The WSJ Calls For War -- Almost

Concluding that "the idea that Iran is still a decade away from a bomb . . . now looks like wishful thinking," and that "[t]he Iranian bomb will thus be a crisis for this Administration, not the next, The Wall Street Journal editorial page today stopped just short of calling for military intervention in Iran:

The task now for the President is to begin speaking publicly about why a nuclear Iran is, as he calls it, "unacceptable." Far from preparing for war with Iran, the Administration has barely begun to confront the tough choices at hand. The reasons for this reluctance are easy to appreciate: The future of democratic Iraq is far from assured; Mr. Bush's approval ratings are in the tank and his political capital is depleted; and the military options against Iran have their own limitations and risks. But Mr. Bush remains President for 33 more months, with a Constitutional responsibility to ensure our safety. And there is no more clear and present danger than Iran's nuclear programs.

I don't know if Iran's nuclear programs do pose the sort of clear and present danger that the WSJ supposes they do. I tend to agree with the WSJ that the prospects of stopping them diplomaticallyare close to nil, but I go back and forth on the question of which is worse: trying to stop them by force or accepting the inevitable and trying to contain a nuclear Iran via deterrence.

The analogy to the "appeasment" of Hitler is widely touted, but wrong. So far at least, Iran has not laid claims to any of its neighbors. And, if it did, that would be the appropriate point for NATO and the other Great Powers to forcefully intervene, much as it did in the First Gulf War. I guess the biggest threat is to Israel, but since Iran and Israel share no common border, that threat consists largely of the threat to lob nuclear tipped missles into Israel. Again, this is a threat that can probably be dealt with by deterrence, although I can see why the Israelis would not be all that sanguine about that approach.

Still, there is the core problem here, and it is a problem that underlies any deabte about preventative war. Why must we -- or any nation -- wait until a threat becomes clear and present before doing anything about it? That question has a bad rep right now becuase it was the theory that underlay the Iraq war. But the thing that made the Iraq war such a terrible mistake was not the principle of "prevention" but the fact that Saddam did not in fact have any WMDs and was not, therefore, even a theoretical threat. Would we be so opposed to the Iraq war if we had found the WMDs? I don't think so. The problem, then, is not that the Iraq war was wrong in principle; rather it was wrong becuase, as it turned out, it was unnecessary.

So, I ask myself: can we afford to let a nut case like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have nuclear weapons? More precisely, are we sufficiently committed to preventing that to accept the consequences of bombing Iran? Zbigniew Brzezinski laid out some of those consequences in an April 23 Op-Ed piece in the LA Times . Those consquences are real and potentially awful. But are they more or less awful that an nuclear armed Iran? Frankly, I just don't know.

This much seems clear to me, though. We would have had a far better chance of containing this threat either diplomatically or militarily if we had not gotten ourselves mired down in Iraq.