Obama Scolds G.O.P. Critics of Iran Policy
WASHINGTON —
President Obama on Tuesday forcefully rebuked Republicans on the presidential campaign trail and in Congress for “beating the drums of war” in criticizing his efforts to find a diplomatic solution to the crisis over Iran’s nuclear program, underscoring how squarely the national security issue had entered the election-year debate.
Mr. Obama’s comments, in which he suggested without naming Iraq that the United States had only recently gone to war “wrapped up in politics,” came in a televised news conference. The White House scheduled it on a day when leading Republicans were addressing an influential pro-Israel lobbying group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, known as Aipac, at its annual conference.
There, the two leading Republican presidential candidates, Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney, assailed Mr. Obama’s foreign policy as ineffective and weak in their appeals to the group. The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, called for Congress to authorize the use of force against Iran.
The president was withering in his retort. “Those folks don’t have a lot of responsibilities,” Mr. Obama said. “They’re not commander in chief. When I see the casualness with which some of these folks talk about war, I’m reminded of the costs involved in war” — for those who go into combat, for national security and for the economy. “This is not a game,” he added. “And there’s nothing casual about it.”
“If some of these folks think that it’s time to launch a war, they should say so, and they should explain to the American people exactly why they would do that and what the consequences would be,” he said.
While the debate over Iran is unlikely to overshadow the economy as the predominant election issue, the heated back-and-forth this week — and the international tension over suspicions that Iran may seek to build nuclear weapons — ensure that it is now a part of the presidential contest.
The spark was the Aipac meeting, where members of both parties sought to show their support for Israel, especially against the potential threat of a nuclear-armed Iran. Mr. Obama spoke on Sunday, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel addressed the conference on Monday night after meeting earlier with Mr. Obama at the White House. The president, in his speech to Aipac, said military force was one option on the table for dealing with Iran. At the White House, Mr. Netanyahu told Mr. Obama that he had not made a decision on an Israeli strike, officials said, though he expressed deep skepticism that the president’s strategy of diplomatic and economic sanctions would force Iran to change course.
In his speech to Aipac, Mr. Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator, accused Mr. Obama of allowing Iran “another appeasement, another delay, another opportunity for them to go forward while we talk.” When he addressed the group, Mr. Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, said, “The only thing respected by thugs and tyrants is our resolve, backed by our power and our readiness to use it.”
For a president who inherited wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and has spent three years trying to wind them down, the talk of war plainly rankled. Mr. Obama’s early opposition to the Bush administration’s war against Iraq helped him to win the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008 over Hillary Rodham Clinton, who had voted to authorize force against Iraq as a senator, and he seemed to recall the period in drawing parallels to the current debate on Iran.
Citing the costs in lives lost or forever changed at his news conference, Mr. Obama said: “Sometimes we bear that cost, but we think it through. We don’t play politics with it. When we have in the past — when we haven’t thought it through and it gets wrapped up in politics — we make mistakes. And typically it’s not the folks who are popping off who pay the price.”
The politics aside, Mr. Obama struck a markedly more circumspect note on Iran a day after he expressed solidarity with Mr. Netanyahu. He reiterated at the news conference the need for time to allow diplomacy and sanctions to work, and rejected suggestions that Iran was so close to a nuclear weapon that the situation needed to be resolved “in the next week or two weeks or month or two months.”
The president added that sanctions were starting to squeeze Iran’s oil industry and central bank, and would intensify in coming months. He said that Iran was now signaling that it wanted to return to the negotiating table over its nuclear program, and he emphasized the risks of what he called premature military action.
“It’s also not just an issue of consequences for Israel if action is taken prematurely,” he said. “There are consequences to the United States as well.” As a friend of Israel, he said, it is the job of the United States “to make sure that we provide honest and unvarnished advice.”
Finally, Mr. Obama made clear that when he said the United States “has Israel’s back” — a phrase he used in his speech on Sunday and in the Oval Office with Mr. Netanyahu — it should not be interpreted to mean that he was giving Israel any kind of go-ahead for a pre-emptive strike on Iran.
His statement, Mr. Obama said, was a more general expression of American support for an ally, like Britain or Japan. “It was not a military doctrine that we were laying out for any particular military action,” he said.
Mr. Netanyahu and other Israeli officials attached great importance to Mr. Obama’s statement, on Sunday and at the White House, that Israel had a sovereign right to defend itself.
It was one of four remarks the president made that Israeli officials said they thought had drawn the United States closer to Israel in recent days. The others were Mr. Obama’s vow to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, his rejection of a policy aimed at containing a nuclear-armed Iran and his explicit reference to military force as an option on the table.
Mr. Netanyahu, in his address to Aipac on Monday, appeared comfortable with the results of his meeting with the president, even as he rejected warnings voiced by Mr. Obama and others that a strike on Iran could unleash even more dangerous consequences for Israel and the United States.
“It’s about time we start talking about the cost of not stopping Iran,” said Mr. Netanyahu, at one point holding up copies of letters from 1944, in which the War Department, the precursor of what is now the Defense Department, rebuffed an appeal by the World Jewish Congress to bomb Auschwitz because, the American officials said, it might drive Nazi Germany to even more “vindictive action.”
Originally Posted by TimWalker
