More blips that seem to indicate Iran is next on the Bushies' must-conquer list. Ken Pollack -- not the funny Pollack, but the subdued loony one -- has a new book out, The Persian Puzzle, wherein he argues that Iran's nuclear capabilities are a gathering threat that we must face. This is the guy whose book on Iraq tipped the center-left toward the hawkish side, and who turned out to be a chief popularizer of the laughably false Iraqi WMD claims.
The other blip was on the Newshour this week. In a story about Porter Goss's CIA purge, Margaret Warner interviewed Rep. Jane Harman, a member of the House Intelligence Committee. Harman, who as a member of the Intelligence Committee certainly knows more than she is allowed to say, let forth with a very suggestive verbal slip:
The directorate of [CIA] operations ... is the target of this purge, and it doesn't make much sense to me, given the fact that these are not the folks who brought us the faulty intelligence reports that led up to 9/11, or led to the mistaken view that they were stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons in Iran... in Iraq.
Now, maybe that's just a slip, and maybe it's not. The Newshour transcript includes the slip, so perhaps they thought it was substantive enough.
At any rate, with Goss eliminating reality-based operatives from CIA, there will be far less standing in the way of the invade-Iran crowd. Of course, the military is stretched too thin to support a second third invasion force, but as Chris Bowers suggests, another terrorist attack just might swing the country to support a draft, which would clean that manpower problem right up.
Interesting times...