A Preview of Bush's 'Attack Iran' Speech

Sometime this spring or summer, barring an unexpected turnaround by Tehran, President Bush is likely to go on national television and announce that he has ordered American ships and aircraft to strike at military targets inside Iran.

We must still sit through several months of soap opera at the United Nations in New York and assorted foreign capitals before this comes to pass, and it is always possible that a diplomatic breakthrough will occur -- let it be so! -- but I am convinced that Bush has already decided an attack is his only option and the rest is a charade he must go through to satisfy his European allies. The proof of this, I believe, lies half-hidden in recent public statements of his, which, if pieced together, provide a casus belli, or formal list of justifications, for going to war.

Three of his statements, in particular, contained the essence of this justification: his January 10 televised speech on his plan for a troop "surge" in Iraq, his State of the Union Address of January 23, and his first televised press conference of the year on February 14. None of these was primarily focused on Iran, but the President used each of them to warn of the extraordinary dangers that country poses to the United States and to hint at severe U.S. reprisals if the Iranians did not desist from "harming U.S. troops." In each, moreover, he laid out various parts of the overall argument he will certainly use to justify an attack on Iran. String these together in one place and you can almost anticipate what Bush's speechwriters will concoct before he addresses the American people from the Oval Office sometime later this year. Think of them as talking points for the next war.

The first of these revealing statements was Bush's January 10th televised address on Iraq. This speech was supposedly intended to rally public and Congressional support behind his plan to send 21,500 additional U.S. troops into the Iraqi capital and al-Anbar Province, the heartland of the Sunni insurgency. But his presentation that night was so uninspired, so lacking in conviction, that -- according to media commentary and polling data -- few, if any, Americans were persuaded by his arguments. Only once that evening did Bush visibly come alive: When he spoke about the threat to Iraq supposedly posed by Iran.

"Succeeding in Iraq also requires defending its territorial integrity and stabilizing the region in the face of extremist challenges," he declared, which meant, he assured his audience, addressing the problem of Iran. That country, he asserted, "is providing material support for attacks on American troops." (This support was later identified as advanced improvised explosive devices -- IEDs or roadside bombs -- given to anti-American Shiite militias.) Then followed an unambiguous warning: "We will disrupt the attacks on our forces... And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq."

Consider this item one in his casus belli: Because Iran is aiding and abetting our enemies in Iraq, we are justified in attacking Iran as a matter of self-defense.

Bush put it this way in an interview with Juan Williams of National Public Radio on January 29: "If Iran escalates its military action in Iraq to the detriment of our troops and/or innocent Iraqi people, we will respond firmly ... It makes common sense for the commander-in-chief to say to our troops and the Iraqi people -- and the Iraqi government -- that we will help you defend yourself from people that want to sow discord and harm."

In his January 10 address, the President went on to fill in a second item in any future casus belli: Iran is seeking nuclear weapons in order to dominate the Middle East to the detriment of our friends in the region -- a goal that it simply cannot be allowed to achieve.