Podhoretz the Elder, a man whose world view has become so twisted that he’s disappointed we might not have to bomb Iran now offers this:
But I entertain an even darker suspicion. It is that the intelligence community, which has for some years now been leaking material calculated to undermine George W. Bush, is doing it again. This time the purpose is to head off the possibility that the President may order air strikes on the Iranian nuclear installations.
As a result:
If this is what lies behind the release of the new NIE, its authors can take satisfaction in the response it has elicited from the White House. Quoth Stephen Hadley, George W. Bush’s National Security Adviser: “The estimate offers grounds for hope that the problem can be solved diplomatically—without the use of force—as the administration has been trying to do.”
What a terrible shame that we can’t just have another war–one that would bring enormous danger to the U.S. forces in Iraq, possibly close off the straits of Hormuz to oil shipments thereby causing a global economic crisis and–let’s not forget–bring Hezbollah terrorist reprisals to the United States.
The Iranians have been cooperating in Iraq the past few months. It is time to do a phenomenally un-Bushian thing: Send a message to the Supreme Leader–not the stooge Ahmadinejad–and say, “OK,, we were wrong. You approached us in 2003 about normalizing our relations. Let’s see what we can do together to calm things down and bring peace to the region.” And then put the same diplomatic effort into this enterprise as we’ve put into that likely nonstarter, the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.