President Bush dismissed as “wild speculation” reports that he is planning an attack on Iran, though the White House said the United States routinely engages in “military contingency planning.”
“I read the articles in the newspapers this weekend,” Bush told students Monday at Johns Hopkins University. “What you’re reading is wild speculation, which, you know, happens quite frequently here in the nation’s capital.”
The president was referring to several published reports that the administration is stepping up plans for possible strikes against Iran. Bush said that while he wants to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, that does not necessarily mean war.
“The doctrine of prevention is to work together to prevent the Iranians from having a nuclear weapon,” he said. “I know here in Washington prevention means force. It doesn’t mean force, necessarily.
“In this case, it means diplomacy,” he said. “Never use force until you’ve exhausted all diplomacy.”
White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan called a New Yorker magazine article by Seymour Hersh “hyped-up reporting based on anonymous sources and a lot of wild speculation.”
Still, he did not deny that plans for hypothetical military action are being devised.
“Those who are seeking to draw broad conclusions based on normal military contingency planning are misinformed or not knowledgeable about the administration’s thinking,” the spokesman told reporters at a morning off-camera briefing.
But Hersh told CNN, “It’s beyond contingency planning. It’s operational planning.”
He added: “The fear is that the White House — there [are] some people in the White House who aren’t really, no matter what happens diplomatically — they don’t believe Iran’s going to give up its ambitions.”
McClellan would not rule out a military strike by the U.S.
‘No president takes options off the table, but our focus is on working with the international community to find a diplomatic solution,” he said.
On March 29, the U.N. Security Council gave Iran 30 days to stop enriching uranium. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad vowed Monday to ignore the threat and continue his nation’s nuclear activities.
