It keeps getting even more interesting . . .

President Bush's efforts to prevent nuclear proliferation may be even more misguided than we thought. He chose to attack a country out of a supposed fear of a nuclear weapons program, which was apparently right in the middle of two countries who actually did have nuclear weapons programs! A couple of stories from the New York Times help prove the case that Syria was indeed working on a clandestine nuclear operation until Israel bombed the supposed facility last month.
The first, which came in Friday's print edition, showed a satellite photo of the site taken in August, featuring a large square building (the reactor) and a pumping station (reactor cooler) nearby along the banks of the Euphrates. Another photo taken Wednesday showed the pumping station intact and the square building gone. Not half a building with a blast crater. Gone. The Syrian government apparently decided that it had to demolish any trace of the reactor as soon as possible, because it will make it harder for the IAEA to investigate claims of illegal nuclear plans. Analysts quoted by the Times claimed that this should only serve to raise suspicions of wrongdoing.
The second, from the Times' website, reports of a photo of the site from September 2003, where construction was already well under way. These developments, coupled with multiple leaks from American intelligence sources and North Korea's hyperbolic condemnations of the Israeli strike, leave little to be concluded other than this: North Korea has helped Syria start a clandestine nuclear weapons program. The fact that top American officials were either not aware of this or chose to ignore it is very alarming. Thus, President Bush's fixation on Iraq quite evidently was not about weapons of mass destruction that could threaten neighboring countries, as he would have pursued either Iran or Syria if this were the case. (It also should slam the door on any claims that the "Israel Lobby" was the principal force behind the Iraq War.)