Iran War Watch: The GOP Candidates React to Obama’s AIPAC Speech

President Barack Obama at the 2012 AIPAC policy conference.Screenshot: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0rFbP6KvxY">YouTube</a>

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Are the United States and Iran on a collision course over the Middle Eastern country’s controversial nuclear program? We’ll be posting the latest news on Iran-war fever—the intel, the media frenzy, the rhetoric.

On Sunday, President Obama delivered his address to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee‘s annual policy conference in Washington, DC. Though he condemned the recent “loose talk of war,” Obama used the 34-minute speech as an opportunity to talk tough on Iran and to reject containment policy:

I do not have a policy of containment; I have a policy to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. And as I’ve made clear time and again during the course of my presidency, I will not hesitate to use force when it is necessary to defend the United States and its interests… And I know that Israeli leaders also know all too well the costs and consequences of war, even as they recognize their obligation to defend their country.

The president gave the much anticipated speech one day before his high-profile meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—a meeting during which the Israeli leader is expected to further pressure the White House on upping the war rhetoric. During the speech, Obama did not specify what lines the Iranian government would have to cross to provoke an American military operation. (Click here for a complete transcript.)

The audience reception was warm, if not hugely enthusiastic. In Ottawa, Netanyahu issued the standard diplomatic response: “I appreciated that he made clear that when it comes to a nuclear-armed Iran containment is not an option,” he said. “I very much appreciated the fact that he said Israel has the right to defend itself by itself against any threat.”

The Republican presidential candidates were—as expected—not quite as generous. On Sunday, Rick Santorum (who pushes something of an End Times theory regarding a nuclear Iran) slammed Obama for the “loose talk of war” comment: “Loose talk of Republicans? The best thing that could happen in the world [oil] markets is an Iran without a nuclear weapon and a new Iranian regime, neither of which [Obama] is doing very much about to make happen.”

While the president was in the middle of delivering the keynote address at AIPAC, Newt Gingrich was on CNN invoking (yet again) genocide committed under Nazism: “We’re being played for fools,” Gingrich said on State of the Union on Sunday morning. “Israel is such a small country; it is so compact that two or three nuclear weapons would be equivalent to a second Holocaust.”

Ron Paul reiterated his noninterventionist position, criticizing both the president’s policy and his fellow candidates’ hawkishness. On Sunday morning, Paul said that it “doesn’t make any sense to bomb a country that is no threat to anybody just because they might get a weapon…I’d try to calm it down a little bit, but I don’t think [the United States] should tell Israel what they should and shouldn’t do.”

Front-runner Mitt Romney repeated his line about how “if Barack Obama is reelected, Iran will have a nuclear weapon and the world will change.” (Romney, Rick Santorum, and Newt Gingrich are scheduled to deliver remarks to the conference via satellite on Tuesday.) During a pancake-breakfast campaign stop in Atlanta on Sunday, Romney accused President Obama of failing to impose “crippling sanctions against Iran” (umm, not true), and said that “he’s also failed to communicate that military options are on the table and in fact in our hand, and that it’s unacceptable to America for Iran to have a nuclear weapon.” Which is all well and good, except for the fact that the president publicly addressed both of those points earlier that day.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate