Tehran's insistence on enriching uranium could destabilize a volatile region, wreak havoc on energy markets and bring nuclear weapons to an Islamic theocracy.

Throughout the article, which is more than a thousand words long, there is not one word to indicate that enriched uranium is used in nuclear power plants; it is simply assumed that "Tehran's insistence on enriching uranium" is due to an intent to build a bomb. Iran's denial that it has any such intent? Never mentioned in the article.

And the "options" which the article lays out for the "international community" to "deal" with Iraq? Sanctions, "beef up treaty" ("significantly increase the diplomatic costs of Iraq ever deploying nuclear weapons," whatever that means), "strengthen regional defenses," "bypass the Persian Gulf" (meaning take Saudi Arabian oil by a different route), and military strikes. There are five options, some of them peaceful, so why did I title this post "Knight-Ridder bangs the war drums"? Because the entire thrust of this article is to convince the American people that there is a "problem" that "we" have to "deal with." Which, in the end, is quite likely to mean war of some kind, a war which articles like this will have pre-conditioned the American people to accept and support.

I mentioned that there is no clue in this article that enriched uranium is used in nuclear power plants and not just in nuclear bombs. There's another subject missing from the article, and if anything it's even more astonishing than that. The word "Israel" does not appear in this article. How bizarre is that? Here's one quote from the article: "Arab states also will have to worry that Iran's possession of nuclear weapons will embolden Tehran to revert to a more aggressive foreign policy." Arab states? Not Israel? A map accompanying the article showing "a nuclear world" even includes this curiously circumspect description: "Israel neither confirms nor denies possessing nuclear weapons. United States intelligence reports have labelled Israel as a de facto nuclear power for years." An uneducated reader would clearly be left thinking this was still an open question. After all, we all know "United States intelligence reports" were wrong about Iraqi WMD, clearly, they might be wrong about this too. And, by the way, what the heck is a "de facto" nuclear power? What other kind is there? [Elsewhere in another sidebar describing "the role of the IAEA," the reader does learn than Israel is "estimated to own 200 nuclear warheads," but it's curious this information doesn't appear on the map's label of Israel itself]

The curious (and absolutely intentional) omission of Israel from the article has an obvious effect on the central conclusion of the article. The author claims that Iran's "enriching uranium" (by which he means build nuclear weapons, as I've already discussed) "could destabilize a volatile region," but, had he noted that Israel is the sole nuclear power in the region, it could just as easily be argued that an Iranian nuclear bomb would stabilize the region by putting limits on Israel's ability to act unilaterally in using nuclear weapons, as it has threatened to do.