Kenneth Pollack’s Willful Delusion on Iran
Kenneth Pollack says this about Iran in a NYT interview with Deborah Solomon (she of Ray Fair prediction fame):
I’d prefer not to have an Iran with nuclear weapons, but if it happens, I think we can probably deal with it….It’s hard to imagine how the Iranians would see it in their interest to give nuclear weapons to a terrorist group. They hate Al Qaeda as much as we do.
I guess I missed the part about Iran hating al Qaeda while I was reading about the Iran-Hamas and the Iran-Hezbollah, and the Iran and Islamic Jihad connections.
Here’s the abstract from Foreign Affairs that showed how Pollack thought about nuclear weapons and terrorist-supporting states back in 2002:
Next Stop Baghdad? Summary: What should the United States do about Iraq? Hawks are wrong to think the problem is desperately urgent or connected to terrorism, but right to see the prospect of a nuclear-armed Saddam Hussein as so worrisome that it requires drastic action. Doves are right about Iraq’s not being a good candidate for an Afghan-style war, but wrong to think that inspections and deterrence alone can contain Saddam. The United States has no choice left but to invade Iraq itself and eliminate the current regime.
I agree with Roger Simon:
“The brief interview with terrorism expert Kenneth Pollack in the front of the NYT Magazine this morning reads like an audition piece for a possible Kerry Administration. (It includes a particularly abject apology by the former CIA analyst for his misjudgment on Iraqi WMDs.) I don’t blame Pollack for this - we’d all like a good job.” If Sinon’s analysis is correct, we have reason to believe that waiting until Iran got nukes would be official US policy in a Kerry administration — which seems obvious enough, given Bush’s clarity and Kerry’s fudging, as we have previously catalogued.
Point of No Return as early as November?
Pollack’s comments do not operate in the realm of the merely possible: dealing with Iran — or not — is an imminent set of choices. According to senior Israeli officials, Iran’s point of no return in its nuclear program is next month:
In an interview in an Israeli newspaper this week, Giora Eiland, Israel’s national security adviser, made a startling statement: November will be the “point of no return” for taking out the Iranian nuclear program.
“Point of no return” is a phrase with a history. In 1981, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin demanded to know when Saddam Hussein’s nuclear plant at Osirak, Iraq, would reach it. Military intelligence then, as always, was muddy. Some of Begin’s advisers counseled patience. Others warned that delay could be fatal. The most influential advocate of the go-for-it approach was Begin’s minister of defense - Ariel Sharon.
Iran is now on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons. This week, President Bush said categorically that he will not let that happen.
Clearly a Kerry administration would take an approach more appealing to the mullahs.
But the United Nations will help, and the EU too — really!