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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/israel/2182070/Israel-%27will-attack-Iran%27-before-new-US-president-sworn-in%2C-John-Bolton-predicts.html>
>Is he an idiot or a puppet?
Aren't you kind of shooting the messenger? He could very well be right and his reasoning sounds at least within possibility. Israel has *at least* the 100 GBU-28 bunker busters they got from us 2 years ago and I imagine local engineering has fancied those up a bit with aftermarket stuff that couldn't make it through the sale because of technology export restrictions. They really are determined Iran will not get nukes (unless delivered in from Israel ) I am not sure why people don't take them seriously on this. Osirak should have been seen as a token of sincerity.
I think it would be a mistake to not see how much US policy in the area has been affected over the last 20 years by attempting to avoid exactly this kind of thing. Our invasion of Iraq may have been ill-advised (and was certainly incompetantly followed-up) but there is also a chance that it forestalled another thread unreeling in which Baghdad would now be glowing in the dark or would look like the surface of the moon.
Charles Hankey
Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.
- Thomas Hardy
Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm-- but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.
-- T. S. Eliot
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.
- Ben Franklin
Pardon him, Theodotus. He is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.