Office of the Independent Blogger

Mayor Mike Bloomberg has dismissed his Presidential campaign, saying he never planned anything of the sort and anyone who says otherwise is a lying reporter. In friendlier terms, of course. The real reason he isn’t running for President is because he’s too smart to spend a billion of his own dollars on such a campaign when he knows he can’t win because of the system and because of his sexual harassment issues in the past.

Kind of sad to know he won’t run, though, as he could do a lot of good by bringing issues to the public’s consciousness.

The New Yorker is running n article about American war plans in Iran. Essentially, it details the President’s concerns about Iranian intervention in Iraq, his instruction to the Joint Chiefs of “Preparation for surgical strikes” and the possibilities that every scenario poses. On this I’ve always been clear — we should have plans in place, just in case, but we probably shouldn’t attack. And I think that’s the President’s general view, which is illustrated by this:

I was repeatedly cautioned, in interviews, that the President has yet to issue the “execute order” that would be required for a military operation inside Iran, and such an order may never be issued. But there has been a significant increase in the tempo of attack planning. In mid-August, senior officials told reporters that the Administration intended to declare Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps a foreign terrorist organization. And two former senior officials of the C.I.A. told me that, by late summer, the agency had increased the size and the authority of the Iranian Operations Group. (A spokesman for the agency said, “The C.I.A. does not, as a rule, publicly discuss the relative size of its operational components.”)

“They’re moving everybody to the Iran desk,” one recently retired C.I.A. official said. “They’re dragging in a lot of analysts and ramping up everything. It’s just like the fall of 2002”—the months before the invasion of Iraq, when the Iraqi Operations Group became the most important in the agency. He added, “The guys now running the Iranian program have limited direct experience with Iran. In the event of an attack, how will the Iranians react? They will react, and the Administration has not thought it all the way through.”

The coming months will be interesting, to say the least.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 30th, 2007 at 5:06 pm and is filed under Outside Retort (Current Affairs).