Is John McCain really dead-set on having an Iran invasion as the primary goal of his presidency?

Comedian Garrison Keilor thinks so. In a Salon column, Keilor writes, “Mr. McCain seems willing to say anything, do anything, to get to the White House so he can go to war with Iran. If he needs to recline naked in Macy’s window, he would do that.”

Keilor can be a funny guy, but the rest of the article, which is surprisingly vitriolic in tone, makes it clear he isn’t joking.

With an eye to asses Keilor’s claims, I went digging for indications that John McCain is in a hurry to attack Iran.

There’s a somewhat silly YouTube video of McCain transmuting the Beach Boys song “Barbara Ann” into “Bomb Iran” as a humorous attempt to lighten the tone of a town-hall meeting. This offhand jest is clearly not a policy proposal, and it would be a gross stretch to interpret it as such.

On a more serious level, McCain is on the record saying that he would attack Iran “if it’s a provable direct threat” involving nuclear weapons, and he’d need “a whole lot of other information about Iranian intentions.”

In attempting to head off this eventuality, McCain suggests an up-front program of freezing the foreign financial assets of Iranian government bodies, stepping up sanctions and exerting other forms of meaningful but non-military force.

These are hardly unreasonable or extreme positions, nor are they anything close to a campaign promise to invade Iran on the double. They certainly can’t match Joe Biden in 2002 concerning Iraq, when he stated, “We have no choice but to eliminate the threat. This is a guy who is an extreme danger to the world ... Saddam must be dislodged from his weapons or dislodged from power.” Now those are fighting words.

Recently, Obama has hedged his promise to negotiate “without preconditions” with the Iranian regime by saying that he “won’t take any options off the table, including military, to prevent them from obtaining a nuclear weapon.”

Unfortunately, he has yet to explain how he would prevent the subtle game that most authoritarian regimes play with the free world’s diplomacy-lovers: making guarantees in bad faith and then quietly absconding from them. The Khomeinists have done this since 1979 with every president from Carter to Bush, and Obama will suffer the same fate without ever realizing it.

Obama would only “step up economic pressure and political isolation” if the Iranian regime refuses to come to the table. And if their prior behavior is any indication, Iranian leaders will dodge this outcome by making illusory concessions while continuing to build up both nuclear weapons and terrorist influence in the Middle East and scoring all of the “rewards” listed on Obama’s campaign Web site: “membership in the WTO, economic investments, and a move toward normal diplomatic relations” to boot.

The real difference between the candidates here is not the misconception that McCain is somehow chomping at the bit to invade Iran or that Obama would never use military force even in an emergency; both have pledged to retain the military option while not being in a great hurry to use it.

Rather, the question is how we avoid the diplomatic manipulation of the Iranian regime without having to resort to marching on Tehran and resolving the matter through force of arms. McCain’s proposal relies on our own initiative and on that of our European allies in imposing sanctions and penalties; Obama lays his hopes instead on the illusory good faith of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

Reach columnist Russ Wung at opinion@dailyuw.com.