Neocons in Washington Post: Military strike on Iran would ‘calm nerves in the region’

The Washington Post seems to think that the United States is not in enough overseas wars. It runs a piece by Matthew Kroenig and Jamie Fly urging us to pursue the military option with Iran. “On Iran, it’s time for Obama to set clear lines for military action.” The excerpt below includes the shocking claim in my headline.

Jamie Fly is at the neoconservative Foreign Policy Initiative. Its board consists of four directors, Robert Kagan, Bill Kristol, Dan Senor and Eric Edelman. A lot of robust diversity there! Looks like a front organization.

Kroenig is at the Council on Foreign Relations and worked in the Obama Defense Department– so much for change you can believe in. Probably a Lester Crown play, the Obama supporter who is militant on Iran. Steve Walt took Kroenig’s argument for war apart last December as a “textbook example of war-mongering disguised as ‘analysis'”:

let’s be crystal clear about what Kroenig is advocating here. He is openly calling for preventive war against Iran, even though the United States has no authorization from the U.N. Security Council, it is not clear that Iran is actively developing nuclear weapons, and Iran has not attacked us or any of our allies — ever. He is therefore openly calling for his country to violate international law. He is calmly advocating a course of action that will inevitably kill a significant number of people, including civilians, some of whom probably despise the clerical regime (and with good reason). And Kroenig is willing to have their deaths on his conscience on the basis of a series of unsupported assertions, almost all of them subject to serious doubt.

Here are Kroenig and Fly in the Washington Post:

The Obama administration has articulated only one bright red line: building nuclear weapons. But if we wait until Iran turns the final screws on a nuclear device, we probably will be too late. The administration’s pledge to use force if necessary also rings hollow if Iran is allowed to make significant progress in all the other areas required for a weapon.

The United States can strike Iran’s nuclear facilities to prevent Iran from making weapons-grade uranium, but once it has the fissile material, the game is over….

Washington has a spectrum of viable military options, including a limited strike against a few key nuclear facilities, as well as a broader bombing campaign that could destroy the Iranian military and destabilize the regime. The response could be commensurate to the seriousness of Iran’s transgressions.

This proactive approach should help calm nerves in the region about Obama’s mettle, and could forestall Israel from taking matters into its own hands.