A Time to Attack: The Looming Iranian Nuclear Threat, a new book by Brent Scowcroft Center Nonresident Senior Fellow Matthew Kroenig, is reviewed in the Wall Street Journal:
Whether the official nuclear agreement is extended another six months or a year or more, the Iranian regime will not abandon its 30-year project. So the U.S. will face an unavoidable choice: accept a nuclear Iran or launch a pre-emptive military strike. Matthew Kroenig, a former Pentagon official who focused on the Iranian nuclear challenge under Defense Secretary Robert Gates, sees this reality clearly. His book, “A Time to Attack,” embraces the military option because he believes it is the only way to stop the clerical regime’s nuclear drive.Mr. Kroenig, a professor at Georgetown, is commendably straightforward in dispensing with the naïve hope that Iran’s nuclear program is peaceful in nature: “Iran would like to build nuclear weapons. The only people Tehran is fooling at this point are people who want to be fooled.” He annihilates the argument that the Islamic Republic will go the way of Japan, maintaining a civilian nuclear program but never building a bomb. “It is simply implausible that Iran would go to such great lengths to get one screwdriver’s turn away from the most powerful weapon on Earth—a weapon that would help Iran meet is foremost geopolitical goals—and then suddenly . . . voluntarily stop short,” he writes, noting that the regime has so far spent $100 billion on this bid.