willing to risk that, just as the Soviets weren't.

Iran's nuclear ambitions are just another tool used to scare the population into compliance, as 9/11 was, as Iraq's yellowcake was, nothing more.