David Frum

But they know as well as everybody else how hazardous it will be to use ground troops.

And once ground troops are deployed, we're into a very protracted war that there's no way to imagine ending.

And I don't think there's any appetite to invade and occupy Iran.

So they will have these limited operations that put the initiative in the Iranian hands.

So if you seize the shoreline opposite the Strait of Hormuz, okay, now you've got an American military occupation of Iran.

How many hundreds of kilometers?

You seize Karg Island, you're sort of sitting ducks.

Any involvement of ground troops will surely create more and more demand until you've got total war against Iran.

And the United States should not be fighting a total war against Iran in a world where Russia and China are more important problems.

When President Bush delivered the Acts of Evil speech in February of 2002,

more than a year before the Iraq War.

Those of us who worked on the speech did not know which countries he would name.

That was not our job.

Our job was to create intellectual and rhetorical structures for policy.

So at the time, that speech left whatever contact I had with it.

Iran aggressively pursues these weapons and exports terror, while an unelected few repress the Iranian people's hope for freedom.

States like these and their terrorist allies

constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world by seeking weapons of mass destruction.

These regimes pose a grave and growing danger.

I didn't know what he was going to say.