Bolton calls for bombing of Iran

[Al-khiyal]

September 30, 2007 -- John Bolton, the former US ambassador to the United Nations, told Tory delegates today that efforts by the UK and the EU to negotiate with Iran had failed and that he saw no alternative to a pre-emptive strike on suspected nuclear facilities in the country.

Mr Bolton, who was addressing a fringe meeting organised by Lord (Michael) Ancram, said that the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was "pushing out" and "is not receiving adequate push-back" from the west.

"I don't think the use of military force is an attractive option, but I would tell you I don't know what the alternative is.

"Because life is about choices, I think we have to consider the use of military force. I think we have to look at a limited strike against their nuclear facilities."

He added that any strike should be followed by an attempt to remove the "source of the problem", Mr Ahmadinejad.

"If we were to strike Iran it should be accompanied by an effort at regime change ... The US once had the capability to engineer the clandestine overthrow of governments. I wish we could get it back."

The fact that intelligence about Iran's nuclear activity was partial should not be used as an excuse not to act, Mr Bolton insisted.

"Intelligence can be wrong in more than one direction." He asked how the British government would respond if terrorists exploded a nuclear device at home. "'It's only Manchester?' ... Responding after they're used is unacceptable."

Mr Bolton, now a fellow at the conservative thinktank the American Enterprise Institute and the author of a forthcoming book called Surrender is Not an Option, was applauded by delegates when he described the UN as "fundamentally irrelevant".

Defending the decision to invade Iraq, he mocked the Foreign Office's "softly softly" approach to Iran's imprisonment of 15 British sailors accused of straying into Iranian waters in April this year.

They were released after Mr Ahmadinejad announced he was making a "gift" to the British people. "They [Iran] got no response from the UK or the US. If you were the Iranian leader, what conclusion do you draw?"

Mr Bolton said he did not really want "to get into the specifics of your own internal politics here" and made no comment on David Cameron's foreign policy. But he said that Gordon Brown's performance under pressure had not been tested and he hoped that Britain would not withdraw from Iraq.

"There is too much of a view in Europe that you have passed beyond history," Mr Bolton told delegates. "That everything can be worked out by negotiation ... Democrats or Republicans, we [Americans] don't see it that way."

However, he praised the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, and his forthright criticism of Iran in recent weeks.

Raising the spectre of George Bush's "axis of evil", Mr Bolton said that Kim Jong-il's regime in North Korea was akin to a "prison camp" and that he would "sell anything to anyone".

Those who thought North Korea would give up its nuclear capability voluntarily were wrong, he said.

The regime had made similar promises during the past decade. Only reunification between North and South Korea could resolve the problem. That could be achieved "if China were to get serious" and cut off fuel supplies to Mr Kim, but the country feared a reunited Korea.

Mr Bolton told an inquiring delegate that he was not and had never been a neoconservative: "I'm not even a Reagan conservative. I'm a [Barry] Goldwater conservative. They [neocons] have somewhat - I would say excessively - Wilsonian views about the benefits of democracy."

However, the threat to world peace did not come from neoconservatives but from the perception that "we have passed beyond history", he said.

The meeting was organised by the Global Strategy Forum, of which Lord Ancram is chairman. Earlier this month, the former Conservative deputy leader criticised the direction in which David Cameron was taking the party and for "trashing" its Thatcherite heritage.

Bolton calls for bombing of Iran

[Al-khiyal]

October 2, 2007 -- A plan by the Bush administration to launch surgical strikes on Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps has won the support of Gordon Brown, according to a US report, although a presidential "execute order" required for such an operation has yet to be issued.

The report in The New Yorker magazine by the journalist Seymour Hersh states that the White House has concluded that many of its problems in Iraq are the responsibility of Tehran. But rather than conduct an unpopular all-out assault on Iran's nuclear facilities, the US is planning limited air strikes, arguing that they are needed to defend soldiers in Iraq.

The article stated that, "The bombing plan has had its most positive reception from ... Gordon Brown", but this was denied yesterday by some with close ties to the US military.

"It is quite the opposite," said Phillip Giraldi a former CIA counterterrorism officer. "In fact Robert Gates [the US Defence Secretary] was rebuffed during his recent visit to London when the idea was floated.

"Because British mine-sweepers based in the Gulf of Hormuz will be essential to any US action against Iran, US war planners need to have Britain on board," he said. "So far that is not forthcoming."

The US has changed its emphasis to counter-terrorism, supported by Pentagon planners wary of earlier plans for an all-out attack on Iran, Hersh writes. The strategy calls for the use of sea-launched cruise missiles and more precisely targeted ground attacks and bombing strikes, "including plans to destroy the most important Revolutionary Guard training camps, supply depots and command-and-control facilities".

Hersh quotes an unnamed senior European as saying that there were four possible responses to Iran-ian activity in Iraq: to do nothing (this would be sending "the wrong signal"); to publicise Iranian actions ("There is one great difficulty with this option – the widespread lack of faith in American intelligence assessments"); to attack the Iranians inside Iraq ("We've been taking action since last December, and it does have an effect."); or, finally, to attack inside Iran.

"The British perception is that the Iranians are not making the progress they want to see in their nuclear-enrichment processing," said the European official.

"All the intelligence community agree that Iran is providing critical assistance, training, and technology to a surprising number of terrorist groups in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, through Hezbollah, in Lebanon, and Israel/Palestine, too."

Earlier this summer, according to Mr Giraldi, the Pentagon, acting under instructions from Vice-President Dick Cheney, tasked Strategic Command to draw up a response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the US. "The plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons," said Mr Giraldi.

That may now have changed, in part because of opposition within the military. "A number of senior air force officers involved were appalled at the implications of what they were doing ... that Iran was being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack," said Mr Giraldi. None were prepared to object and damage their career, he added.

Hersh maintains that the Bush administration's emphasis on "surgical" strikes reflects a failure to persuade the US public that Iran poses an imminent nuclear threat.

The White House has come to terms, in private, with the general consensus of the US intelligence community that Iran is at least five years away from obtaining a bomb. There is also a growing recognition in Washington that Iran is emerging as the geopolitical winner of the war in Iraq.

U.S. plan for air strikes on Iran 'backed by Brown'

[nesreen]

He is Insane . He belongs in a mental Institution with Ann Coulter .

[Al-khiyal]

The Plan

[nesreen]

wow
7 countries in 5 years ? i hope something, anything a miracle happens and stops them from any further destruction . thanks for the link Al Khiyal you are doing a fantastic job .

[Al-khiyal]

Video : Putin warns U.S. against military action on Iran