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Robert Wright

Robert Wright - Robert Wright is a senior editor at The Atlantic and the author, most recently, of The Evolution of God, a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. More

Robert Wright is a senior editor at The Atlantic and the author, most recently, of The Evolution of God, a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Wright is also a fellow at the New America Foundation and editor in chief of Bloggingheads.tv. His other books include Nonzero, which was named a New York Times Book Review Notable Book in 2000 and included on Fortune magazine's list of the top 75 business books of all-time. Wright's best-selling book The Moral Animal was selected as one of the ten best books of 1994 by The New York Times Book Review.Wright has contributed to The Atlantic for more than 20 years. He has also contributed to a number of the country's other leading magazines and newspapers, including: The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Foreign Policy, The New Republic, Time, and Slate, and the op-ed pages of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Financial Times. He is the recipient of a National Magazine Award for Essay and Criticism and his books have been translated into more than a dozen languages.

The Nuttiest Bomb-Iran Idea of Them All?

By Robert Wright
Feb 10 2012, 7:36 PM ET Comment

Last month Jamie Fly and Gary Schmitt got a lot of attention by arguing that the garden variety bomb-Iran plans aren't ambitious enough. Rather than just use surgical strikes to set back Iran's nuclear program, they said, we should expand the target list and keep bombing until the government falls. Then you would get regime change without the hassle of boots on the ground.

Matthew Duss has suggested that proposals like this serve as framing devices. They're so radical that they expand the "Overton window" to the right, making standard bomb-Iran proposals sound moderate, Duss wrote in Salon.

But Duss, co-host of the Bloggingheads show Foreign Entanglements, apparently believes that everyone deserves their day in court. He gave Fly his. Here is the heart of their exchange: 


You can watch the whole conversation here.



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