The Case for Bombing Iran

[fencesitter]

The Case for Bombing Iran
I hope and pray that President Bush will do it.

BY NORMAN PODHORETZ
Wednesday, May 30, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT

http://www.opinionjournal.com/federation/feature/?id=110010139

The father of neoconservatism is mad. But, his fello neocons are still listening to him...

Although many persist in denying it, I continue to believe that what Sept 11, 2001, did was to plunge us headlong into nothing less than another world war. I call this new war World War IV, because I also believe that what is generally known as the Cold War was actually World War III, and that this one bears a closer resemblance to that great conflict than it does to World War II. Like the Cold War, as the military historian Eliot Cohen was the first to recognize, the one we are now in has ideological roots, pitting us against Islamofascism, yet another mutation of the totalitarian disease we defeated first in the shape of Nazism and fascism and then in the shape of communism; it is global in scope; it is being fought with a variety of weapons, not all of them military; and it is likely to go on for decades.

What follows from this way of looking at the last five years is that the military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq cannot be understood if they are regarded as self-contained wars in their own right. Instead we have to see them as fronts or theaters that have been opened up in the early stages of a protracted global struggle. The same thing is true of Iran. As the currently main center of the Islamofascist ideology against which we have been fighting since 9/11, and as (according to the State Department's latest annual report on the subject) the main sponsor of the terrorism that is Islamofascism's weapon of choice, Iran too is a front in World War IV. Moreover, its effort to build a nuclear arsenal makes it the potentially most dangerous one of all.

The Iranians, of course, never cease denying that they intend to build a nuclear arsenal, and yet in the same breath they openly tell us what they intend to do with it. Their first priority, as repeatedly and unequivocally announced by their president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is to "wipe Israel off the map"--a feat that could not be accomplished by conventional weapons alone.

But Ahmadinejad's ambitions are not confined to the destruction of Israel. He also wishes to dominate the greater Middle East, and thereby to control the oilfields of the region and the flow of oil out of it through the Persian Gulf. If he acquired a nuclear capability, he would not even have to use it in order to put all this within his reach. Intimidation and blackmail by themselves would do the trick.

Nor are Ahmadinejad's ambitions merely regional in scope. He has a larger dream of extending the power and influence of Islam throughout Europe, and this too he hopes to accomplish by playing on the fear that resistance to Iran would lead to a nuclear war. And then, finally, comes the largest dream of all: what Ahmadinejad does not shrink from describing as "a world without America." Demented though he may be, I doubt that Ahmadinejad is so crazy as to imagine that he could wipe America off the map even if he had nuclear weapons. But what he probably does envisage is a diminution of the American will to oppose him: that is, if not a world without America, he will settle, at least in the short run, for a world without much American influence.

******* many long paragraphs later....

......Not so George W. Bush, a man who knows evil when he sees it and who has demonstrated an unfailingly courageous willingness to endure vilification and contumely in setting his face against it. It now remains to be seen whether this president, battered more mercilessly and with less justification than any other in living memory, and weakened politically by the enemies of his policy in the Middle East in general and Iraq in particular, will find it possible to take the only action that can stop Iran from following through on its evil intentions both toward us and toward Israel. As an American and as a Jew, I pray with all my heart that he will.

[The Wielding Truth]

1. I have to say NO. absolutely NO. Iran is not our enemy.

[Warpy]

2. Norman needs to recognize that we

are not the hired muscle for Israel. Norman needs to remember which country he's living in. Norman needs to pick which country he most wants to support and live there.

NO to any unilateral aggression against Iran. Not now, not ever! I don't even want our military to LITTER where it can blow across the border.

[yurbud]

3. this is a struggle of civilization like Italy vs. Ethiopia

We have all the technology, money, and power. Those countries cannot put a plane in the air unless we let them. They have no ability to act with conventional military outside their own borders, and even if they unleash terrorists against us, they would not be able to overthrow our government and occupy us. An actual country like Iran might be restrained in using nukes or something of that scale against us since they can do the math and know we have the capability to instantly and overwhelmingly retaliate.

If they tried to cut off our oil, they would starve themselves to death since they have nothing else to sell.

Many of their leaders are hand-picked by our government.

This is not so much a clash of civilizations as a bunch of drunken trust fund baby frat boys beating up the homeless with baseball bats to steal the change they've begged for.