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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Hawkish Projection and War with Iran

The real problem isn't that Iran doesn't take American threats seriously, but that an attack on Iran would be illegal and unpardonably stupid.

Richard Cohen bemoans Obama’s lack of “menace”:

Will [the Iranians] be deterred by Obama? Did they notice how he called for Bashar al-Assad to go but left it at that? Did they notice that the president refused to aid the Syrian rebels until things really got out of hand? Did they notice how Syria blew through his “red line” and the president of the United States did nothing? You bet they did. What they saw was weakness, a president so resolutely determined to avoid the mistakes of the past that he was making new ones of his own.

Interventionists often have the bad habit of assuming that other governments perceive the president’s decisions exactly as they perceive them. Cohen is unhappy that Obama called for Assad to go “but left it at that,” so he concludes that Iran sees the same “weakness” that he does. Likewise, Cohen is unhappy that Obama hasn’t supported Syrian rebels to the extent that Syria hawks have been demanding for years, and he thinks that this reflects Obama’s “weakness,” so he assumes that this is how the Iranians must also see things. At best, this is just bad analysis, and at worst it is simple projection of American hawkish views onto other regimes.

Naturally, Cohen doesn’t mention that Obama didn’t simply “leave it at that” in Syria, and he very nearly dragged the U.S. into a war against Assad last year. He also doesn’t consider the reality that the Iranian government distrusts every U.S. administration and assumes that Washington is out to get them no matter who the president happens to be. Iran’s leaders take it for granted that the U.S. is “menacing” to them because that has been the consistent policy of the U.S. for thirty years. Tehran doesn’t need to be frightened into believing that the U.S. will attack them. The greater danger in the negotiations with Iran is that they might not believe that the U.S. is willing or able to respect any deal that they make.

Mind you, it is absolutely not a good thing that Obama has boxed himself in by repeatedly endorsing the assumptions behind preventive war against Iran. As we have seen in Syria and again with ISIS, the real problem with Obama’s rhetoric is that he commits the U.S. to take misguided action, and he is then quite willing to follow through on those commitments without having thought through the consequences. No one made Obama issue his “red line,” and he wasn’t obliged to back it up with the threat of military action, but he did those things anyway. Had it not been for overwhelming political opposition at home, Obama would have ordered the bombing of Syria last year when he didn’t have to. Obviously, he has ordered bombing in Iraq and Syria this year despite the lack of a direct threat to the U.S., and he took the U.S. into a war in Libya that it had no reason to fight. Given that track record, Iran’s government would have to be oblivious to think that Obama isn’t willing or able to order an attack on their country. Unfortunately, it is only too easy to believe that he would do this despite the fact that an attack on Iran would virtually guarantee that Iran would seek to get nuclear weapons as soon as possible. The real problem isn’t that Tehran doesn’t take the possibility of American military action against their country seriously, but that such military action would be illegal and unpardonably stupid.

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