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 Republican frontrunners all espouse equally tough — if not tougher — positions on Iran. But why in an election where no one wants to be seen as the heir to Bush is everyone nodding in unison on Iran, give or take the details? And why are even those who are benefiting politically from their opposition to the Iraq war so willing to contemplate using force against Tehran?

To work out why, one has to appreciate the real nature of the Iraq debate in the United States. Those in the political mainstream who now oppose the war do not do so because they are pacifists or because they believe that America has no place telling other countries how to behave. They do so because they believe that the Iraq war has made America less secure.

Edwards’s mea culpa for supporting the war in Iraq was not based on the premise that the war was wrong, but on the absence of a threat to America. If Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, Edwards would — by his own logic — still support the war. Obama has opposed the Iraq mission from the beginning, but he didn’t do so as a pacifist or as someone who believed that America shouldn’t call the shots in international affairs. His recent warning to Pakistan that America, under his leadership, would strike terrorist hide-outs in its territory shows that he has no problem with unilateral military action in principle. Tony Blair was spot on when he told colleagues shortly before stepping down as prime minister that, ‘The American people haven’t turned against the war because they suddenly think it’s an immoral war. The Americans like a Man with a Plan, and the plan has to work. Bush had a plan but they don’t think it worked. It’s a key difference.’

If you accept that the United States has a key role in the world; that it is (to borrow a phrase from Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton’s secretary of state) the ‘indispensable nation’, it is hard to argue against the idea that America should do something about Iran. Consider for a moment the consequences of a nuclear Iran — consequences that, unlike those of a nuclear North Korea, would have an immediate and direct impact on US, and Western, security and interests.