‘Bomb Iran’ Podhoretz: War Would ‘Unleash A Wave’ Of Global Anti-Americanism

[babylonsister]

http://thinkprogress.org/2007/06/20/podhoretz-bomb/

‘Bomb Iran’ Podhoretz: War Would ‘Unleash A Wave’ Of Global Anti-Americanism

The current issue of Commentary magazine — “widely regarded as the leading outlet for neoconservative writing” — features a controversial cover story by Norman Podhoretz titled “The Case For Bombing Iran.”

Podhoretz’s article appeals to President Bush, “a man who knows evil when he sees it” and who has been “battered more mercilessly and with less justification than any other in living memory,” to carry out military strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities. U.S. diplomats are now pointing to the essay to pressure foreign diplomats to increase pressure on Iran.

In a new interview, Podhoretz was asked to comment on the possible fallout of the military strikes he advocates. “Well, if we were to bomb the Iranians as I hope and pray we will,” Podhoretz says, “we’ll unleash a wave of anti-Americanism all over the world that will make the anti-Americanism we’ve experienced so far look like a lovefest.”

Watch it (6:20) and read transcript at link~

Podhoretz qualified his statement about anti-Americanism, saying it was only a “worst case scenario.” It’s “entirely possible,” he claimed, that “many countries, particularly in the Middle East” would “at least secretly applaud us.”

But even global anti-Americanism is worth it, he argues, to slow Iran’s nuclear program “for five or 10 years or more.” In fact, American Progress senior fellow Joseph Cirincione has argued that such a strike “would not, as is often said, delay the Iranian program. It would almost certainly speed it up. That is what happened when the Israelis struck at the Iraq program in 1981.”

[JHB]

1. I see insane people

and they're all Pod-people.

[seemslikeadream]

2. 9/11 9/11 9/11 9/11 9/11 9/11 9/11 9/11 9/11 9/11 9/11 9/11 9/11 9/11

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/cm/main/viewArticle.html?id=10882

The Case for Bombing Iran
Norman Podhoretz
June 2007


Although many persist in denying it, I continue to believe that what September 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.

[AntiFascist]

5. Echoes of former CIA director under Clinton, James Woolsey....

http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/04/03/sprj.irq.woolsey.world.war/

Thursday, April 3, 2003 Posted: 5:02 PM EST (2202 GMT)

LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) -- Former CIA Director James Woolsey said Wednesday the United States is engaged in World War IV, and that it could continue for years.

In the address to a group of college students, Woolsey described the Cold War as the third world war and said "This fourth world war, I think, will last considerably longer than either World Wars I or II did for us. Hopefully not the full four-plus decades of the Cold War."

...

[kenny blankenship]

3. "secretly applaud us"

yeah, that's the kind of thing this pig and his porcine friends said before the invasion and rape of Iraq: don't pay attention to the warnings and condemnations from other countries of the Middle East-secretly they will applaud us.

yeah that worked out real well.

[RaleighNCDUer]

4. "...unleash a wave of anti-Americanism..."

Never mind the 'secretly applauding' others - it is the anti-Americanism that they WANT. It will justify everything they do for the next 20 years, converting an obviously imperial aggressive war into one of righteous self-defense. They hate us for our freedoms, you know.

[Quantess]

6. I think some of them are hoping for Armageddon.

Seriously. Some neo-cons are getting impatient for the End Times.

[paparush]

7. Bush: "A man who knows evil when he sees it.."

Got that right brother. Every time that callous, bloodthirsty sumbitch looks in the mirror he sees the face of evil.

[kenny blankenship]

8. Also I think they have a secret handshake

and annual membership dinners.