Tact

There's been a bit of a dust-up recently over some comments that Hillary Clinton has made about Iran:

"I want the Iranians to know that if I'm the president, we will attack Iran (if it attacks Israel)," Clinton said in an interview on ABC's "Good Morning America."

"In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them," she said.

"That's a terrible thing to say but those people who run Iran need to understand that because that perhaps will deter them from doing something that would be reckless, foolish and tragic," Clinton said.

The thing is, though what she is saying is correct--any policy of deterrence entails the sort of massive retaliation that she is talking about--the way that she says it makes her sound unnecessarily aggressive.

In the first place, the question itself was a fairly outlandish hypothetical--there is absolutely no one who seriously believes that Iran would launch a direct attack against Israel. In fact, the reason this is the case is precisely because Iran and everyone else already knows that the United States would retaliate in such a situation (in addition to the retaliation that would be carried out by Israel itself). Therefore, Clinton's first reaction should have been to give a careful preface to her answer to make it clear that this was a purely hypothetical question with no immediate relevance to the current situation with Iran.

Next, rather than use colorfully bellicose language like "totally obliterate", she should have couched her answer in the most boring technocratic terms possible. I mean, you don't want to sound like you relish the idea of having to retaliate. Non-emotional, bureaucratic, mechanistic--this is how you want to express a policy of deterrence, because it gets the substantive point across without making anyone nervous or sending any confusing rhetorical messages. Moreover, she could have even avoided singling out Iran altogether, instead choosing to give her answer in terms of what the US generally does to protect close allies, Israel being one of them.

Obama, I think, is perceptive in seeing the potential trouble that remarks like Clinton's are likely to cause down the road:

"When Iran is able to go to the United Nations complaining about the statements made and get some sympathy, that's a sign that we are taking the wrong approach," Obama said.

Moreover, he seems to know how to give the more careful answer that I think is better to give:

"We have had a foreign policy of bluster and saber-rattling and tough talk, and in the meantime have made a series of strategic decisions that have actually strengthened Iran."

Israel is "the most important ally" the United States has in the Middle East, and that Washington would respond "forcefully and appropriately" to any attack, Obama said Sunday.

"But it is important that we use language that sends a signal to the world community that we're shifting from the sort of cowboy diplomacy, or lack of diplomacy, that we've seen out of George Bush," he said. "And this kind of language is not helpful."

It is not as if the sort of cowboy-diplomacy sloppiness of Clinton's remarks can be attributed to hers being off-the-cuff comments--she had already said earlier that Iran would undergo "massive retaliation" for an attack on Israel, and so she should have had her wording on this issue down pat.

In the end I think it comes down to a sort of fearfulness on the part of Democrats that has been ingrained in them by Republicans on national security issues, especially since the Republicans rose to dominance in the 90s: they don't want to look weak, and so they protect themselves from this perception by mimicking the Republicans, in style if not in actual policy. The result has been the dangerous lack of a counterweight to the sort of macho, with-us-or-against-us Bush foreign policy--an imbalance that expressed itself most painfully in the Democrats' non-existent opposition to the Iraq War resolution in 2003.

One thing I like about Obama is that he doesn't seem to have this fear. I greatly look forward to him taking on McCain on foreign policy in the general election.