I think M. J. Rosenberg (my favorite TPM cafe person) is onto something here:
I guess the reports that Jeff Goldberg is about to publish a neocon magnum opus calling for bombing Iran are true.
[…..]Following the Iraq pattern (Goldberg was lead boy in the Iraq pro-war chorus) his piece won’t come out until the fall. As Karl Rove said last time, you don’t roll out a new product (in this case, war) in August.
Rosenberg thinks Obama may go along with it. I’m skeptical about that, but I wonder if the very liberal New Yorker magazine will publish another Goldberg piece like this one from 2002:
Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction clearly are not meant solely for domestic use. Several years ago in Baghdad, Richard Butler, who was then the chairman of UNSCOM, fell into conversation with Tariq Aziz, Saddam’s confidant and Iraq’s deputy Prime Minister. Butler asked Aziz to explain the rationale for Iraq’s biological-weapons project, and he recalled Aziz’s answer: “He said, ‘We made bioweapons in order to deal with the Persians and the Jews.’ “
Iraqi dissidents agree that Iraq’s programs to build weapons of mass destruction are focussed on Israel. “Israel is the whole game,” Ahmad Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress, told me. “Saddam is always saying publicly, ‘Who is going to fire the fortieth missile?’ “—a reference to the thirty-nine Scud missiles he fired at Israel during the Gulf War. “He thinks he can kill one hundred thousand Israelis in a day with biological weapons.” Chalabi added, “This is the only way he can be Saladin”—the Muslim hero who defeated the Crusaders. Students of Iraq and its government generally agree that Saddam would like to project himself as a leader of all the Arabs, and that the one sure way to do that is by confronting Israel.
In the Gulf War, when Saddam attacked Israel, he was hoping to provoke an Israeli response, which would drive America’s Arab friends out of the allied coalition. Today, the experts say, Saddam’s desire is to expel the Jews from history.
The experts do say interesting things, don’t they?