With 18 Months To Go, Will Bush Hit Iran?

Will President Bush, perhaps on the advice of Dick Cheney, order a military strike on Iran before he leaves office in 18 months? Interviews with two former administration officials this week give some insights.

Strictly speaking, the Bush team has frequently said that no option for dealing with Iran's nuclear program is off the table. It's highly improbable, however, that the U.S. would launch an all-out war against Iran in the next year or so. Apart from the question of its merits or demerits, Bush could muster very little domestic or international support for such a move, and the U.S. military is already too stretched in Iraq to take on what would be an even larger task than the toppling of Saddam Hussein. Barring a terrorist incident on the scale of 9/11 and laid unambiguously at Tehran's doorstep, it's hard to imagine Bush trying to muster a military effort to oust the mullahs from power.

What about a quick attack, with air strikes and Cruise missiles, with the limited objective of obliterating Iran's nuclear program but not overthrowing the Islamic regime? That's harder to discount. I've been thinking about this since May, when I blogged about Cheney's recent tour of the Middle East. Speaking to troops on the USS John C. Stennis, he effectively warned Iran that it faced a military strike if it did not dismantle its nuclear program. "With two carrier strike groups in the Gulf, we're sending clear messages to friends and adversaries alike," Cheney said. "We'll stand with our friends in opposing extremism and strategic threats. And we'll stand with others to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons and dominating this region."

In an interview with Larry King on CNN, former Secretary of State Colin Powell provided some insights--including about Cheney's role-- into how the Bush administration went to war in Iraq over Powell's preference to settle the dispute with Saddam at the U.N.

As Cheney was pushing for war, Powell says he convinced Bush to go to the U.N. instead. Powell is being wishy-washy when he says that ultimately it was Saddam's fault that he "missed the opportunity to avoid war." But Powell, whose wife Alma was also on the program, made no objection when King quoted Alma saying she thought "Colin has been callously used to promote a war she wished has never happened." "That is true," Alma told King. "I still feel that way." Earlier in the interview, Powell provided some thoughts on Cheney's influence in the administration's pecking order. Powell registered no objection when King quoted Republican wise man Brent Scowcroft saying "this is a Dick Cheney I don't know"; then Powell commented, "Mr. Cheney has strong views on issues. And, as you would expect, he presses those strong views...Sometimes he went directly to the president and the rest of us weren't aware of--of what advice he was giving, and sometimes I would do that, as well. It was not a system where we routinely exposed all points of view." Powell concluded, "But the bottom line is that the president is the one who decides what advice he wishes to accept and act on and what advice he doesn't feel he should act on."

This would be history if Cheney were not still in office, presumably giving Bush advice on how to "prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons and dominating this region." We don't know precisely what advice Cheney is giving, but some blunt remarks by one of Cheney's former allies inside the administration, John Bolton, may not be far off the point. In an interview with the Jerusalem Post this week, Bolton, who for six years had key responsibility for the Iran issue as an under secretary of state and U.N. ambassador, openly promoted military options to halt Iran's nuclear program.

The essential point of Bolton's argument is that the United States has run out of options: "The current approach of the Europeans and the Americans is not just doomed to failure, but dangerous. Dealing with [the Iranians] just gives them what they want, which is more time...We have fiddled away four years, in which Europe tried to persuade Iran to give up voluntarily. Iran in those four years mastered uranium conversion from solid to gas and now enrichment to weapons grade... We lost four years to feckless European diplomacy."

Because "diplomacy and sanctions have failed," Bolton argued, "we have to look at: 1) overthrowing the regime and getting in a new one that won't pursue nuclear weapons; 2) a last-resort use of force." Bolton believes "the regime is more susceptible to overthrow from within than people think," but said it "may take more time than we have."

Bolton strongly disagreed with the Bush administration's current approach and said it was one of the reasons he quit his U.N. post six months ago. He hastened to emphasize that this approach was that of the State Department, and that Secretary of State Condeleezza Rice--i.e., not Cheney-- "is overwhelmingly predominant in foreign policy" nowadays.

That doesn't mean Bolton is not pushing for tougher action--"I am pushing the U.S. very hard, from the outside"--and its reasonable to assume that Cheney is, too, from the inside.

There's an interesting piece in the latest Weekly Standard by Israeli scholar Meyrav Wurmser that is worth noting in this context. She makes a case that last summer's Hizballah war with Israel, and this summer's wars in Lebanon and Gaza, form part of a "renewed regional offensive against the United States and Israel" by Iran and Syria. She argues that they have been emboldened by American and Israeli setbacks in the Middle East and by the Bush administration's decision to reverse policy and "naively" begin talking to Damascus and Tehran--showing itself "not consistently willing to confront its enemies." The upshot, Wurmser argues, is that logically Iran and Syria will now "initiate another conflict with Israel," hoping "another Israeli defeat will further damage U.S. interests and deepen America's image as a country in retreat." Wurmser ends by calling for a "broad strategic vision," adding, and "toughness is necessary, but it will remain ineffective without a purpose and a plan."

What that new "strategic vision" and "plan" should be, she doesn't spell out. But her ideas are certain to get a hearing in Cheney's office, given that her husband, David, is one of Cheney's national security advisors and a policymaker fond of strategic visions and plans. In 1996, he famously drafted a document advocating the overthrow of Saddam. The policy paper, known as "A Clean Break--a New Strategy for Securing the Realm," advised then-incoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to work with the U.S. based on a "shared philosophy of peace through strength"--disregarding "land-for-peace" agreements with Arabs, launching military strikes on Syria, encouraging Palestinian challenges to Arafat's leadership and "removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq — an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right."

Much of what David Wurmser advocated was later adopted as policy after 9/11 by the Bush administration--before joining Cheney's office, Wurmser worked with Bolton at the State Department--albeit with unsatisfactory results thus far. Yet there is no indication that Cheney has repudiated the "peace through strength" approach to the Middle East's problems.

The real question is whether Cheney now agrees with Bolton that diplomacy and sanctions have failed with Iran and that the U.S. has run out of options other than a "last-resort use of force." Given the stakes as Cheney sees them, will he be content risking that America's next president proves to be "feckless" and "naive"?

Cheney's 2002 speech making the administration's case for the invasion of Iraq could logically be extended to the challenge that Iran presents today. "Should all his ambitions be realized, the implications would be enormous for the Middle East, for the United States, and for the peace of the world," Cheney argued. "Armed with an arsenal of these weapons of terror, and seated atop ten percent of the world's oil reserves, Saddam Hussein could then be expected to seek domination of the entire Middle East, take control of a great portion of the world's energy supplies, directly threaten America's friends throughout the region, and subject the United States or any other nation to nuclear blackmail."

"The elected leaders of this country have a responsibility to consider all of the available options," Cheney went on. "What we must not do in the face of a mortal threat is give in to wishful thinking or willful blindness. We will not simply look away, hope for the best, and leave the matter for some future administration to resolve. As President Bush has said, time is not on our side."

"The risks of inaction are far greater than the risk of action," Cheney argued. "The entire world must know that we will take whatever action is necessary to defend our freedom and our security."

For what it's worth, Cheney's speech included an approving reference to an Israeli military strike on Iraq in 1981 that destroyed Saddam's known nuclear program--a nuclear reactor in Osirak. Israel's attack was publicly condemned at the time and even the Reagan administration suspended some arms deliveries to Israel afterwards. Cheney noted that due to the Israeli bombing, "Saddam's nuclear ambitions suffered a severe setback." Dealing Iran's program such a setback is probably the maximum Cheney can wish for now.

--By Scott MacLeod/Cairo