Melanie Phillips gets it right on Iran

It would be awfully nice if Dubya has indeed come around to this position:

Encouragingly, there are signs that Bush may have now accepted what has long been apparent – that he has been ill-served by his top brass in Iraq. The US commander–in-chief wants to win – but has realised that his generals merely want to manage a retreat. Now there’s been a shake-up...

The fight in Washington with the army top brass has...been over a major difference in strategic perception. In order to win in Iraq, it is essential to defeat Iran. This is for the blindingly obvious reason that the principal instigator of the war in Iraq is… Iran. I have never understood how anyone could think that you can win a war by refusing to fight the aggressors and instead running around trying vainly to put out the fires they are starting. As I said last month here and on many other occasions, the coalition cannot secure Iraq without first defeating Iran.

It has also long been clear that Iraq is merely a front in wider regional — and indeed, global — war. Iran declared war on the west in 1979, when Ayatollah Khomeini announced his intention of conquering the west for Islam. The response of the west has been to ignore the fact.... Ahmadinejad is the true heir to Khomeini; and is it any wonder that he feels able to cock a snook at the west on the assumption that it is toothless and will not prevent him from acquiring nuclear weapons, when for more than two decades the west refused to defend itself against Iranian aggression – and even now, when Iran is fighting the west through proxies in Iraq, it is still flinching from taking the fight to the enemy?

Turning Iran into another Libya would do the trick.

Of course, there would still be the Saudis...