McCain will bomb Iran if he becomes president. Joshua Muravchik said so explicitly at his debate with Steven Walt at the Nixon Center last night. Jim Lobe has the story:

He also asserted that “McCain is by history more of a neo-con than Bush” (no quarrel there) and noted that his service as chair of the International Republican Institute (IRI), a creation and beneficiary of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), helped steer him in that direction. “I would expect from McCain policies (that) I would like,” he said just before his observation about McCain’s intentions vis-a-vis Iran.

When James Poulos of Culture11 invited me to contribute some thoughts on what McCain and Obama should say in their debate tonight (as opposed to what they will say), I realized that there was no possibility, even hypothetically, of McCain taking any other line than the one laid down by Muravchik and the neocons. He’s joked about bombing Iran, and if he’s president, he’ll do it. “Should” or “shouldn’t” isn’t even a question for him.