“This Is Not Like Planning to Invade Quebec”

The speaker is Patrick Clawson, the deputy director for research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy; the topic is U.S. policy towards Iran; and the reporter is the renowned Seymour Hersch, writing in the recent New Yorker (“The Iran Plans: Would President Bush go to war to stop Tehran from getting the bomb?”).

This is off topic, I acknowledge, and so I’ll be quick.

Clawson says that unless Iran backs down from its plans to enrich nuclear fuel, the U.S. will likely use military force against that country, and that “it would be prudent to prepare for a wider war, ‘given the way the Iranians are acting. This is not like planning to invade Quebec.’” Quite apart from what he might have meant about Canada, the article is deeply disturbing for what the many insiders Hersch has interviewed have to say about the U.S. government approach to Iran and its serious consideration of the use of tactical nuclear weapons against Iranian bunkers.

Comments

  1. The Quebec comment sounds like a reference to this story:
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/29/AR2005122901412_pf.html
    on the 1930’s-era plans for a US invasion of Canada.