When in doubt, bomb 'em to smithereens

Neocons in Washington Post: Military strike on Iran would ‘calm nerves in the region’

by Philip Weiss on May 21, 2012 33, mondoweiss.net

The Washington Post seems to think that the United States is not in enough overseas wars. It runs a piece by Matthew Kroenig and Jamie Fly urging us to pursue the military option with Iran. "On Iran, it’s time for Obama to set clear lines for military action." The excerpt below includes the shocking claim in my headline.

Jamie Fly is at the neoconservative Foreign Policy Initiative. Its board consists of four directors, Robert Kagan, Bill Kristol, Dan Senor and Eric Edelman. A lot of robust diversity there! Looks like a front organization.

Kroenig is at the Council on Foreign Relations and worked in the Obama Defense Department-- so much for change you can believe in. Probably a Lester Crown play, the Obama supporter who is militant on Iran. Steve Walt took Kroenig's argument for war apart last December as a "textbook example of war-mongering disguised as 'analysis'":

let's be crystal clear about what Kroenig is advocating here. He is openly calling for preventive war against Iran, even though the United States has no authorization from the U.N. Security Council, it is not clear that Iran is actively developing nuclear weapons, and Iran has not attacked us or any of our allies -- ever. He is therefore openly calling for his country to violate international law. He is calmly advocating a course of action that will inevitably kill a significant number of people, including civilians, some of whom probably despise the clerical regime (and with good reason). And Kroenig is willing to have their deaths on his conscience on the basis of a series of unsupported assertions, almost all of them subject to serious doubt.

 (More here.)