Reid chides those who throw ‘the word ‘war’ around so casually’

By Karoun Demirjian

Tuesday, March 6, 2012 | 7:06 p.m.

A visit from Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, coinciding with the annual meeting of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, has had all of Washington buzzing about one thing this week: Iran, and the potential of war to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons.

Sen. Harry Reid’s regular rival across the Senate, Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, upped the ante Monday night, declaring in a speech to the AIPAC assembly that if Iran “at any time begins to enrich uranium at weapons-grade levels or decides to go ahead with a nuclear weapons program, then the United States will use military force to end that program.”

On Tuesday, Reid expressed how utterly he disagreed.

“I think we have to be very, very, very cautious and with trepidation look at declaring war,” Reid said Tuesday afternoon. “Let’s just stop throwing the word 'war' around so casually.”

The comments that reflected what President Barack Obama was saying just a few minutes before at the White House, where he was peppered with questions about the way forward in the U.S. and Israel’s protracted diplomatic, economic, and potentially nuclear standoff with the oil-rich Islamic republic.

“When I see the casualness with which some of these folks talk about war, I’m reminded of the costs involved in war,” Obama said, referencing his political rivals for the White House this year, some of whom have called for the president to threaten decisive military action. “This is not a game. There’s nothing casual about it.”

Similarity of the phrases they chose aside, this was not just a talking points campaign.

Reid and McConnell have butted heads in the past when it comes to the United States’ military engagements, especially in the Middle East. Reid and McConnell both initially voted to authorize the war in Iraq, but from that point on, diverged on the bulk of their war-related votes. It was Reid who famously declared the Iraq war “lost” in 2007, and steered the Senate in the first few months of his majority leadership to block the necessary funding to keep the war going for want of an exit plan. (The bill to fund the effort would eventually pass.)

Though a war with Iran has been discussed freely on the campaign trail, plans for such an intervention are not presently part of the Obama administration’s strategy.

“The one thing we have not done is launch a war,” Obama said of his attempts to keep Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, as he dared his Republican opponents to come up with a substantive alternative to his diplomatic and economic sanctions already under way. “If those folks think it’s time to launch a war, they should say so ... everything else is just talk.”

Israel’s prime minister Netanyahu, in the U.S. this week, has not shown the same confidence in the administration’s strategy — though he hasn’t gone so far as to make an outright call for war to commence either.

“Israel has patiently waited for the international community to resolve this issue. We’ve waited for diplomacy to work, we’ve waited for sanctions to work,” he said in a speech Monday. “None of us can afford to wait much longer.”

Reid and McConnell met together with Netanyahu on Tuesday morning, in a closed-door session that ran over its allotted time on the prime minister’s schedule. Netanyahu had met with Obama on Monday.

Reid added Tuesday that it’s up to the president to make the ultimate call about if or when to commit the U.S. to hostilities with Iran, without Congress rushing ahead of him.

“There’s only one person in the country that’s the commander in chief, and that’s whether we have a Democratic president or a Republican president. It’s the president of the United States,” Reid said. “I’m not going to be a part of rushing forward on a declaration of war. These are things that have to be done very, very cautiously.”