Mr. Jones writes an interesting essay, yet he confines himself to strategic questions alone, like the good policy intellectual, who seeks to avoid the ethical question of a protracted bombing campaign, against a country that is engaged in nothing that could be considered as beyond the norm. And the IAEA report is the empirical evidence, that renders Mr. Jones’ careful, yet ethically vacuous essay, irrelevant to a serious policy debate, but gains him high marks with his fellow ‘policy analysts’. But this is not a debate about policy approach but about The Party of War and it many advocates and rationalizers: see the latest essay by Edelman, Krepinevich,Montgomery in Foreign Affairs, dated November 9, 2011, for a more carefully framed set of arguments for an unprovoked attack on Iran, as necessary to protect us against the irrational Iranian Menace. The cliche is recast as needed ,with the appropriate actor of the moment. The cost of war are here irrelevant: in this debate human life is not germane, which should places a particular variety of strategic thinking under a rigorous ethical interrogation.

Political Observer