Three weeks ago, the president raised eyebrows around the world when he alluded to “World War III” during a press conference in response to a question about Iran. A reporter asked whether he believes Iran wants to build a nuclear weapon, leading Bush to say, “[I]f you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.”
The over-the-top, irresponsible rhetoric drew quick rebukes. Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria, among others, responded to the president’s bizarre choice of words: “The American discussion about Iran has lost all connection to reality.”
Of course, Bush was just answering a question at a press conference. Perhaps he hadn’t thought things through, and didn’t mean to use such reckless language? No such luck — yesterday, he repeated the phrase.
In an interview with German TV reporters yesterday, President Bush went on again about World War III.
Not in reference to Pakistan, mind you – though that’s where much of the world’s focus has turned this week. Nor does he seem particularly worried about failure in Iraq or Afghanistan, the spread of Islamic extremism, terrorists acquiring nuclear weapons – he didn’t mention any of them when asked about his goals for the last year of his presidency.
Rather, Bush remains fixated on Iran. He repeated that he was “absolutely serious” when he warned last month that a nuclear-armed Iran could lead to the ultimate conflagration. And he proclaimed yesterday: “[T]his is a country that has defied the IAEA — in other words, didn’t disclose all their program — have said they want to destroy Israel. If you want to see World War III, you know, a way to do that is to attack Israel with a nuclear weapon. And so I said, now is the time to move.”
Is the president trying to be irresponsible?
William Arkin described Bush’s rhetoric as “stupid.”
Iran is still at least years away from having nuclear weapons. And with sanctions and international isolation and the preemptive tendencies of the U.S. and Israel, the likelihood of Iran successfully attaining nuclear capability is far less than 50-50.
It’s also somewhat unlikely that Iran would move to attack Israel. As Fareed Zakaria observed recently in Newsweek: “Iran has an economy the size of Finland’s and an annual defense budget of around $4.8 billion. It has not invaded a country since the late 18th century…. Israel and every Arab country (except Syria and Iraq) are quietly or actively allied against Iran. And yet we are to believe that Tehran is about to overturn the international system and replace it with an Islamo-fascist order? What planet are we on?”
World War III, I’ve written before, would more likely ignite because of a normal set of events that careens out of control. Events Iraq or the Persian Gulf, for example, could lead to miscues and alerts and mobilizations and people shooting at each other across borders.
Of all the potential crises America and the world faces, Iran seems one of the easiest to put into a harmless box.
For what it’s worth, putting aside the question of whether or not the president is clueless, Foreign Policy’s blog noted that Bush’s rhetoric comes at a delicate point in time. The U.S. is poised to release “nine Iranians who had been detained by the U.S. military in Iraq on the grounds that they were helping plot attacks on U.S. soldiers.”
What appears to be happening here is that the United States is testing Iranian intentions by releasing these nine prisoners. Are the Iranians trying to show that cooperation is in the offing? Or are they signaling that Iran has a lot of control over the violence in Iraq, and could therefore make the situation much, much worse in the event of a U.S. attack?
Whatever the case, the Bush administration has a history of screwing up these delicate games of diplomatic semaphore…. Could Bush, with all his loose talk about “World War III,” be missing another chance?
It wouldn’t be the first time.