Bolton: U.S. should hit Iran training camps

The United States should launch air strikes on Iranian-based camps that are training insurgents for war in Iraq, said the ex-U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

John Bolton said striking Iran would represent a major step toward victory in Iraq, the Telegraph of London reported.

He acknowledged the risk of a hostile Iranian response harming Americans’ overseas interests existed but said the damage inflicted by Tehran would be “far higher” if Washington took no action, the newspaper reported.

“This is a case where the use of military force against a training camp to show the Iranians we’re not going to tolerate this is really the most prudent thing to do,” he said in The Telegraph. “Then the ball would be in Iran’s court to draw the appropriate lesson to stop harming our troops.”

Bolton, an influential former member of President Bush’s inner circle, dismissed as “dead wrong” British intelligence conclusions that the U.S. military had overstated the support that Iran was providing to Iraqi fighters.

A U.S. military spokesman revealed last week that the elite Quds Force of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards had drafted personnel from Lebanon’s Hezbollah to train fighters from Iraq’s Shia militias.

Col. Donald Bacon, a spokesman for the coalition in Baghdad, said captured fighters had told interrogators that thousands of Iraqi fighters were undergoing training in the Islamic Republic.
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