Jamie Fly and Bill Kristol have a bridge to sell America.
The folks who helped bring you the Iraq war say the takeaway of the alleged Iranian assassination plot is that diplomacy with Iran has failed.
What diplomacy?  Fly and Kristol have more wars under their belts than the U.S. has had direct meetings with Iran.  If Fly and Kristol fought their wars the way they say we should carry out diplomacy, we would have been out of Iraq a long time ago.
The total lack of diplomatic channels is the reason that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Michael Mullen, before his term ended this month, urged forcefully and publicly for the U.S. to pursue “any channel that’s open” for diplomacy with Iran to avert a national security disaster.  “We haven’t had a connection with Iran since 1979,” Mullen has noted. “Even in the darkest days of the Cold War, we had links to the Soviet Union.”
But apparently Kristol and Fly know better than the Admiral. So what are these great minds advocating, beyond “diplomacy is dead”?

“Fortunately, there is a template for action from President Obama’s predecessors in the Oval Office. An appropriate response would be targeted strikes against key regime facilities that support Iran’s illicit activities.”

You guessed it—bombing Iran.  But Kristol and Fly’s “template,” they say, is just tactical strikes, not all out war.  It is the template followed by Bill Clinton when he bombed Iraq in 1993 and Ronald Regan when he bombed Libya in 1986.
And, as we all know, those military strikes stopped Saddam and Moammar in their tracks and created bastions of peace and stability in Iraq and Libya that have served U.S. national security interests for decades.
No, I’m kidding of course—the smoke hasn’t even cleared in Libya and our troops aren’t home from Iraq yet.  Kristol must think we are pretty gullible.  The U.S. hasn’t even paid off its credit card for the last wars, and Fly and Kristol want to buy a new one.
Perhaps if the good folks at Bill Kristol, Inc. want to dish out advice, they should figure out how to clean up the old messes they helped create before they prod us into a new one.