Most Americans think that the United States should initiate military action to destroy Iran's ability to make nuclear weapons, if Iran gets close to developing them.
A new NBC News/Wall Street poll released Monday showed that 52 percent of poll respondents said they backed U.S. military action if the Tehran regime is on the brink of developing a nuclear weapon. Forty percent said the United States should not initiate military action if Iran were about to develop a nuclear weapon.
Public support for use of U.S. military force against Iran if it is on the verge of nuclear weapons has been consistent for the past two years.
The poll finding came as President Obama was meeting Monday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and amid growing speculation that Israel might use a unilateral military strike to try to cripple Iran’s nuclear program.
In brief comments before their meeting at the White House, Netanyahu said the Iranian leaders see the United States and Israel as indivisible allies.
“For them, we are you and you’re us,” he told Obama. “And you know something, Mr. President -- at least on this last point, I think they're right. We are you, and you are us. We're together.”
In a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee on Sunday, Obama decried “too much loose talk of war.”
But he also repeated his commitment to use military force if necessary. “Iran’s leaders should understand that I do not have a policy of containment; I have a policy to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon,” he said. “And as I have 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.”
Republican presidential contenders have accused Obama of lacking firmness in his dealings with Iran. Repeating a statement he has made before in the campaign, GOP contender Mitt Romney said Sunday at a campaign event in Georgia, “If Barack Obama gets re-elected, Iran will have a nuclear weapon and the world will change if that’s the case.”
Iran is likely to be a prime topic for questioning Tuesday by members of the Senate Armed Services Committee when the head of U.S. Central Command, Gen. James Mattis, whose area of responsibility includes Iran, testifies before the committee.
The public support for a military strike has grown since 2008: when the same poll question was asked in July of 2008, only 41 percent of poll respondents supported U.S. military action to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.
But at a recent panel discussion at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, two retired high-ranking U.S. military officers warned against U.S. military action.
Retired Admiral William Fallon, who flew combat mission during the Vietnam war and served as head of the U.S. Central Command during the Iraq war, said “There’s an inverse proportion to those who have had experience in what really happens in wars” and those who “have an awful lot to say about it.” U.S. military action against Iran is “certainly not a preferred option, not anything that somebody that has any real sense of what happens in these conflicts would wish to have happen.”
And retired Marine Gen. James Cartwright, the former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, “The likelihood of a strategy that would deny the Iranians is probably a strategy that requires an invasion and a change of administrations in Iran.”
He also questioned whether a strike would only make the Tehran regime more determined to acquire nuclear weapons. “Are you actually going to steel their resolve to go ahead and do this, or are you going to delay for a few years and then get back into negotiation?”
He noted that, “You have the Libya example sitting out there. This is the country that we got to agree to abandon their nuclear aspirations, and then we replaced the leadership. That’s not a good precedent for the Iranians to be looking at.”
After the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Libyan regime of Muammar Gaddafi negotiated a deal with the Bush administration to abandon its program to develop chemical, nuclear and biological weapons. Thus Libya lacked a deterrent when the United States and NATO allies used military force to help topple the regime last year.
Cartwright said of the Iranians, “This is a will issue… and if they have the will to do it, they will produce” nuclear weapons.
