I am not suggesting that bombing Iran is imminent or even wise, only that it is now far more likely than during the tenure of the Bush administration.
A lot of things can happen for many reasons. Would President Obama order a strike campaign against Iran because it could bolster his reelection campaign?
I'll go out on a limb and say no he would not.
But it could happen anyway. Some of his advisers could prod him that way without saying why they want it. It could be a good idea for strategic and political reasons. And something can be seen as a good idea, with only the timing in question. In that circumstance, a president could easily deeply believe that a strike in early October is better than a strike in late November without doing it "because" it would help politically.
Indeed, President Roosevelt explicitly pushed for the invasion of North Africa to take place before rather than after the 1942 Congressional elections. He did not order it, and did not get it, but politics was not set aside by even a war president. So we could see Iran bombed during an election campaign.
And Hanson's major point is that what Bush would have been impeached over, Obama will get congratulations or silence from the usual suspects. Indeed, I'm on record as guessing President Obama would get the Nobel Peace Prize for nuking Iran. That's not the potential the Nobel committee saw when they later actually did award President Obama that honor, but that could well be a license to kill.
And as I note in that post, I think our military has been working on capabilities to make sure we don't have to rely on an intelligence "slam dunk" that Iran is working on nukes and that we can have a decent chance of being able to await the deployment of actual Iranian nuclear capabilities.
