Asia Times: Growing elite opposition to strike on Iran - By Jim Lobe

[Douglas Carpenter]

a VERY important article that should be read in full by everyone

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/NA28Ak04.html

snips:

Adding to the sense that war was suddenly a very real possibility, these events more or less coincided with the publication by the influential Foreign Affairs journal of an article entitled "Time to Attack Iran: Why a Strike is the Least Bad Option''. It advocated a limited and carefully calibrated US aerial attack on Iran's air defenses and nuclear sites, and was authored by an academic, Matthew Kroenig, who had just completed a one-year stint as a strategic analyst in the office of the secretary of defense.

The confluence of all these developments provoked a number of influential members of the foreign policy establishment - including several prominent liberal interventionists who had supported the Iraq war - to warn against any further escalation either by the US or Israel.

...

"As before, we're letting a bunch of ignorant, sloppy-thinking politicians and politicized foreign-policy experts draw 'red line' ultimatums. As before, we're letting them quick-march us off to war," warned Gelb, a repentant Iraq-war hawk, about the chorus of neo-conservatives and other hawks with whom he had previously been aligned.

...

On the pages of The New Republic, Kenneth Pollack, a former top Central Intelligence Agency analyst at the Brookings Institution whose 2002 book, The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq, was cited frequently by liberal hawks before the war, argued not only against any further escalation, but also suggested that the sanctions track on which the Barack Obama administration and the European Union have increasingly relied was proving counter-productive.

...

Meanwhile, another influential liberal hawk, Princeton Professor Anne-Marie Slaughter, argued in project-syndicate.org that the West and Iran were playing a "dangerous game" of "chicken" and that the West's current course "leaves Iran's government no alternative between publicly backing down, which it will not do, and escalating its provocations."

a VERY important article that should be read in full by everyone

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/NA28Ak04.html
//

[Jackpine Radical]

1. I wonder if his former colleagues think Gelb

has turned yellow.

Seriously, I'm glad to see that at least some of these "liberal hawks" are waking up.

[riverwalker]

2. good article

"The more publicly the West threatens Iran, the more easily Iranian leaders can portray America as the Great Satan to parts of the Iranian population that have recently been inclined to see the US as their friend," wrote Slaughter, who stepped down as director of the policy planning office under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

[think]

3. K&R: Iraq war "Liberal Hawks" warning of the build up to war with Iran

Please read.