Robert Joseph and Richard Perle weighed in this week on the idea of attacking Iran. While many other neocon and right-wing commentators have done the same, Joseph and Perle are important because the former is a senior U.S. government official and the latter is considered the chief spokesman for the neoconservative faction outside the government.

Joesph, the undersecretary of state for arms control (the post previously held by John Bolton), spoke this week at the Foreign Press Center in Washington. In his remarks, he contradicted many others who say that Iran is far from the ability to develop nuclear weapons:

"I would say that Iran does have the capability to develop nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them," he said in a response to a question.

With the Europeans having declared two years of negotiations with Iran at a dead-end, Joseph said "there is no end of diplomacy" and that taking Iran to the Security Council was "moving diplomacy to the next level."
"We are giving every chance to diplomacy to work," Joseph said.

At the same time, the official said, "No options are off the table. We cannot tolerate a nuclear-armed Iran."

Perle, meanwhile, said that the fact that the Bush administration was wrong about WMD in Iraq doesn't mean that the United States ought to hesitate before accusing Iran of building a bomb. In fact, he said, turning logic on its head and giving it a spin, the very uncertainty means that the United States ought to be even more interested in attacking Iran. The less we know about whether Iran is building a bomb, the more eager we ought to be to bomb them:

"If you want to try to wait until the very last minute, you'd better be very confident of your intelligence because if you're not, you won't know when the last minute is," Perle told Reuters on the sidelines of an annual security conference in Munich.

"And so, ironically, one of the lessons of the inadequate intelligence of Iraq is you'd better be careful how long you choose to wait."