Iran a Threat But Iraq Wasn't

It’s easy to write that now. In the left-wing Guardian Jonathan Freedland writes that:

That the Iraqi peril was a phantom, all but the pro-war diehards now concede. On the current menace posed by Iran, there is no such consensus.

Iran is a country that experts agree could have nuclear weapons in a short while.

But it is surely relevant that Iran is led by a man who cannot let a week go by without issuing an annihilationist threat to one of his regional neighbours.

Well, you expect this sort of thing from left-wing commentators. But looked at from a strategic viewpoint, the attraction of an Iraq invasion was that it was next to Iran. Iran was always the problem, even back in 2000/2001. But when you are doing military operations you have limited options. Iraq was a threat to neighboring states, including of course Israel and it was doable. Hence the decision to invade Iraq.

I suspect that if you could have got into the meetings in the months after 9/11 you would have heard, again and again, that Iraq was only the start. What was needed was to contain Iran.

Of course, when and if we do something about Iran then the lefty media will say that Bush Lied about that too. Iran was never a threat, they’ll say. And Bush knew it.