Virgin Quest

The denizens of al Qaeda may be psychopaths and theologically deluded and a whole lot of other unflattering traits, but nobody ever said they weren't politically shrewd. Now they have hit upon a mode of biological warfare that is sure to attract the avid and enthusiastic support of the American Left:

Al-Qaeda is recruiting suicide bombers who are infected with the AIDS virus, according to Britain's Sunday Mirror.

The newspaper reported that terror chiefs are also targeting fanatics who suffer other lethal blood diseases such as hepatitis and dengue fever in order to increase their "kill rate" from an explosion....Experts have found that bones and other blood-spattered fragments from a suicide bomber could penetrate the skin of a victim more than 50 yards away and infect them.

The lavender lobby can't lose with this gambit. Either they can cite it to revamp their perpetual demand that the country bankrupt itself to fund AIDS research as a homeland security issue and then use it to denounce President Bush as being "soft on terrorism" (in addition to "homophobic"), or they can cheer on al Qaeda to launch attacks of this sort in the "red" states that re-elected Bush against Osama bin Laden's dire and severe warnings. Which would also make them Bush's fault.

Speaking of OBL, NRO's indominable Michael Ledeen reports (via Cap'n Ed) that the devoutly randy old SOB has finally departed for his heavenly orgy:

[A]ccording to Iranians I trust, Osama bin Laden finally departed this world in mid-December. The al Qaeda leader died of kidney failure and was buried in Iran, where he had spent most of his time since the destruction of al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The Iranians who reported this note that this year's message in conjunction with the Muslim Haj came from his number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, for the first time.

Of course, I don't know if you get seventy-two virgins if you drown in your own piss instead of contracting AIDS and blowing yourself up at a Billy Graham crusade. Maybe OBL is taking an eternal golden shower instead. But as I recall, the congressional war resolution against al Qaeda, passed in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, included on the target list any regime that sponsored or otherwise gave aid & comfort to bin Laden's bloodmisters. And if OBL did, indeed, make Iran his new home base after he was chased out of Afghanistan, that would certainly seem to be the legal grounds on which to effect regime-change in Iran by, shall we say, a more direct route.

And, thanks in no small measure to Bill Clinton, we have a vanishing window of opportunity to make that happen:

In a hairbrained scheme that was personally approved by then-President Clinton, the CIA deliberately gave Iranian physicists blueprints for part of a nuclear bomb that likely helped Tehran advance its nuclear weapons development program.

The allegation, detailed in the new book State of War, by New York Times reporter (and eventual felon, hopefully) James Risen, comes as the Iranian nuclear crisis appears to be coming to a head, with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad urging that Israel be "wiped off the map" and his government announcing last week that it will [and did] resume uranium enrichment on Monday....

Beginning in February 2000, the CIA recruited a Russian scientist who had defected to the US years earlier. His mission: Take the nuclear blueprints to Vienna to sell them - or simply give them - to the Iranian representatives for the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Dubbed "Operation Merlin," the plan was supposed to steer Iranian physicists off track by incorporating design flaws in the blueprints that would render the information worthless. But in what may turn out to be one of the greatest foreign policy blunders of all time, Operation Merlin backfired when the Russian scientist spotted the design flaws immediately - and even offered to help Iran fix the problems.

Risen said the Clinton-approved plan ended up handing Tehran "one of the greatest engineering secrets in the world, providing the solution to one of a handful of problems that separated nuclear powers such as the United States and Russia from rogue countries such as Iran that were desperate to join the nuclear club but had so far fallen short." He noted that thanks to the bizarre operation, Iran could now "leapfrog one of the last remaining engineering hurdles blocking its path to a nuclear weapon."

And plunge the world into disaster by any of several different avenues.

One could ask what Mr. Bill was thinking, but that would be a rhetorical question. I'll leave the answer to the imagination, but here's a hint: OSL has spent the past three weeks taking cold showers.

And cold water is hard to come by in his new accomodations....