Can Obama Sell an Iran Strike?

With the Democrats souring on Afghanistan and Republicans distrustful of his foreign policy, an attack on Iran might be Obama's hardest political sell.

There have begun to be hints and signals that the Obama administration is rethinking its policy on Iran.  Michael Barone has detected shifts in the appeasement policy and noted that some liberals think a nuclear Iran would doom the international agenda.    Joe Klein, not a neocon or any other kind of con, has apparently been bruiting this about.

This is a strange development.  George W. Bush did not attack Iran.  Barack Obama came to office promising to end our two foreign wars (and presumably the War on Terror would go away of itself).  Iran’s nuclear program is reputed to be far advanced and imminent.  If it is not, Barack Obama risks his presidency on such a strike.

I do not think he will risk it.  Barack Obama would rather live with a nuclear Iran than strike the first blow against a third world country.  In addition, it would require him to attack through bombing and, perhaps, special forces to ensure the labs were destroyed.  This is a gigantic risk.  The last Democratic president to send men into Iran fared badly.  The president is also against preemption: he even ran on the theme.  With the Democratic Party souring on Afghanistan, Iran would be a bridge too far in his political support.  But Iranian nukes are a true threat and President Obama may see the world differently now.

In August 1998, Bill Clinton launched a strike against Sudan to destroy a suspected weapons site.  This was just as Monica Lewinsky was testifying and he was in political trouble.  Similarly, President Clinton took on Serbia on behalf of Kosovo but almost exclusively from the air.  It has made him a hero.

If the administration is determined to destroy Iranian nuclear capabilities it will require an enormous effort.  Not simply some cruise missiles in the dessert.  It will need to take out redundant, entrenched sites and we need to be confident of our intelligence which likely means relying on Israel.  When could this attack be ready?  I do not know.

But if Barack Obama launches such a strike against Iran it had better be after the midterm elections.  To so radically reverse policy and order such a strike fraught with peril and risk, the president ought to be cognizant of what a liberal movie once called the “Wag the Dog” strategy.  A strike in the fall, thirty days or so before the election, will be seen as a political ploy and will be sold as such by the aggrieved Iranians.  The well-known spike in approval an American president gets when he hits a long-time enemy of the country and shows strength is too well-known to make such an attack’s timing seem a matter of happenstance.

Republicans should support such a strike if it is made with good chances of retarding a nuclear Iran.  But such Republican support should also examine when and how the choice was made to launch it.