I have just written a fairly lengthy post at Cato’s blog Cato-at-Liberty picking up on some of the themes from President Bush’s speech before the Military Officers Association of America.

In the days leading up to the fifth anniversary of 9/11, President Bush has focused attention on the war on terrorism, emphasizing, as he has repeatedly over the past few months, that a defeat in Iraq would represent a victory for Al Qaeda. 

His speech yesterday was unique, however, in terms of the number of times — 17 — that the president mentioned Osama Bin Laden by name, and by virtue of the president’s decision to focus on the terrorist leader’s speeches and writings. “We know what the terrorists intend to do because they’ve told us,” Bush explained to the assembled crowd, ”and we need to take their words seriously.”

No one can or should quarrel with the president’s determination to defeat al Qaeda, and Americans almost universally embrace a strategy which, in the president’s words, seeks “to protect America, by defeating the terrorists on the battlefield, and defeating their hateful ideology in the battle of ideas.” But the president is now attempting to lump together two (or more) very different movements into a single frightening enemy.

This conflation of Al Qaeda with other Islamist radical groups is set forth in a single sweeping paragraph:

As we continue to fight al Qaeda and these Sunni extremists inspired by their radical ideology, we also face the threat posed by Shia extremists, who are learning from al Qaeda, increasing their assertiveness, and stepping up their threats. … This Shia strain of Islamic radicalism is just as dangerous, and just as hostile to America, and just as determined to establish its brand of hegemony across the broader Middle East. And the Shia extremists have achieved something that al Qaeda has so far failed to do: In 1979, they took control of a major power, the nation of Iran, subjugating its proud people to a regime of tyranny, and using that nation’s resources to fund the spread of terror and pursue their radical agenda.  

From there, the president proposes to expand the war on terrorism from Al Qaeda, a largely Sunni Arab organization, to also include largely Shiite terrorist groups, such as Hezbollah (which the president pointed out “has killed more Americans than any terrorist organization except al Qaeda”), and to Hezbollah’s principle patron, the leaders of Shiite/Persian Iran, who “have also declared their absolute hostility to America.” Such an expansion of the war on terrorism is badly misguided.

For starters, Iran is a natural enemy of the organization that spawned the likes of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a man who took almost as much pleasure in killing Shia Muslims as he did Americans. We should be looking for ways to work with Iran in defeating a common foe. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, that is precislely what we did. Tehran cooperated with the United States when we removed the Taliban from power in the fall of 2001, and they offered still more assistance in the fight against Al Qaeda in the beginning of 2002 . Since the time of President Bush’s Axis of Evil speech in January 2002, however, relations between Iran and the United States have turned decidedly colder. The election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005 represented a further setback. President Bush yesterday highlighted Ahmadinejad’s musings of “a world without America and Zionism.”

For John Podhoretz, a leading supporter of the Bush Doctrine of democratizing the Middle East – by force if necessary – the language in President Bush’s speech yesterday leads inexorably to a single, simple fact: the United States is likely to launch a military strike against Iran. “Barring a miraculous change of heart on the part of the Iranian regime, a military strike is all but inevitable,” Podhoretz writes in the New York Post. “Bush himself will view his own presidency as a failure if he doesn’t act.”

So, is Podhoretz right? Is war with Iran “all but inevitable”? If the president is fixed on such a course, who or what will stop him?

I have little faith that the Congress will do so. The prevailing view on the panel that I chaired last week at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA) was that the experience of the Iraq war, especially, teaches that bipartisanship alone will not guard against reckless and ill-considered military interventions. (See Steve Clemons’ comments on the panel discussion here.)

There was considerable bipartisan support (well beyond Dick Gephardt and Joe Lieberman) for the congressional resolution authorizing the president to wage war against Iraq, and a number of prominent liberal commentators were outspoken in their support for the war. Left-leaning magazines, including The New Republic, and the editorial staff at the reliably liberal Washington Post, remain adamant that the war was a noble cause, albeit one that was botched by the Bush administration. (An argument, by the way, that has been thoroughly refuted here and here.) It is not unreasonable to presume that there would be bipartisan support for future wars launched on similar grounds (elimination of WMD, liberation of religious and ethnic minorities from tyranny, promotion of democracy, etc.).

Which brings us back to Iran. The language from the president’s speech yesterday bears eerie parallels to that deployed in the late summer and early fall of 2002 in making the case for war against Iraq:

The Iranian regime and its terrorist proxies have demonstrated their willingness to kill Americans — and now the Iranian regime is pursuing nuclear weapons. The world is working together to prevent Iran’s regime from acquiring the tools of mass murder. The international community has made a reasonable proposal to Iran’s leaders, and given them the opportunity to set their nation on a better course. So far, Iran’s leaders have rejected this offer. Their choice is increasingly isolating the great Iranian nation from the international community, and denying the Iranian people an opportunity for greater economic prosperity. It’s time for Iran’s leader to make a different choice. And we’ve made our choice. We’ll continue to work closely with our allies to find a diplomatic solution. The world’s free nations will not allow Iran to develop a nuclear weapon.

Can a bipartisan consensus committed to a peaceful resolution to the Iran vs. U.S. standoff form over the next few weeks or months? Or will a competing bipartisan consensus, energized by fears of a Sunni-Shia axis, and scornful of the belief that Iran can be deterred from using nuclear weapons, succeed in pushing a preventive war that will, in all likelihood, make our experience in Iraq look easy by comparison?

You’ll pardon my pessimism if I believe the latter is more likely. 

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