THE CRUNCH - AT 7:36 A.M. ET:  The internet is filled with a sense of despair over Barack Obama's foreign policy, or lack of it.  There is a recognition that crunch time is coming, and coming fast.  It is evident, for example, that the Iranian regime, which is seeking nuclear weapons, is not terribly impressed by Mr. Obama's pencil-rattling.  Minds are focusing on the reality of policy, not rhetoric, which means we are entering an area - action and result - for which the president of the United States is substantially unequipped.  We can't even be sure that he's really interested.

Elliot Cohen of Johns Hopkins, which houses some of the few remaining sane scholars in international studies, has written a superb piece on the actual choices Obama faces with Iran.  This is not comic-book reading, and one does not come away with a yearning for another Obama speech.   Cohen is blunt:

Pressure, be it gentle or severe, will not erase that nuclear program. The choices are now what they ever were: an American or an Israeli strike, which would probably cause a substantial war, or living in a world with Iranian nuclear weapons, which may also result in war, perhaps nuclear, over a longer period of time.

That recalls Churchill's admonition to Chamberlain upon the latter's return from Munich:  "You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor and you will have war."  I get the feeling we're heading down the same path.

At the heart of the problem is not simply the nuclear program. It is the Iranian regime, a regime that has, since 1979, relentlessly waged war against the U.S. and its allies. From Buenos Aires to Herat, from Beirut to Cairo, from Baghdad to, now, Caracas, Iranian agents have done their best to disrupt and kill. Iran is militarily weak, but it is masterful at subversive war, and at the kind of high-tech guerrilla, roadside-bomb and rocket fight that Hezbollah conducted in 2006. American military cemeteries contain the bodies of hundreds, maybe thousands, of American servicemen and servicewomen slain by Iranian technology, Iranian tactics, and in some cases, Iranian operatives.

This, of course, is conveniently forgotten by "policy" makers who regard such rough talk as beneath them, not quite the jargon one finds in the velvet salons of Georgetown.

Cohen is no automatic warrior.  He recognizes the great limitations of an Israeli air strike.  As for an American action, Cohen's assessment of the Obama administration's will is devastating:

More to the point, it is difficult to believe that the Obama administration has the stomach for war. Its appalling public case of nerves over the war in Afghanistan—a "war of necessity," as of only a few months ago—is indicative of its true temper. And if President Obama does not have the courage to accept hazards and ugly surprises, and if he cannot bring himself to deploy his rhetorical skills to the mobilization of opinion at home and abroad, he should not start a shooting war, even if the Iranians are already waging one against us.

Oh, come now, Eliot.  You can't mean something so harsh about our The One, can you?

Yeah.

What is Cohen's sad conclusion?

It is, therefore, in the American interest to break with past policy and actively seek the overthrow of the Islamic Republic. Not by invasion, which this administration would not contemplate and could not execute, but through every instrument of U.S. power, soft more than hard. And if, as is most likely, President Obama presides over the emergence of a nuclear Iran, he had best prepare for storms that will make the squawks of protest against his health-care plans look like the merest showers on a sunny day.

COMMENT:  The tragedy, one of many, is that, even if Obama fails miserably, he will still maintain his base of support in the universities, among the chattering classes, and on the fashionable media left.  They will never abandon him because they live in a world of symbols, not of bombs.  Like children, they never believe that the bombs are meant for them.

September 28,  2009