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The Usual Suspects

Many of you may have read the Op-Ed in today’s Washington Post, “Stopping a Nuclear Iran,” https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/22/AR2008102203005.html.  It is by two former Senators, Daniel Coats and Chuck Robb, one a Republican and the other a Democrat, and describes a “bipartisan” approach to Iran that should be adopted as the policy of whomever becomes the next president.  […]

Many of you may have read the Op-Ed in today’s Washington Post, “Stopping a Nuclear Iran,” https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/22/AR2008102203005.html.  It is by two former Senators, Daniel Coats and Chuck Robb, one a Republican and the other a Democrat, and describes a “bipartisan” approach to Iran that should be adopted as the policy of whomever becomes the next president.  The recommended policy is described as the product of a “high level task force on Iranian nuclear development.”  It assumes that Iran is actively developing a nuclear weapon, that the United States would be threatened by such a development to such an extent that attacking Iran preemptively is justified, and that Iran must not be allowed even to have the ability to enrich uranium because that would give it the capability to create a weapon because Iran is a “radical clerical regime that supports terrorism.”  All of the assumption should, of course, be challenged and the most recent serious look at Iranian nuclear developments (the NIE of December 2007) concluded that Iran had no weapons program.  The Op-Ed concluded by asserting that the next president “will need to begin to build up military assets in the region from day one” for an “initial air attack,” a “devastating strike,” lasting “several weeks.”  Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?  Well, it should as it is essentially the AIPAC position on Iran.

The Bipartisan Policy Center’s “politically diverse task force” is given full credit for the report, which is intended to create “an enduring bipartisan consensus behind an effective US policy on Iran.”  Apart from the two Senators, who was on the task force? one might ask, and was there anyone who might be able to explain the Iranian position, surrounded as it us by US forces and confronted by both Israel and Washington’s nuclear arsenals.  The report itself was written by Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute.  Task force members included Dennis Ross of the Washington Institute on Near East Policy and Kenneth Weinstein, who heads the Hudson Institute, both regarded as strongly pro-Israeli.  The remaining members are two generals, an admiral, two former defense department officials, a state department official, and the chief energy economist from Lehman Brothers.  Formerly with Lehman Brothers, one presumes. Nobody who actually knows anything about Iran or who speaks Farsi.   Back in New Jersey, we would have referred to the task force as a loaded deck.  What is particularly disturbing is that what my German friends would refer to as quatsch is being sold to the public by the Washington Post as balanced, objective policy making that is “bipartisan.”

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