Never is wisdom more requisite in a president than in time of war. Abraham Lincoln was perhaps America’s wisest war president and should remain a beacon to his successors. Now, as the White House reportedly contemplates war with Iran, it is instructive to recall Lincoln’s response to his secretary of State, “One war at a time, Mr Seward.”

In 2001, the US launched a justifiable war against Osama in Afghanistan. Two years later, the Bush administration launched a far more dubious war in Iraq. Neither conflict ended in victory. With those two wars on the front burner, why is anyone considering three wars at a time? While it seems clear that an American war with Iran might be in Israel’s interest, it is not necessarily so. Some in Saudi Arabia might like to see rival Iran pummelled by the US military. But the US should not fight proxy wars for Saudi Arabia or Israel, and it’s debatable if either would ultimately be safer in the long run after a US attack on Iran.

Both Moscow and Washington have made the same two policy errors in Southwest Asia in the past 30 years. They tried to occupy rigidly Muslim countries and reshape tribal Islamic societies, tailoring them to their respective Western ideologies. Both superpowers grossly misjudged the powerful hold religion has over Muslims, and they expected Afghans and Iraqis to embrace secular communism or Western democracy. The Russians failed, and America’s prospects don’t appear much better.

Perhaps the most egregious error policy planners make is their assumption that once wars are started, their outcome is predictable. Wars simply do not end the way those who launch them expect. Iraq was supposed to be quick and clean, and Iraqis, we were told, would welcome their American liberators. The Taliban, ousted from Afghanistan in 2001, has risen again like a phoenix.

President Bush should begin with the premise that war with Iran is not an option and the realisation that constructive engagement may well be the labour of decades. That may not prevent Iran from building a bomb. But states that join the nuclear club, India, Pakistan, and China, have historically tended to behave more, not less responsibly, and treaties between adversarial states have worked. In the modern world, greatness is more often a consequence of wise restraint and measured responses such as economic sanctions. Restraint over Iran married to engagement on a broad front could be Bush’s greatest foreign-policy legacy.

No one now can predict the scope, let alone the duration or cost, of the war that would ensue if the US launches attacks on Iranian targets. But the absurdity of thinking that war with Iran would resolve much is illustrated in the following truism from an Iranian friend: “In Iraq, the leadership loves the Americans, and the Iraqi people have killed close to 4,000 American soldiers. By contrast, in Iran, the leadership hates Americans but the people generally like them.” This is the conundrum the Bush administration should consider as it reportedly calls on the Pentagon to revisit a battle plan for attacking Iran.

One sad consequence of bombing might well be a rallying of the Iranian people around their flagging leadership, boosting popular support for an unpopular regime. You can almost hear Iran’s neoconservative leadership saying, “Make my day.” — The Christian Science Monitor