Washington Post: Obama Should Bomb Iran To Rescue The Economy

10-31-2010 • RawStory.com

Here is where Obama is likely to prevail. With strong Republican support in Congress for challenging Iran's ambition to become a nuclear power, he can spend much of 2011 and 2012 orchestrating a showdown with the mullahs. This will help him politically because the opposition party will be urging him on. And as tensions rise and we accelerate preparations for war, the economy will improve. "I am not suggesting, of course, that the president incite a war to get reelected," Broder qualifies. "But the nation will rally around Obama because Iran is the greatest threat to the world in the young century." Broder's column has come in for almost instant criticism from economic and political policy experts. In a blog entry entitled "Has David Broder Lost His Mind?," Foreign Policy managing editor Blake Hounshell writes that Broder's proposal is "crazy for a number of reasons." One is that markets don't like tensions, and certainly not the kind that jack up oil prices. Second, World War II brought the United States out of the Great Depression because it was a massive economic stimulus program that mobilized entire sectors of society. Today's American military has all the tools it needs to fight Iran, and there isn't going to be any sort of buildup. Hasn't Broder been reading his own newspaper? The Pentagon is looking to find billions in cuts as it confronts the coming world of budget austerity.