Bush Held Secret Iran Meeting

Neoconservative guru Norman Podhoretz met secretly with President Bush and urged him to attack Iran before it can acquire nuclear weapons.

The meeting last spring in New York was not logged on the president’s schedule. But Podhoretz, whose new book is “World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism,” disclosed details of the meeting in an interview with Britain’s Sunday Times.

“I urged Bush to take action against the Iranian nuclear facilities and explained why I thought there was no alternative,” he said. “I laid out the worst-case scenario – bombing Iran – versus the worse-case consequences of allowing the Iranians to get the bomb.

“He gave not the slightest indication of whether he agreed with me, but he listened very intently.”

The threat of Iran producing nuclear weapons became even more urgent last week when President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said at the United Nations that the dispute over Iran’s nuclear program is now “closed.”

At his meeting with the president, Podhoretz said, he told Bush that he has “the awesome responsibility” of averting another holocaust.

Podhoretz told the Times he is convinced Bush won’t leave office with Iran having acquired nuclear weapons or the capability of producing them, and added that the president “believes that if we wait for threats to fully materialize, we’ll have waited too long – something I agree with 100 percent.”

Podhoretz, 77, has joined Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign as a senior foreign policy adviser.

Giuliani said recently that he would not tolerate a nuclear-armed Iran.