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Attacking Iran: Just go for it!

Those neo-conservatives - the geniuses who brought us the Iraq and Afghanistan wars amongst others - just won't give up.   Now they are pumping Israel to attack Iran.      Just read the rhetoric and ponder what madmen these people are.     Any thought of consequences of war?   Nary one!

From "Neoconservatives Despair Over U.S.-Iran Diplomacy" on Information Clearing House...

"The Weekly Standard, a neo-conservative publication, described Israel's position as "Standing Alone", the title of its lead editorial at week's end, although its authors, editor-in-chief William Kristol and the director of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, Michael Makovsky, took a far more defiant tone than Abrams. They urged Netanyahu to follow through on his latest threats to attack Iran's nuclear facilities with or without US approval.

"No one likes the truth-telling skunk at the appeasement party," they wrote, asserting that President Barack Obama's "soft-headed, even desperate, desire for some sort of [nuclear] deal, any deal" with Iran comprised the kind of Western "failure of nerve and a collapse of will" that the later British prime minister Winston Churchill decried with the rise of Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

Similarly, the Wall Street Journal's chief foreign affairs columnist, Bret Stephens, complained bitterly about the situation confronting Israel in the wake of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani's UN tour de force the previous week.

"Israel is now in the disastrous position of having to hope that Iranian hard-liners sabotage Mr Rouhani's efforts to negotiate a deal," he wrote just before Netanyahu took the podium to denounce Tehran's perfidy.

The Israeli leader, he complained, had already deferred far too much to Obama's diplomatic efforts by not attacking Iran last year. Given Washington's "retreat from the world" - most recently demonstrated by its failure to deliver on threats to attack Syria - the Israelis should "downgrad[e] relations with Washington," he demanded, and now "must proceed without regard to Mr Obama's diplomatic timetable".

Gary Sick, an Iran expert who served on the National Security Council under presidents Ford, Carter and Reagan, told IPS that neo-conservatives' recent outpouring of defiance and despair constituted "the most convincing evidence I have seen to date that the die-hard supporters of sabotaging an agreement between the US and Iran are in full defensive mode".




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