In the wake of charges against two people in an alleged Iranian plot to assassinate Saudia Arabia’s Ambassador to Washington, several neoconservative think-tankers both implicitly and explicitly called for the U.S. to engage in a war with Iran. Now, they’re being joined by neoconservative don Bill Kristol, the well-connected Weekly Standard editor behind innumerable hawkish neocon projects of the past 15 years.

In the October 24, 2011, issue of the Weekly Standard, Kristol writes:

It’s long since been time for the United States to speak to this regime in the language it understands—force.

And now we have an engraved invitation to do so. The plot to kill the Saudi ambassador was a lemon. Statesmanship involves turning lemons into lemonade.

So we can stop talking. Instead, we can follow the rat lines in Iraq and Afghanistan back to their sources, and destroy them. We can strike at the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and weaken them. And we can hit the regime’s nuclear weapons program, and set it back. Lest the administration hesitate to act out of fear of lack of support at home, Congress should consider authorizing the use of force against Iranian entities that facilitate attacks on our troops, against IRGC and other regime elements that sponsor terror, and against the regime’s nuclear weapons program.

What Kristol is talking about here is an all out war with Iran: attacking the Islamic Republic’s military, regime elements, and of course Iran’s nuclear program (which is alleged to be aimed at nuclear weapons, but has yet to be proven so — though don’t look for Kristol to make the distinction).

Sometime Kristol ally and fellow Standard writer Reuel Marc Gerecht, a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, made a similar call in the Wall Street Journal last week: “The White House needs to respond militarily to this outrage. If we don’t, we are asking for it.”

Gerecht called for attacking Iran in 2010 and Kristol, for his part, indicates that the latest alleged Iranian plot is little more than a pretext to start a war he’s had on his mind for a while: He writes that “it’s long since been time” to start a war with Iran.

Kristol was a central node in the long-running campaign for war with Iraq. He founded the Project For a New American Century, which advocated for war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1998 and said, less than two weeks after 9/11, that “even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power.” Kristol was also an advisory board member to the short-lived pressure group the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a hawkish outfit that worked in 2002 and 2003 to push Congress and the public for war.

GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain’s campaign has been so beset by foreign policy gaffes that he’s constantly forced to defend his record. First, it was his assertion that he believed in the Palestinian right of return — which he subsequently walked back under pressure. Then he unilaterally recognized Taiwan. Then last week he displayed deep ignorance about Uzbekistan, an increasingly important ally in the Afghanistan war that Cain called “Ubeki-beki-beki-stan-stan.” Cain again had to defend himself, and merely blamed liberal, African-American commentators for not “want(ing) black people to think for themselves.”

On Fox News yesterday, Cain again defended himself and posited that he is merely waiting to display a foreign policy acumen that he has spent a “long, long, long time” — nine months — building up. Here’s Cain’s secret plan to surprise everyone with his depth of knowledge on world affairs:

Have you ever heard the expression “the tiger in the tall grass”? Just sort of wait? Do they think that for the last nine months I have not been studying the foreign policy challenges that they face? Do they think for the last nine months I have not been consulting with a group of foreign policy advisers about all the different situations that we’re in? Do they think for a moment that I’m not a student of the position that I seek, and that I probably know more about foreign policy than they think?

What I’m just saying, Neil, is that I hope they continue to think that I’m foreign policy dumb, until the right time they will find out I’m not as foreign policy dumb as they think. I am have been a student of every one of these issues for a long, long, long time. So I hope they continue to maintain that attitude.

Watch Cain on Fox here:

The “Ubeki-beki-beki-stan-stan” gaffe prompted ThinkProgress’s Matt Yglesias to observe:

Cain is transparently running for talk radio host or something. If it wouldn’t make a good subject for a 10-minute drive time segment, he doesn’t want to talk about it… Cain, trying to leap from ex-CEO of third-rate pizza chain to president of the United States, doesn’t think he needs to do anything.

In yesterday’s Fox interview, Cain did not, however, mention any specifics. One wonders why, if Cain has been studying U.S. hotspots for nine months, he completely botched answers about China-Taiwan relations, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the geostrategic map of supplying U.S. troops fighting in the Afghanistan war. And if he’s been studying these issues for nine months and can still bungle answers this badly, is it even possible for him to become competent enough in foreign policy to occupy the white house in another 16 months?

(HT: Max Blumenthal)