Bill Kristol rattled the sabres on Fox News Sunday:
“We cannot let whatever bad results were in Iraq deter us from doing what is necessary here. We can’t ask Israel to do it; it’s our responsibility if we care about the future of the Middle East. I think we could do much more to stimulate dissent and to help the democratic opposition, in Iran, but look, the fact that the military action would be hard, doesn’t mean you couldn’t have a four day Desert Fox-like operation like in Iraq in 1998, which probably did damage Saddam’s ability to acquire weapons of mass destruction.
Ezra Klein interpteted this as an endorsement of an INVASION of Iran. Lawyers, Guns, and Money responds:
Ah yes, so Bill Kristol has come out explicitly in favor of invading Iran. As the Republican Party’s most beloved Democratic Lester Maddox protege once asked, “with what–spitballs?” Perhaps it’s my lack of Straussian training, but I’m rather at a loss to reconcile the simultaneous positions that 1)we need to invade Iran, 2)we cannot “cut-and-run” from Iraq, and 3)it was grotesquely irresponsible to suggest that there was even the slightest possibility of a draft if Bush was re-elected. Where exactly are we getting these troops? Are they growing a group of super-warrior clones at the offices of The Weekly Standard or something?
And Peter Beinhart will call critics of this plan unserious…
In Kristol’s latest column Do not appease Tehran, he praises the Washington Post:
The Washington Post’s editorial page, for one, endorses political and economic steps of real consequence, warns against letting diplomacy degenerate into appeasement, proposes to test the seriousness of our allies and nations such as Russia and China, and refuses to rule out the threat of military action.
and he warns:
Doves profess concern about Iran’s nuclear program and endorse various diplomatic responses to it. But they don’t want even to contemplate the threat of military action. Perhaps military action won’t ultimately be necessary. But the only way diplomatic, political and economic pressure has a chance to work in the coming months is if the military option — or various military options — are kept on the table.
Meanwhile, some hawks, defenders of the Iraq war, would prefer to deal with one challenge at a time. They hope we can kick the can down the road a while longer, or that a deus ex machina — a Jewish one — will appear to do our job for us. But great powers don’t get to avoid their urgent responsibilities because they’d prefer to deal with only one problem at a time, or to slough those responsibilities on to others.
We’ve seen this movie before, and we all panned the ending. If there is a lesson Kristol should have learned from Iraq II, it is not to beat your wardrums so loudly that you look like a wimp if you DON”T invade. Keep your options open.
And the lesson we should all have learned from Iraq I is that we shouldn’t bomb enemies we are in no position to defeat. Don’t get yourself into an open-ended round of economic sanctions. Don’t make messes that you are not prepared to clean up.
But PNAC lives for and off messes.
Update [2006-1-16 14:33:30 by BooMan]:
From the AP:
Powerful members of the U.N. Security Council agreed Monday that Iran must fully suspend its nuclear program, Britain’s Foreign Office said following a meeting aimed at forging a common response to Tehran’s decision to resume uranium enrichment activities.
Diplomats also announced plans to call for an emergency meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency board of directors on Feb. 2-3 to discuss what action to take against Tehran for removing some U.N. seals from its main uranium enrichment facility in Natanz last week.
