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

Whether or not there are still GIs surging around Baghdad, the next president will have to deal with Iran. It would be a fundamental misreading of the American mood to believe that any withdrawal from Iraq is a prelude to a general disengagement from the Middle East. No serious candidate is an isolationist, thankfully. Indeed, one of the major arguments in Washington for leaving Iraq is that US involvement there restricts its options vis-à-vis Iran. As Blair was leaving Downing Street he worried that many of his colleagues had completely misunderstood this central point. ‘Look at what the presidential candidates are actually saying,’ he said. ‘Part of the enthusiasm to get out of Iraq is precisely because they regard Iran as more important long term.’

Ironically, it is the relative success of the surge that has kept the Iran issue on the backburner. If America had been defeated in Iraq or withdrawn, stopping Iran from going nuclear would have become the first priority of US foreign policy.

You don’t need to be Dr Strangelove to think that striking Iran would be better than letting it go nuclear. Nor do you need to be a neoconservative, or any other kind of conservative for that matter. The Iran problem is not the work of President Bush and will not leave the Oval Office with him. The rest of the world urgently needs to grasp this.

Sensibly, Gordon Brown and David Cameron have not ruled out the military option when it comes to Iran. But neither have they sought to educate the public about the threat; preferring instead to leave the electorate to its Iraq-induced stupor on foreign affairs. Nicolas Sarkozy’s recent speech warning that if sanctions are not ratcheted up sufficiently to stop Tehran, the world will face either the disaster of a nuclear-armed Iran or an attack on Iran was, though, an encouraging sign that there is a growing realisation of quite how serious and advanced the Iran crisis already is.

The problem is that the kind of measures that could deter Iran require UN Security Council approval and there is little sign that either Russia or China would support them. If European and other countries are serious about avoiding another war in the Middle East, a further radicalisation of Muslim opinion and all the other consequences of a strike on Iran, then they need to start putting together a coalition of the willing to impose the kind of serious pressure on Iran — including a naval blockade designed to choke its economy — that would persuade it to give up its nuclear programme.

Without this, Iran will continue its progress towards a bomb and at some point in the near future a US president will have to choose between bombing Iran and letting it go nuclear. Whether Bush, Clinton, Obama or Giuliani is president, the decision would be the same: they would all order a strike on Iran.