Keys Corner

John Bolton, arch-neocon and former US ambassador to the United Nations called for Iran to be bombed yesterday:

Mr Bolton, who was addressing a fringe meeting organised by Lord (Michael) Ancram, said that the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was “pushing out” and “is not receiving adequate push-back” from the west.

“I don’t think the use of military force is an attractive option, but I would tell you I don’t know what the alternative is. Because life is about choices, I think we have to consider the use of military force. I think we have to look at a limited strike against their nuclear facilities.”

He added that any strike should be followed by an attempt to remove the “source of the problem”, Mr Ahmadinejad.

“If we were to strike Iran it should be accompanied by an effort at regime change … The US once had the capability to engineer the clandestine overthrow of governments. I wish we could get it back.”

Sounds like the US rhetoric on their invasion of Iraq. Watch the price of oil if they start to move in this direction – it will go through the roof, I think.

Seymour M. Hersh, writing in next week’s New Yorker paints a picture of the American government spoiling for a chance to bomb Iran as soon as they have manufactured a plausible reason for an attack, but that hasn’t learned from their mistakes in Iraq and thought through what will happen if they do attack:

“They’re moving everybody to the Iran desk,” one recently retired C.I.A. official said. “They’re dragging in a lot of analysts and ramping up everything. It’s just like the fall of 2002”—the months before the invasion of Iraq, when the Iraqi Operations Group became the most important in the agency. He added, “The guys now running the Iranian program have limited direct experience with Iran. In the event of an attack, how will the Iranians react? They will react, and the Administration has not thought it all the way through.”

That theme was echoed by Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national-security adviser, who said that he had heard discussions of the White House’s more limited bombing plans for Iran. Brzezinski said that Iran would likely react to an American attack “by intensifying the conflict in Iraq and also in Afghanistan, their neighbors, and that could draw in Pakistan. We will be stuck in a regional war for twenty years.”