RUTHFULLY YOURS

I respect the pollster in question, but I think he’s wrong. The electorate doesn’t always know what it wants to hear, until it hears it, and the job of political leadership is to lead. My old mentor in Republican politics, the late supply-side pundit Jude Wanniski, liked to say that the electorate was like a diamond in the rough: there is always an optimal way to cut the diamond, and a political leader has to know just where to place the chisel.

During the past month I’ve been on the talk radio circuit, and if this grass-roots medium is any reflection of the American mood, foreign policy is very much on the minds of voters, particularly Republican primary voters. Talk radio isn’t a bad focus group. It’s not a scientific sample, and I have no pretensions to political forecasting. But Americans are not so insular that they ignore the threat of terrorism under the sponsorship of a nuclear-armed Iran. And Israel’s security is a matter close to the hearts of conservative voters, especially (but not only) the evangelicals, who comprise more than a quarter of all registered voters.

The pollsters’ caution that “it’s the economy stupid” is not entirely misguided — economics clearly is the biggest issue in the election — but Republican reticence on foreign policy can’t be blamed entirely on what the candidates hear from focus groups. In the previous thread  on bombing Iran, one poster — clearly a person very well informed about the workings of the national security establishment — asked why it is that the establishment rejected military action against Iran so vehemently. I referred him to an April 2010 essay for Tablet magazine in which I argued that the security establishment had staked its reputation on stabilizing Iraq, and worried that an attack on Iran would turn the region into a chaotic mess, just as Admiral Mullen warned in his 2009 Charlie Rose interview.

The Republican mindset remains rooted in the “Bush Freedom Agenda,” the Wilsonian illusion that with enough money and firepower, America could build democracies in the Muslim world that would be friendly towards the United States. But that has failed miserably. Iraq has turned into an ally of Iran, and may turn into its puppet. Our best ally in the Muslim world, the feckless Hosni Mubarak, has fallen and left in its place a chaotic, Islamist-leaning disaster in Egypt. The vicious, corrupt but pro-Western Tunisian government is gone, and an Islamist party with a violent history will almost certainly rule in its place after this week’s elections. Turkey’s supposedly moderate-Islamist government vies with Iran to sponsor Hamas and threatens war against Israel (and yet we hear Hillary Clinton warning Iran not to interfere in Iraq because “we have a NATO ally in Turkey” — have worms eaten her brain?).  Pakistan sponsors terrorist attacks against American embassies, and we warn, and warn, and do nothing about it.

Admiral Mullen was right: if we take serious action to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons, either through bombing (as I propose) or through active subversion of the regime (as Michael Ledeen proposes), Iran will use all the power it has accumulated through our years of inaction to create chaos in the Middle East. So be it: the strongest power is best positioned to benefit from chaos, and the strongest power is still the United States of America. If we abandon the illusory goal of stability, and assert American security interests aggressively, we will find that the fault lines in the Middle East can work to our benefit as well.

Republicans should demand of their candidates that they take a no-compromise position on Iran’s nuclear ambitions. They should pledge to use force to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons. Period. No ifs, ands, or buts. No nation-building, no occupation army, no Mr. Nice Guy — just the raw exercise of American muscle. And the American public will stand up and cheer.