How many would-be presidential candidates agree with this guy that war with Iran is the best option?
Former socialist, now diehard neoconservative jingo Joshua Muravchik wrote one of his patented bomb bomb bomb Iran pieces that was posted on
The Washington Post website Friday night. An editor there headlined it
War with Iran is probably our best option:
Sanctions may have induced Iran to enter negotiations, but they have not persuaded it to abandon its quest for nuclear weapons. Nor would the stiffer sanctions that Netanyahu advocates bring a different result. Sanctions could succeed if they caused the regime to fall; the end of communism in Ukraine and Kazakhstan, and of apartheid in South Africa, led to the abandonment of nuclear weapons in those states. But since 2009, there have been few signs of rebellion in Tehran.
Otherwise, only military actions—by Israel against Iraq and Syria, and through the specter of U.S. force against Libya—have halted nuclear programs. Sanctions have never stopped a nuclear drive anywhere.
Does this mean that our only option is war? Yes, although an air campaign targeting Iran’s nuclear infrastructure would entail less need for boots on the ground than the war Obama is waging against the Islamic State, which poses far smaller a threat than Iran does.
In case you aren't familiar with this fellow, Right Web
provides a few paragraphs:
Muravchik has been a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a trustee at Freedom House, a board member of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), a signatory on Project for the New American Century (PNAC) letter-writing campaigns, and an adjunct scholar at the Washington Institute for Near East Affairs (WINEP). Since 2009, Muravchik has been a fellow at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at John Hopkins University, a Washington, D.C.-based graduate school that has served as home base for numerous figures associated with neoconservatism, including Paul Wolfowitz, Eliot Cohen, and Thomas Donnelly.
Head below the fold for more on this call for war, courtesy of
The Washington Post.
The Post column is hardly Muravchik's first fevered foray against Iran. Back in 2006, he wrote a column for the Los Angeles Times whose first short paragraph could just as well have been used for the headline today:
We must bomb Iran.
Three years later, in a piece in Foreign Policy in which he informs neoconservatives that their problem isn't their imperialist ideology but rather their weak messaging, he wrote:
Prepare to Bomb Iran. Make no mistake, President Bush will need to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities before leaving office. It is all but inconceivable that Iran will accept any peaceful inducements to abandon its drive for the bomb.
Then in 2011, he
wrote at USAToday:
President Obama has pursued diplomacy doggedly to no effect. Regime change would be the best solution, but Iran's Green Movement seems quiescent while time ticks down, leaving only the military option. Of course, force should always be a last resort, but perfect certainty that nothing else will work only comes when it's too late.
But, as his previous writings (and today's column) show, Muravchik
doesn't view military action as a last resort.
In this most recent bombbombbomb column he mentions the impact of the military casualties on the views of rank-and-file Iranians but has nothing to say about the civilian casualties that a bombing campaign would have. For any campaign that would have more than a modest impact on Iran's nuclear program, the tally of dead civilians would be thousands, perhaps tens of thousands. But such slaughter is not even worth Muravchik's mention. And blowback? Well, the U.S. might take a few hits, he says, but if so the U.S. can just broaden the attacks.
Give Muravchik credit for one thing. He makes clear with his casual "we can strike as often as necessary" comment that perpetual war is no bad thing in his view.
As one of my Daily Kos colleagues has noted, this op-ed should provide a question that should be asked of every presidential candidate:
Is war with Iran the best option? With a follow-up for those who say yes: How soon after you step into the Oval Office would you order the first attacks?
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Retroactive Genius has a discussion of Muravchik's column here.