“Bush will not leave office with Iran having acquired a nuclear weapon or having passed the point of no return,” Podhoretz said.

CAIRO — Using their political leverage that once led to the invasion of Iraq, neo-conservatives in and outside the Bush administration are pushing the wartime American leader to strike Iran before leaving office in just over 15 months, The Sunday Times reported.

“I urged Bush to take action against the Iranian nuclear facilities and explained why I thought there was no alternative,” Norman Podhoretz, the godfather of the neo-conservatives in the US, told the British paper on Sunday, September 30.

“I laid out the worst-case scenario – bombing Iran – versus the worst-case consequences of allowing the Iranians to get the (nuclear) bomb,” added Podhoretz, 77, disclosing details of his unpublicized 45-minute meeting with Bush at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York last spring.

The US accuses Iran of seeking to develop nuclear weapons, but Tehran insists that its program is for peaceful civilian use.

The UN Security Council agreed on Friday, September 28, to give Iran until November to answer questions from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) about its nuclear program.

Podhoretz said that when he said Bush was just “giving futility its chance” by pursuing diplomacy, the president and his former close aide Karl Rove had burst out laughing.

“It struck me,” Podhoretz recalled, “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’.”

To Hit

Podhoretz, who has joined the presidential campaign of Republican frontrunner Rudolph Giuliani as a senior foreign policy adviser, reminded Bush of his “awesome responsibility to prevent another holocaust” of a possible Iranian nuclear attack on Israel.

“You’re the only one with the guts to do it,” he told Bush.

Podhoretz believes “Bush is going to hit” Iran before his presidency ends.

“George Bush will not leave office with Iran having acquired a nuclear weapon or having passed the point of no return,” he said.

Podhoretz has laid out his views in a new book, World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism.

The Bush administration’s neoconservatives have been falling by the wayside since the Iraq invasion.

The disgraceful downfall of Paul Wolfowitz, the Pentagon’s former number three and the Iraq war architect, as the president of the World Bank has driven another nail in the coffin of neoconservatives.

Chief among the falling neocons are Donald Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary; Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policies; Richard Perle, a former assistance defense secretary; and John Bolton, the former ambassador to the United Nations.

Lawrence Anthony Franklin, who served on the Iran desk in the office of Defense Secretary, has pleaded guilty to passing information about US policy to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the main pro-Israel lobby.

Iran Dossier

In a related development, the members of the US secretariat in the UN were compiling a dossier for Iran’s alleged violations of international law to be used to justify military strikes, revealed The Sunday Telegraph.

“They’ve been given instructions to build a dossier. They’ve been scouring around for stuff over the last couple of weeks,” said Steven Clemons, a fellow with the New America Foundation, a Washington think-tank, citing one diplomat who requested anonymity.

Clemons said Vice President Dick Cheney is the main driving force behind an attack on Iran.

“There are people more beholden to the Cheney side who have people searching for things that Iran has done wrong — making the case.”

Clemons recently exposed how a member of Cheney’s office used private meetings with neo-conservatives at the American Enterprise think- tank to reveal the vice-president’s frustration that Bush had authorized a diplomatic strategy against Iran by his Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

According to the last edition of the Newsweek magazine, David Wurmser, the former Cheney’s Middle East adviser, had told fellow neo-conservatives that Cheney had considered asking Israel to launch limited missile strikes against the Iranian nuclear site at Natanz.

He said Cheney was aiming at provoking a reaction from Teheran that would help justify wider US air strikes.

Wurmser, who tried to link Saddam Hussein to the September 11 attacks, denied the report.

The Iran dossier exercise is reminiscent of attempts by Cheney and Rumsfeld to build the case against Saddam Hussein before the Iraq war.

Just before the 2003 US-led invasion, former UK prime minister Tony Blair compiled the so-called Iraq Dossier to justify involvement in the war.

It was revealed later that the information in the “dodgy” dossier had been plagiarized from various unattributed sources.