Bush's Legacy in Danger

President Bush is in danger, if he isn't careful, of seeing his foreign policy reputation erode in his final term of office from one of plain talk and bold action to one of tough talk accompanied by hesitation. What else to make of the report in the Israeli daily Ha'aretz that Israel is having trouble getting the Bush administration to agree to its requests for a package of security aid and a shared understanding that would facilitate an Israeli strike against Iranian nuclear facilities?

The Ha'aretz report said that Washington has failed to respond positively to requests for "bunker-buster" bombs and advanced midair refueling planes and that the Bush administration had referred an Israeli request for access to an air corridor over Iraq to Prime Minister Maliki, who is close to Iran. To do this while proclaiming that an Iranian nuclear bomb would be unacceptable is a bit like proclaiming that Russian aggression against Georgia is unacceptable while, at the same time, essentially accepting it.

What will the Iranians think? They are likely to believe the Bush administration has bought the left-wing propaganda line that while a nuclear Iran poses a direct existential threat to Israel's survival, it poses much less of a threat to America. This line might have gulled some back when it was just Iran's proxy Hezbollah chanting "death to America." But in recent years we have witnessed the disclosure that Iranian "diplomats" posted to the United Nations have been expelled from America after being caught casing the New York subway system. We have learned of evidence that Iranian bombs are killing American soldiers on the battlefields of Iraq. Not to mention the growing ties between Iran and Venezuela, which is closer to Texas than it is to Tel Aviv. Only an ostrich could now think that America must learn to live with a nuclear Iran.

There is some debate within Israel over whether an air and missile strike would effectively derail, or seriously delay, the Iranian program. Iran's likely reaction to any Israeli strike must also be weighed. America risks being dragged in both because it has troops on both Iranian flanks, in Iraq and in Afghanistan, and because an Israeli strike would be seen as having received an American blessing. In other words, a unilateral Israeli strike could be seen as drawing America into a war it did not choose. Since this calculation weighs heavily on Israeli leaders, a decision to go ahead anyway would indicate that, notwithstanding the danger to Israel's position in America, the threat of an Iranian bomb is imminent and the need to address it compelling.

Israelis may be calculating that a delay past January 20 of next year would mean that the equation will have to be withdrawn, though that calculation, too, must be affected by Senator McCain's recent closing of the gap with Senator Obama in the opinion polls. The last year has been full of head feints and artful and not so artful dodges. Neither side wants the other to know precisely what it is up to. The threat of an Israeli preemptive strike has been cited, most recently by Senator Obama, as an argument that the Europeans, Russia, and China should "tighten the screws" on Iran so that Tehran abandons its nuclear quest "before Israel feels like its back is to the wall." Israel is the boogeyman. But the scare campaign doesn't appear to be working. Divisions between the western powers on the one hand, and Russia and China on the other — not to mention internal divisions within western countries — have shredded the argument that Iran will be stopped by a combination of sanctions and diplomacy.

A carrot and stick approach will certainly not work if the stick isn't credible. That's why our political leaders say they favor keeping "all options on the table," a claim that is undermined by constricting Israel's military option. Mr. Bush has earned over the past seven and a half years what we would characterize as a wide degree of deference to his judgment on national security questions, though he may not have always been able to get his aides to agree with him.

The most favorable interpretation of the facts is that Mr. Bush wants Israel to wait until General Petraeus captures or kills Osama bin Laden before it moves against Iran. Or that Mr. Bush wants the glory of destroying Iran's nuclear program for America, not for Israel. Or that Mr. Bush wants to wait until after the American presidential election to act for fear of affecting the results. President Clinton left the Bin Laden problem for his successor to deal with and America felt the pain on September 11, 2001. That is not to blame Mr. Clinton for September 11, but to caution against deferring the problem. Somehow, notwithstanding the dispatch of Ha'aretz, we can't believe Mr. Bush would commit a new error by leaving the Iranian nuclear problem to the next president.