NEW YORK TIMES ACCIDENTALLY UNDERMINES JOHN BOLTON “BOMB IRAN” OP-ED IN OWN PAGES
The New York Times yesterday published an op-ed by the characteristically bellicose John R. Bolton, headlined ‘To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran.’ Bolton, now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, was U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations during the George W. Bush administration.
In an unusual touch, a link added to the original online edition of Bolton’s op-ed directly undermines Bolton’s case for war:
…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…can accomplish what is required.
U.S. and Israeli politicians often claim that Israel’s bombing of Iraq in 1981 significantly set back an already-existing Iraqi nuclear weapons program. The truth is almost exactly the opposite. Harvard Physics Professor Richard Wilson, who visited the ruins of Osirak in 1982 and followed the issue closely, has said the available evidence “suggests that the bombing did not delay the Iraqi nuclear-weapons program but started it.” This evidenceincludes the design of the Osirak reactor, which made it unsuitable for weapons production, and statements by Iraqi nuclear scientists that Saddam Hussein ordered them to begin a serious nuclear weapons program in response to the Israeli attack.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
