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.