Now there are prominent neocon calls to not only attack Iran, but bomb it into regime change. Ackerman tears his hair out:
The funny-but-actually-horrible thing here is how reminiscent Fly and Schmitt’s argument is of, say, fall 2002. You’ve seen this play run before. A few reasonable people start thinking aloud, well, OK, maybe Iraq’s WMD is threatening enough to consider war. (Yo, Matthew Kroenig, how does it feel to be Kenneth Pollack?) Seizing an opening, the hawks come to jimmy the Overton Window even further: “If the United States seriously considers military action, it would be better to plan an operation that not only strikes the nuclear program but aims to destabilize the regime, potentially resolving the Iranian nuclear crisis once and for all.” It’s like they took a 2002 op-ed agitating for the Iraq invasion and did a find-and-replace.
I mean, seriously. This is actually a line in the op-ed: “More troubling are, in the words of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the ‘known unknowns.’”
And in the classic case of Washington failing upwards, the chief neocon theorist who was deeply involved in backing the Iraq War fiasco, Robert Kagan, is back on the front cover of The New Republic. Lecturing us about America's role in the world. These people are shameless.
The Dish 