Norman Podhoretz wants to bomb Iran

Podhoretz: Bush to Bomb Iran Before Leaving Office

“I believe,” Podhoretz told the Israel Broadcast Authority on May 24 (see video below), “contrary to what many people assume, that [Bush] will [attack Iran] before he leaves office, possibly shortly before he leaves office,” thus leaving the political fallout to the incoming president, more than likely a Democrat. “I think he agrees with the analysis that I offer that there is no alternative to military action.”

Of course, in order to sell this invasion of a sovereign nation, based on illusory claims the mullahs of Iran are in the process of building a nuclear bomb to use against Israel—a crackpot theory but one that remarkably has gained a degree of credence in the United States—Podhoretz and the neocons have erected an elaborate if preposterous edifice to support their Brothers Grimm fable about 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,” Podhoretz writes for the June issue of Commentary Magazine.

It is of course very convenient for Mr. Podhoretz to leave out the International Atomic Energy Agency. Last March, the IAEA “revealed that it has not found any evidence that Teheran had diverted material towards making atomic weapons…. In its report which has been circulated to its 35 board members, the IAEA said that its three years of investigations had not shown ‘any diversion of nuclear material to nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices’, the Associated Press reported.”

“A recent U.S. intelligence estimate found that Iran is further away from making bomb-grade uranium than previously thought, according to U.S. officials,” the Washington Post reported in August, 2005. “The IAEA, in its third year of an investigation in Iran, has not found proof of a weapons program.”