4.11.2006
Military Fantasies on Iran (NYTimes.com)
EDITORIAL
Published: April 11, 2006
Iraq shows just how badly things can go wrong when an administration rashly embraces simple military solutions to complicated problems, shutting its ears to military and intelligence professionals who turn out to be tragically prescient. That lesson has yet to be absorbed by the Bush administration, which is now reportedly honing plans for airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.
Congress and the country need to ask the administration just what is going on, and just what it hopes to accomplish by this latest saber rattling.
If the administration's real goal is to change minds in Iran and energize diplomacy, it is not going about it in a very smart way. If, instead, it intends to proceed with a bombing campaign when and if diplomacy fails, Congress and the public need to force the kind of serious national debate that never really took place before the American invasion of Iraq.
Routine contingency planning goes on all the time in the Pentagon, but the discussions on Iran seem to have progressed beyond this level, with high administration officials pushing the process and dropping indirect hints of possible future American military action in language that sometimes recalls statements made before the invasion of Iraq.
(More ... Military Fantasies on Iran - New York Times) ¶ 21:33
Published: April 11, 2006
Iraq shows just how badly things can go wrong when an administration rashly embraces simple military solutions to complicated problems, shutting its ears to military and intelligence professionals who turn out to be tragically prescient. That lesson has yet to be absorbed by the Bush administration, which is now reportedly honing plans for airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.
Congress and the country need to ask the administration just what is going on, and just what it hopes to accomplish by this latest saber rattling.
If the administration's real goal is to change minds in Iran and energize diplomacy, it is not going about it in a very smart way. If, instead, it intends to proceed with a bombing campaign when and if diplomacy fails, Congress and the public need to force the kind of serious national debate that never really took place before the American invasion of Iraq.
Routine contingency planning goes on all the time in the Pentagon, but the discussions on Iran seem to have progressed beyond this level, with high administration officials pushing the process and dropping indirect hints of possible future American military action in language that sometimes recalls statements made before the invasion of Iraq.
(More ... Military Fantasies on Iran - New York Times) ¶ 21:33
