Having recently completed a short Obama endorsement (in TAC’s forthcoming issue, one voice among many) which argues that the best reason to vote for Obama is that McCain will start a war with Iran, I find this Jim Lobe post more than troubling. Apparently, soft neocons like Dennis Ross are well entrenched in the Obama campaign, and are laying the groundwork for various hard-line scenarios that end with an attack on Iran (after a pleasant interlude of “negotiation” where we make non-negotiable demands). So, already the work is beginning to paint Barack into a corner–and get him to pursue polices rejected by the realists in the Bush administration.

I’m a hopin’ that Barack is wise enough to see through all this, and recognizes that an attack on Iran would wreck his presidency and much else. But Lobe –perhaps the Beltway’s most sophisticated analyst of neoconservative tactics– fears him getting boxed in.