A recent missile test in Iran

At the top of the list of under-explored issues in the 2008 presidential campaign, place this one: war between Iran and Israel. It is the potential hot subject of the next presidential administration, but there is a strange silence about it. Tom Friedman of The New York Times would have us believe that the Iranian government is on the skids because of the falling price of oil and the mullah's managerial incompetence. But the Teheran theocrats have failed to conform to such wishful analyses in the past and there is little reason to think anything has changed.
 
A more likely prospect is increased belligerence in coming months from an Iranian regime that is looking for outside opportunities to shore up domestic support. Iran is building nuclear bombs and rockets to deliver them.
 
Consider this now in the context of the campaign. Media and politicians have been rather quick to pass over Senator Joe Biden's remarks to Seattle campaign donors recently, remarks that quite plainly predict a coming foreign policy crisis. The Democratic vice presidential nominee, who is privy to top secret national security intelligence, concluded his talk with the observation, "I probably shouldn't have said all this because it dawned on me that the press is here."

But he had just said earlier, "Mark my words." So, before the campaign ends, let's mark them.
 
It has long been rumored that Israel will not allow Iran to gain the weapons and delivery system to attack Israel. First, Israel will make a pre-emptive attack on Iran's nuclear facilities.
 
In the event of an attack the United States surely will back Israel logistically and we might well join the fight directly.  After all, Iran repeatedly vows to eradicate Israel and bring down the U.S. It funds terrorist groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon and Sadrites in Iraq.

Once the American election is over and the domestic political scene in Israel calms down (after parliamentary elections in late winter) an attack will become timely. Israelis certainly are capable and have the will to make a preemptive strike, as they did in 1981 against the Osiraq nuclear reactor in Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

Strong statements of general backing for Israel suggest that both presidential nominees are prepared to give more specific support to an Israeli attack when it happens. Both may have made private commitments to that effect. But right now neither candidate wants to talk about the subject. McCain may not want to sound like a warmonger and Obama would be afraid of disillusioning his Left wing base--the peace folk who initially rallied to him because of his steadfast opposition to the American war in Iraq.

Israel's actual plans, and American possible actions in connection with them, are all highly classified, of course. Outside the Bush Administration, only the presidential candidates--and key members of Congress, such as Biden, who chairs the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations --would have been briefed. These people know what others can only suspect and wonder about.

Biden, with such knowledge, warned in Seattle,  "Mark my words. It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did Jack Kennedy. Remember I said it standing here if you don't remember anything else I said. Watch, we're going to have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy."

Biden also said that he expects that the Obama Administration's handling of the unnamed crisis will be unpopular with many people. "Because it's not gonna be apparent initially, it's not gonna be apparent that we're right...Gird your loins," he told the donors, "Because this guy (Obama) has it. But he's gonna need your help. Because I promise you, you all are gonna be sitting here a year from now going, 'Oh, my God, why are they there in the polls? Why is the polling so down? Why is this thing so tough?

"There are gonna be a lot of you who want to go, 'Whoa, wait a minute, yo, whoa, whoa, I don't know about that decision.' Because if you think the decision is sound when they're made...they're not likely to be a popular as they are sound. Because if they're popular, they're probably not sound."

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright tried to spin the Biden effusion as just a commonplace notation that a new leader must always expect to be tested by events. Obama, the brilliant rhetorician, dismissed it as a "rhetorical flourish."

Instead, it sounds like someone speaking a kind of code that he half-wants to be understood and half-wants not to be understood. It also sounds like the Joe Biden who likes to demonstrate his insider status and who notoriously lacks a filter. Slade Gorton of Washington State has described his former Senate colleague as "a politician who never lets a vagrant thought enter his head and remain unspoken."

Other possible scenarios that have been derived from Biden's words include an altercation with Russia, perhaps over U.S. sponsorship of NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine. Some people imagine an Al Qaeda attack that would cause Obama to invade Pakistan, as in the primaries he suggested he might do (never mind that Pakistan is an ally that fervently does not want our troops.) But, in the case of Eastern Europe, the scenario doesn't rise to the high drama implied by Biden's fulminations, and in the case of Pakistan, an invasion any time soon seems unlikely.

In contrast, prospects of an Israeli attack on Iran have been discussed for a long time and have achieved a level of expectation, not just conjecture. Former U.N. ambassador John Bolton last summer predicted an Israeli attack soon after the American elections are over. (I think that the Israelis would want a new U.S. president fully resident in the White House so that he would have to take responsibility.)
 
Despite years of diplomacy by many countries and international organizations, efforts to restrain the Iranians have failed. The International Atomic Energy Agency of the United Nations (IAEA) has been rebuffed repeatedly. The defiant Iranian theocracy has virtually asked for attack.
 
Still, such an attack, even if successful, is bound to have huge repercussions. An open declaration of war seems probable. Iran has said it will urge its terrorist surrogates to rise up in the Middle East and to assault the U.S. worldwide and on our own territory. Iran's own naval and para-military units have the capacity to threaten shipping lanes around the Straits of Hormuz through which most of the world's oil passes. Oil prices could rocket for a while.
 
Other nations in the region, history shows, will profess outrage at Israeli and U.S. actions, even though nearly all will be relieved that Iran's atomic threat has been removed. The United Nations will condemn Israel. The U.S. will become even more unpopular in the "Arab street," including among some of our allies (not all) in Iraq.

But if the issue of a possibly impending war with iran is absent in the presidential campaign, there is precedence for such avoidance. There seems to be a hole in American awareness at election time where foreign policy ought to be. That was true in 2000 when terrorism was barely mentioned, if at all--eleven months before the 9/11 assaults. Going back, Pearl Harbor arrived a bit more than a year after FDR won re-election to a third term, pledging to keep "our boys" out of war. And in 1916 Woodrow Wilson was re-elected with the slogan, "He Kept Us Out of War," only five months before America entered World War I. We may be at such a point again.

But will anyone even remember this "crisis" issue omission when and if Biden's prediction comes true and a war with Iran "tests" a newly elected Obama?

 
** Bruce Chapman, president of Discovery Institute, was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Organizations in Vienna under President Reagan.