William Kristol on Iran: war sooner than expected

This morning on Fox News, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol continued to beat the war drums for a military strike against Iran. Watch it

Kristol is attempting to hype the Iranian situation as a crisis. As Retired Army Lt. Gen. Robert G. Gard said recently, “To call the Iranian situation a ‘crisis’ connotes you have to do something right now, like bomb them.”

The truth is there is very little good intelligence on Iran’s capabilities. Here’s what the experts are saying:

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts warned that “we have not made the progress on our oversight of Iran intelligence, which is critical.”

Roberts’ Intel Committee staff director Bill Duhnke said, “There is no organized commit­tee staff effort to look at Iran right now.”

“I continue to believe that our sources are stale and our case is thin,” said Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), the ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee

“U.S. intelligence on the ground is quite poor, especially as it relates to understanding how decisions are made and who controls the power centers in Iran,” said CSIS expert Jon Wolfsthal.

Faulty intelligence hasn’t stopped Kristol in the past. Why would he start now?

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Full transcript:

KRISTOL: I think we could be in a military confrontation with Iran much sooner than people expect. I don’t think this is an issue that’s going to wait two and a half years until President Bush leaves the presidency. I think he will decide at some point next year — in 2007 — he’ll have to make some very tough decisions about what the U.S. and the world can tolerate in terms of this regime – this apocalyptic, messianic regime — which has made clear that it would use — would feel free to use weapons if it had them, that has very deep ties with terrorist groups, what we could accept in terms of their nuclear program.

QUESTION: What does that mean, what we can accept, does that mean going over and doing something about whatever they’ve got?

KRISTOL: It could mean that. I hope we’re doing things covertly to try to slow down their nuclear progress and I hope we can do much more perhaps and get some allies to do more, but I don’t think a military strike against Iran is at all out of the question. If you saw the president’s press conference yesterday, he said he hoped diplomacy would work, but I was struck by his words. I hope diplomacy would work, it would be helpful if the world spoke with a united voice against Iran, but he’s said over and over, you cannot allow this regime to have nuclear weapons and I think we may come to a real serious choice next year.

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