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

James Forsyth says that the world's fixation with the President's errors in Iraq has obscured the collective determination of the presidential candidates, Democratic and Republican, to end Iran's nuclear ambitions 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. When Obama was running for the Senate in 2004, he was asked about how he would deal with an Iran on the verge of going nuclear. He noted that, after the damage Iraq had done to America's standing in the world, it would hardly be 'optimal' for the US to strike Iran, but added that 'having a radical Muslim theocracy in possession of nuclear weapons is worse. So I guess my instinct would be to err on not having those weapons in the possession of the ruling clerics of Iran.. . . And I hope it doesn't get to that point. But realistically, as I watch how this thing has evolved, I'd be surprised if Iran blinked at this point' It seems Obama wouldn't blink either.

The most left-wing of the Democratic frontrunners, the former senator John Edwards, has also struck a tough line on Iran despite recanting his earlier vote for the Iraq war. He told a security conference at the beginning of this year: 'Let me be clear: under no circumstances can Iran be allowed to have nuclear weapons.' Like his rivals for the nomination, Edwards was eager to stress that he wasn't ruling anything out in his efforts to stop Iran. 'To ensure that Iran never gets nuclear weapons, we need to keep all options on the table. Let me reiterate — all options must remain on the table.' Once his audience had got the message, he acknowledged that the war in Iraq had made the American public less gung-ho but he seemed confident that they could be persuaded if action was necessary. 'The American people are smart if they are told the truth, and if they trust their president. So Americans can be educated to come along with what needs to be done with Iran.'

Even as the contenders have moved left in an attempt to appeal to left-wing Democratic primary voters and their debates have come to sound like a Dutch auction over who can get America out of Iraq quickest, the consensus on Iran has stuck. All three frontrunners support direct diplomacy with Iran, but none is planning to fly to Tehran, sip mint tea and welcome Iran to the nuclear club. Robert Einhorn, who served as assistant secretary of state for non-proliferation under both Democratic and Republican presidents, emphasises to me that the differences between the Democrats and Bush are not about the threat itself but 'about the diplomatic tools that could be used' to deal with it None of the front-running Democrats intend to back away from their hawkish positions on Iran. Clinton has stressed in the debates that, while she supports diplomacy, 'we still have to make it clear that Iran having a nuclear weapon is absolutely unacceptable. We have to try to prevent that at all costs.' When Edwards was asked if a military threat should be considered, he replied that 'no responsible president would ever take any option off the table'. Obama is sponsoring some of the toughest anti-Iran sanctions legislation in Congress and his current line on Iran is virtually the same as the one he road-tested in 2004. Will Marshall, co-founder of the Democratic Leadership Council — the influential Washington think-tank that played a crucial role during the Clinton years and will do so again come the restoration — tells me that the Democrat contenders are all aware that they need to pass the commander-in-chief test. But he also points out that 'Democrats, especially those of a certain age, remember how Iran helped to bring down the Carter administration. . . . There's some history there.' While the Bush administration had unfinished business with Saddam Hussein's Iraq, the Democrats have it next door in Iran.

The Republican frontrunners all espouse equally tough — if not tougher — positions on Iran. But why in an election where no one wants to be seen as the heir to Bush is everyone nodding in unison on Iran, give or take the details? And why are even those who are benefiting politically from their opposition to the Iraq war so willing to contemplate using force against Tehran?

To work out why, one has to appreciate the real nature of the Iraq debate in the United States. Those in the political mainstream who now oppose the war do not do so because they are pacifists or because they believe that America has no place telling other countries how to behave. They do so because they believe that the Iraq war has made America less secure.

Edwards's mea culpa for supporting the war in Iraq was not based on the premise that the war was wrong, but on the absence of a threat to America. If Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, Edwards would — by his own logic — still support the war. Obama has opposed the Iraq mission from the beginning, but he didn't do so as a pacifist or as someone who believed that America shouldn't call the shots in international affairs. His recent warning to Pakistan that America, under his leadership, would strike terrorist hide-outs in its territory shows that he has no problem with unilateral military action in principle. Tony Blair was spot on when he told colleagues shortly before stepping down as prime minister that, 'The American people haven't turned against the war because they suddenly think it's an immoral war. The Americans like a Man with a Plan, and the plan has to work. Bush had a plan but they don't think it worked. It's a key difference.'

