Foreign policy by bombing

Dana Priest has a frightening article in the Washington Post today. It has experts talking about how likely Iran would be to start terrorist actions against the U.S. if they are bombed by our military. Since President Bush and his team are using some of the same language to talk about Iran and they did to talk about Iraq right before our military started bombing:

The possibility of a military confrontation has been raised only obliquely in recent months by President Bush and Iran's government. Bush says he is pursuing a diplomatic solution to the crisis, but he has added that all options are on the table for stopping Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons.

the article makes me worry about items in it like this:

But terrorism experts considered Iranian-backed or controlled groups -- namely the country's Ministry of Intelligence and Security operatives, its Revolutionary Guards and the Lebanon-based Hezbollah -- to be better organized, trained and equipped than the al- Qaeda network that carried out the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Perhaps if President Bush hadn't been distracted by his obsession with Iran's neighbor Iraq, our foreign policy might have been more focused on working to stop the dangerous country in that region that actually was working to acquire weapons of mass destruction.

Talk of bombing doesn't seem to worry the government of Iran. In fact, they almost seem to be hoping the U.S. will do it:

Speaking in Vienna last month, Javad Vaeedi, a senior Iranian nuclear negotiator, warned the United States that "it may have the power to cause harm and pain, but it is also susceptible to harm and pain. So if the United States wants to pursue that path, let the ball roll," although he did not specify what type of harm he was talking about.

You can read the rest here.