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

To many, 20 January 2009, George W. Bush’s last day in office, can’t come soon enough. The President’s pugnacious speech to the American Legion summed up why: not content with vigorously defending two wars, he seemed to start banging the drum for another with his statement that Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons threatened to put the Middle East ‘under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust’ and pledge that America ‘will confront this danger before it is too late’.

It is tempting to dismiss Bush’s remarks as mere sabre-rattling from an increasingly irrelevant and isolated President. After all, Bush has his hands full persuading Congress to continue funding the Iraq war; especially with the divisions between the British and American strategies made brutally apparent by British forces pulling back to Basra airport at the same time that Bush was flying into Iraq to rally support for the American troop surge. But those who think that the next president will jettison Bush’s policy on Iran are in for a shock.

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.