(IPS) - Led by a familiar clutch of neo-conservative hawks, major right-wing publications are calling on the administration of Pres. George W. Bush to urgently plan for military strikes - and possibly a wider war - against Iran in the wake of its announcement this week that it has successfully enriched uranium to a purity necessary to fuel nuclear reactors.
In a veritable blitz of editorials and opinion pieces published Wednesday and Thursday, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard and the National Review warned that Tehran had passed a significant benchmark in what they declared was its quest for nuclear weapons and that the administration must now plan in earnest to destroy Iran's known nuclear facilities, as well as possible military targets to prevent it from retaliating.
Comparing Iran's alleged push to gain a nuclear weapon to Adolf Hitler's 1936 march on the Rhineland, Weekly Standard editor William Kristol called for undertaking "serious preparation for possible military action -- including real and urgent operational planning for bombing strikes and for the consequences of such strikes".
"(A) great nation has to be serious about its responsibilities," according to Kristol, a leading neo-conservative champion of the Iraq war and co-founder of the Project for the New American Century, "even if executing other responsibilities has been more difficult than one would have hoped."
The National Review, another prominent right-wing weekly, echoed the call. "Any air campaign should ...be coupled with aggressive and persistent efforts to topple the regime from within," advised its lead editorial, entitled "Iran, Now", and almost certainly written by Michael Ledeen of the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI).
"Accordingly, it should hit not just the nuclear facilities, but also the symbols of state oppression: the intelligence ministry, the headquarters of the Revolutionary Guard, the guard towers of the notorious Evin Prison."
The hawks' latest campaign appeared timed not only to the alarm created by Iran's nuclear achievement and by a spate of reports last weekend regarding the advanced state of U.S. war plans, but also to counter new appeals by a number of prominent and more mainstream former policy-makers for Washington to engage Iran in direct negotiations. The Financial Times Wednesday published a column by Richard Haass, president of the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations and a top adviser to Secretary of State Colin Powell during Bush's first term, in which he called for Washington to make "a fair and generous diplomatic offer" to Iran that would permit it to retain a small uranium enrichment programme, if for no other reason than to rally international opinion behind the U.S. in the event rejects it.
Arguing that the "likely costs of carrying out such an attack substantially outweigh probable benefits", Haass noted that "the most dangerous delusion (among those who support military action) "is that a conflict would be either small or quick."
On Thursday, he was joined by Powell's deputy secretary of State, Richard Armitage, who, in an interview with the Financial Times, also called for direct talks.
"It merits talking to the Iranians about the full range of our relationship ...everything from energy to terrorism to weapons to Iraq," said Armitage, who is considered a strong candidate to take over the Pentagon if Donald Rumsfeld resigns or is forced out.
"We can be diplomatically astute enough to do it without giving anything away," he added, noting that Washington could be patient "for a while" given the estimated five to 10 years the U.S. intelligence community believes it will take before Tehran can obtain a nuclear weapon.
Such statements are anathema to the hawks, who have long depicted any move to engage Iran as equivalent to the appeasement policies toward Hitler of France and Britain in the run-up to World War II.
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