By David J. Karl
For the Obama administration, was the “military option” ever really an option with Iran?
Depending on one’s perspective, President Obama’s address at American University earlier this month was either a rousing defense of the Iran nuclear agreement or anegregious instance of political demagoguery. But one thing the speech underscores with certainty is that Mr. Obama’s earlier vows that he was prepared to use military force to prevent Tehran’s atomic ambitions were disingenuous.
These were pledges Obama issued with regularity as the multilateral negotiations with Iran got underway. In his 2012 State of the Union address, he stated that “America is determined to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and I will take no options off the table to achieve that goal.” In a media interview shortly afterwards, he emphasized that he was not bluffing about the military option and that “when the United States says it is unacceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapon, we mean what we say.” “I don’t bluff,” he emphatically insisted. The president then followed this up by delivering a hard-hitting address to the American Israel Political Action Committee, an influential lobbying group in Washington, stressing that “when it comes to preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, I will take no options off the table, and I mean what I say.”
A chorus of administration heavyweights seconded Mr. Obama. Vice President Joe Biden reiterated the “no bluffing line. In a television interview Secretary of State John Kerry pushed back against those who argued that Obama was blowing smoke by pointing to the unequivocal nature of the president’s statements. And Under Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, who was the chief U.S. negotiator in the Iran talks, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that “We will not allow Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon, and there should be no doubt that the United States will use all elements of American power to achieve that objective.”
Yet the Obama administration’s threat to pick up the cudgel of military action has always an air of unreality. After all, a commander-in-chief who proudly trumpeted that he had extricated the country from George Bush’s wars in the Greater Middle East was quite unlikely to initiate a third one. Mr. Obama made clear his determination on this issue in his cautious approach toward the civil wars in Syria and Libya. The “red line” he communicated numerous times regarding the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons turned out to be extremely equivocal. And he later acknowledged that the 2011 limited intervention in Libya was a “51-49 decision” because he feared the political narrative of “how a president elected to extract us from a war in one Arab country got Americans killed in another.”
Read the full story at The Diplomat