Neoconservative patriarch, Norman Podhoretz, urges Israeli attack on Iran
For not the first time, one of the godfathers of the neoconservative movement has again encouraged Israel to attack Iran. Commentary’s Norman Podhoretz said in a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed that the result of a nuclear war between the two nations would be “far worse than any imaginable consequences of an Israeli conventional strike today.”
Podhoretz writes this in response to recent developments concerning temporarily lifting sanctions on the Islamic Republic, which in exchange, Iran will stop uranium enrichment.
“It was the new consensus shaped by such thinking that prepared the way for the accord reached by six major powers with Iran in Geneva last month. The Obama administration tells us that the interim agreement puts Iran on a track that will lead to the abandonment of its quest for a nuclear arsenal. But the Iranians are jubilant because they know that the only abandonment going on is of our own effort to keep them from getting the bomb,” Podhoretz writes.
Podhoretz clearly, and some would say, understandably, doesn’t buy the Iranians on this deal. So an Israeli attack would be just what it would take to put this issue to rest.
“If, then, Israel fails to strike now, Iran will get the bomb. And when it does, the Israelis will be forced to decide whether to wait for a nuclear attack and then to retaliate out of the rubble, or to pre-empt with a nuclear strike of their own.
“And so my counsel to proponents of the new consensus is to consider the unspeakable horrors that would then be visited not just on Israel and Iran but on the entire region and beyond. The destruction would be far worse than any imaginable consequences of an Israeli conventional strike today when there is still a chance to put at least a temporary halt, and conceivably even a permanent one, to the relentless Iranian quest for the bomb.”