Jeffrey Lord, writing at The American Spectator (“Iran Bomb Plot Sinks Ron Paul’s Credibility“):

Remember Congressman Paul back at that Fox debate in Iowa saying to Chris Wallace that the threat from Iran was “small”? That “Iran does not have an air force that can come here…. They can’t even make enough gasoline for themselves…” This was in addition to Paul’s attack on former president George W. Bush for signing an executive order designating Iran’s Revolutionary Guard a “terrorist group.” All are of a piece in the consistent Ron Paul theme that many see as a McGovernite foreign policy. Not only far-left wing philosophically but with a startling — and dangerous — naïveté about the nature of America’s enemies.

Comes now the news that lo and behold Iran is being accused by the FBI — with the charge backed up by House Intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers, the Kentucky Republican — of plotting not one but two attacks on American soil. The targets being the Saudi Ambassador to the U.S. and the Israeli Embassy….

All of which is to say, Congressman Paul’s theories about Iran have just been blown to smithereens.

Iran didn’t use an air force to get to America — it had an Iranian, American-naturalized citizen Manssor Arbabsiar — already here.

Suppose instead of a plot to blow up a Washington restaurant — among the charges — with a conventional bomb, Arbabsiar and his cohort had managed to smuggle in a nuclear weapon? What did Paul write in his book The Revolution in addition to scorning the idea that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard was a danger?

I had said all along that Iran posed no imminent nuclear threat to us or to her neighbors.

This time around, luck was on America’s side. Iran didn’t — yet — have the capacity to smuggle in a nuclear weapon. But they were within a whisker of getting a conventional bomb and killing hundreds –on American soil.

An act which all by itself could easily be defined as an act of war.

But the real casualty here?

The Ron Paul movement.

The congressman has just been shown to be wrong about Iran — big time.

Ron Paul is not the only so-called libertarian who has been shown to be wrong. Paul — along with many so-called libertarians and great swaths of leftists — likes to preach the gospel of benign neglect: Leave others alone and they will leave us alone. This is such jejune nonsense that I find it hard to believe that sentient adults profess to believe it. But a dangerously high number of them do.

Rather than repeat the long list of posts that I have written on this subject, I refer you to the list at the end of “Nonsense about Presidents, IQ, and War.”