Iran really will be next

If Bush doesn’t force Iran to back down, then his successors will

James Forsyth

8 September 2007

All the presidential candidates are determined to stop Tehran

The fact is that President Bush’s comments about Iran could just as easily have come from one of the Democrats running to replace him in the Oval Office. Indeed, Bush sounded positively moderate in comparison to Hillary Clinton. In a speech in January 2006, she warned that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was ‘moving to create his own new nuclear reality in line with his despicable rewriting of history’. She emphasised that the United States ‘cannot and should not — must not — permit Iran to build or acquire nuclear weapons’. Just to ram home the point, she declared that the US ‘cannot take any option off the table in sending a clear message to the current leadership of Iran — that they will not be permitted to acquire nuclear weapons’.

Barack Obama’s position is very similar to Hillary Clinton’s, despite their different views on the Iraq war. When Obama was running for the Senate in 2004, he was asked about how he would deal with an Iran on the verge of going nuclear. He noted that, after the damage Iraq had done to America’s standing in the world, it would hardly be ‘optimal’ for the US to strike Iran, but added that ‘having a radical Muslim theocracy in possession of nuclear weapons is worse. So I guess my instinct would be to err on not having those weapons in the possession of the ruling clerics of Iran.... And I hope it doesn’t get to that point. But realistically, as I watch how this thing has evolved, I’d be surprised if Iran blinked at this point.’ It seems Obama wouldn’t blink either.

The most left-wing of the Democratic frontrunners, the former senator John Edwards, has also struck a tough line on Iran despite recanting his earlier vote for the Iraq war. He told a security conference at the beginning of this year: ‘Let me be clear: under no circumstances can Iran be allowed to have nuclear weapons.’ Like his rivals for the nomination, Edwards was eager to stress that he wasn’t ruling anything out in his efforts to stop Iran. ‘To ensure that Iran never gets nuclear weapons, we need to keep all options on the table. Let me reiterate — all options must remain on the table.’ Once his audience had got the message, he acknowledged that the war in Iraq had made the American public less gung-ho but he seemed confident that they could be persuaded if action was necessary. ‘The American people are smart if they are told the truth, and if they trust their president. So Americans can be educated to come along with what needs to be done with Iran.’