If you accept that the United States has a key role in the world; that it is (to borrow a phrase from Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton's secretary of state) the 'indispensable nation', it is hard to argue against the idea that America should do something about Iran. Consider for a moment the consequences of a nuclear Iran — consequences that, unlike those of a nuclear North Korea, would have an immediate and direct impact on US, and Western, security and interests.

Once Iran was a nuclear power, any leverage on it would be severely limited. Tehran would feel emboldened to ramp up the support that it offers to Hamas and Hezbollah; peace between Israel and Palestine or stability in Lebanon would be almost impossible to achieve in these circumstances. The regime would also throw its weight around in its backyard with abandon. The Persian Gulf would become a Persian Lake. There would be little the Iraqi government could do to deter effective Iranian suzerainty over the south of the country.

Then there are the internal Muslim wars of religion. The Sunni powers in the region wouldn't take kindly to the first nuclear-armed Muslim state in the Middle East being Shiite. Sunni Saudi Arabia would, intelligence experts believe, respond by purchasing a bomb off the shelf from their co-religionists in Pakistan. Egypt would pull its nuclear programme out of mothballs and drive hard for a bomb. A nuclear Iran would spark a nuclear arms race across a volatile region that is vital to the United States' interests.

Then there is the question of how Israel would react to a nuclear-armed Iran. It is hard to imagine any country sitting idly by while a state that calls for its destruction develops nuclear weapons: Israel's history makes such a scenario inconceivable. It is all very well to dismiss Ahmadinejad's words as mere bombast, but few world leaders pray for the apocalypse at the UN General Assembly. Ahmadinej ad did. If Israel believed that America would not act, it would do so — and with justification. The option of turning a blind eye to Iran going nuclear, as the Bush administration effectively did with North Korea, is simply not available to an American president when it comes to Iran. Every candidate in the field knows that they will be held to their words on Iran in a way they will not be on nearly every other foreign policy issue.

Whether or not there are still GIs surging around Baghdad, the next president will have to deal with Iran. It would be a fundamental misreading of the American mood to believe that any withdrawal from Iraq is a prelude to a general disengagement from the Middle East. No serious candidate is an isolationist, thankfully. Indeed, one of the major arguments in Washington for leaving Iraq is that US involvement there restricts its options vis-a-vis Iran. As Blair was leaving Downing Street he worried that many of his colleagues had completely misunderstood this central point. 'Look at what the presidential candidates are actually saying,' he said. 'Part of the enthusiasm to get out of Iraq is precisely because they regard Iran as more important long term.'

Ironically, it is the relative success of the surge that has kept the Iran issue on the backburner. If America had been defeated in Iraq or withdrawn, stopping Iran from going nuclear would have become the first priority of US foreign policy.

You don't need to be Dr Strangelove to think that striking Iran would be better than letting it go nuclear. Nor do you need to be a neoconservative, or any other kind of conservative for that matter. The Iran problem is not the work of President Bush and will not leave the Oval Office with him The rest of the world urgently needs to grasp this.

Sensibly, Gordon Brown and David Cameron have not ruled out the military option when it comes to Iran. But neither have they sought to educate the public about the threat; preferring instead to leave the electorate to its Iraq-induced stupor on foreign affairs. Nicolas Sarkozy's recent speech warning that if sanctions are not ratcheted up sufficiently to stop Tehran, the world will face either the disaster of a nuclear-armed Iran or an attack on Iran was, though, an encouraging sign that there is a growing realisation of quite how serious and advanced the Iran crisis already is.

The problem is that the kind of measures that could deter Iran require UN Security Council approval and there is little sign that either Russia or China would support them. If European and other countries are serious about avoiding another war in the Middle East, a further radicalisation of Muslim opinion and all the other consequences of a strike on Iran, then they need to start putting together a coalition of the willing to impose the kind of serious pressure on Iran — including a naval blockade designed to choke its economy — that would persuade it to give up its nuclear programme Without this, Iran will continue its progress towards a bomb and at some point in the near future a US president will have to choose between bombing Iran and letting it go nuclear. Whether Bush, Clinton, Obama or Giuliani is president, the decision would be the same: they would all order a strike on Iran.