No Iran Attack?

Don't Be So Sure…
Never underestimate the neocons

By Justin Raimondo

"......Before we segue into all the reasons why we shouldn't be letting our guard down, however, let's take a moment or three to savor the War Party's distress. This morning's edition of National Review Online is a veritable cornucopia of spittle-on-the-screen invective. There's a whole section devoted to debunking the debunkers, and each and every article is a study in sophistry elevated almost to an art form.

Michael Ledeen avers that since "you can't prove a negative," the NIE is wrong. Thus, there is no need for any empirical evidence, since, after all, you can't be 100 percent certain, so Iran is guilty as a given. And weren't these the same guys who thought Iraq had WMD? What Ledeen fails to mention is that he and his gang agreed with that assessment, but in the solipsistic universe of the neocons, a different set of rules applies.......

What about "the Syrian episode," Rubin asks: doesn't that prove the Iranians are going after nukes without having to produce one themselves? But it proves nothing of the kind. "The Syrian episode" is an elaborate hoax carried out by the one country that has everything to gain by provoking war between the U.S. and Iran. The best analysis I've seen describes the Dair-el-Zor strike as an attack on a giant underground weapons depot, where medium- and long-range missiles bought from North Korea and Iran are stored. My best guess is that Israel's amen corner in the national security bureaucracy saw the NIE coming and engineered the Israeli strike to raise the possibility of imported nukes......

The NIE seems to have unhinged the lesser neocons, who are reduced to the sort of noises a small mammal makes when cornered. Norman Podhoretz, however, is quite a different story: his contribution to the "debate" is a perfect gem of the purest nihilism, a textbook example of Bizarro World logic. According to Podhoretz, since the last NIE was wrong, this one cannot be right.....

However, the nuclear issue has never been the primary thrust of the neocons' case for war with Iran: far more important has been the accusation that we are already at war with Iran because they're supposedly funding, harboring, and directing "terrorist" activities against U.S. troops in Iraq. According to what the administration has been saying for many months, the Iranians are killing U.S. soldiers – so when are we going to take them out? Hillary Clinton, too, is asking this question: that's why she voted for the Kyl-Lieberman resolution declaring the Iranian Revolutionary Guards to be an official "terrorist" organization, the only time a military component of a foreign regime has been so defined. Kyl-Lieberman will give the president full authority to engage in "hot pursuit" and precipitate a cross-border incident with Iran that could easily escalate into a full-scale military conflict.......

War with Iran is no less likely now than it was last week, last month, or last year. Indeed, it is conceivable that the chances of just such a provocation occurring sometime before we get a new president have increased, precisely because the War Party has been dealt such a devastating setback on the nuclear front......"