John Bolton is whipping up hysteria against Iran by calling for war as he contemplates a run for President.
If President Obama's approach has "brought a bad situation to the brink of catastrophe" under Bolton's logic, then John Bolton's contemplated invasion of Iran could bring about World War III. At the best, our reputation would take another hit as other countries will wonder if they are next for either CIA-style regime change or another Shock and Awe (TM). At the worst, Russia and China would feel threatened enough that they would trigger a nuclear arms race. At some point, they will create a red line given their belief that our goal is to surround them with missiles under the pretext of "human rights." Russia has already done so with Ukraine.
Bolton says that unchecked, a nuclear Iran would set off a Middle Eastern arms race in which Saudi Arabia and Egypt would be among the next nations to acquire nukes, possibly from Pakistan. But it is simply not true that Iran is building nuclear weapons. His own network, FOX News, notes that Israel's Mossad has said that Iran is not performing the activity necessary to build nuclear weapons. And furthermore, the Ayatollah Khomeini, back in 1987, said that nukes were prohibited by Islam:
But the key to understanding Iran’s policy toward nuclear weapons lies in a historical episode during its eight-year war with Iraq. The story, told in full for the first time here, explains why Iran never retaliated against Iraq’s chemical weapons attacks on Iranian troops and civilians, which killed 20,000 Iranians and severely injured 100,000 more. And it strongly suggests that the Iranian leadership’s aversion to developing chemical and nuclear weapons is deep-rooted and sincere.
A few Iranian sources have previously pointed to a fatwa by the Islamic Republic’s first supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, prohibiting chemical weapons as the explanation for why Iran did not deploy these weapons during the war with Iraq. But no details have ever been made public on when and how Khomeini issued such a fatwa, so it has been ignored for decades.
Now, however, the wartime chief of the Iranian ministry responsible for military procurement has provided an eyewitness account of Khomeini’s ban not only on chemical weapons, but on nuclear weapons as well. In an interview with me in Tehran in late September, Mohsen Rafighdoost, who served as minister of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) throughout the eight-year war, revealed that he had proposed to Khomeini that Iran begin working on both nuclear and chemical weapons — but was told in two separate meetings that weapons of mass destruction are forbidden by Islam. I sought the interview with Rafighdoost after learning of an interview he had with Mehr News Agency in January in which he alluded to the wartime meetings with Khomeini and the supreme leader’s forbidding chemical and nuclear weapons.
Khomeini's prohibition is significant because he issued it during the height of Saddam Hussein's chemical attacks against Iran during their war. Bolton's piece, therefore, is guilty of the selective use of facts.
Bolton himself admits that Saudi Arabia is in the process of signing nuclear cooperation agreements with numerous other countries and is seeking to have 16 reactors by 2030. The question, therefore, is, why is Saudi Arabia so special? Why does the international community isolate Iran over its nukes, while refusing to ask the necessary questions about Saudi Arabia's nuclear program? Given that country's newly-announced invasion of Yemen, there are a lot more unanswered questions about Saudi Arabia's intentions with its nuclear program than there are with Iran's.
Yet in his world, the Saudis are the right kind of Islamists and the Iranians are the wrong kind. He concludes by calling for the bombing of Iran along with regime change:
The inescapable conclusion is that Iran will not negotiate away its nuclear program. Nor will sanctions block its building a broad and deep weapons infrastructure. The inconvenient truth is that only military action like Israel’s 1981 attack on Saddam Hussein’s Osirak reactor in Iraq or its 2007 destruction of a Syrian reactor, designed and built by North Korea, can accomplish what is required. Time is terribly short, but a strike can still succeed.
Rendering inoperable the Natanz and Fordow uranium-enrichment installations and the Arak heavy-water production facility and reactor would be priorities. So, too, would be the little-noticed but critical uranium-conversion facility at Isfahan. An attack need not destroy all of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, but by breaking key links in the nuclear-fuel cycle, it could set back its program by three to five years. The United States could do a thorough job of destruction, but Israel alone can do what’s necessary. Such action should be combined with vigorous American support for Iran’s opposition, aimed at regime change in Tehran.
But by his own logic, our bombing of Iran's facilities would only set them back 3-5 years. If Obama somehow manages to get its deal with Iran signed despite our support of Saudi Arabia's invasion of Yemen, it would set back their program by at least 10.