We Are All Pod's Children

The Politico's David Paul Kuhn chats up Norman Podhoretz, who reminisces about getting a private meeting with George W. Bush and urging him to bomb Iran.

"I did say to [the president], that people ask: Why are you spending all this time negotiating sanctions? Time is passing. I said, my friend [Robert] Kagan wrote a column which he said you were giving 'futility its chance.' And both he and Karl Rove burst out laughing.

"It struck me," Podhoretz added, "that if they really believed that there was a chance for these negotiations and sanctions to work, they would not have laughed. They would have got their backs up and said, 'No, no, it's not futile, there's a very good chance.'"

Podhoretz walked out of the meeting neither deterred nor assured the president would attack the Persian state.

Yet he believes, he said prior to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to New York for the United Nations' General Assembly, that "Bush is going to hit" Iran before the end of his presidency.

The acceptable political center of this debate is apparently between Podhoretz's position and Mitt Romney's call to pre-emptively indict Ahmedinejad.