President Bush has focused much of his Iran diplomacy on U.N. Security Council resolutions but has never taken the military option off the table. Senator Clinton, who is seeking to succeed him in office, is upping the ante, saying that if the Iranians attacked Israel “we would be able to totally obliterate them.”

This kind of language is “reflective of George Bush,” Senator Obama said yesterday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “When Iran is able to go to the United Nations complaining about the statements made and get some sympathy, that’s a sign that we are taking the wrong approach.”

To U.N. sensibilities, Mrs. Clinton’s words were as offensive as a Jeremiah Wright “home to roost” sermon would be at a September 11 memorial service. An Iranian ambassador to the United Nations, Mehdi Danesh-Yazdi, immediately fired off letters to Secretary-General Ban and the president of the Security Council, calling Mrs. Clinton’s remarks “a flagrant violation” of the U.N. Charter.

Last month, the Iranians sent out a similar letter after an Israeli Cabinet minister, Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, delivered warnings to Iran similar to Mrs. Clinton’s. The Iranian complaints, in turn, seem to have been lifted from the Israeli playbook. The Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, Dan Gillerman, was the first to invoke the U.N. Charter provision barring threats to obliterate member states, writing letters of complaint after President Ahmadinejad vowed to “wipe Israel off the map.”

At Turtle Bay, then, everything is even-steven, and Iran, a respected family member, is indeed getting some sympathy. This is the kind of dead end your foreign policy leads to if it is anchored in the consensus-oriented United Nations. But Mr. Obama is not alone focusing on the world body. After the criticism heaped on Mr. Bush’s so-called unilateral war in Iraq, the president has led a lowest-common-denominator Iran policy, trying to unite America with Russia, China, Britain, France, and Germany, which have agreed on little but platitudes.

And so, even after the Security Council passed three resolutions imposing mild economic sanctions on Iran for its refusal to suspend its enrichment of uranium, Tehran holds all the cards. Last week, Mr. Ahmadinejad visited New Delhi to promote a $7.5 billion pipeline project that would deliver Iranian gas to India through Pakistan, making a joke of the economic isolation the sanctions intended.

The five permanent council members and Germany, realizing that their sticks have failed to deliver, agreed in London last Friday to offer new carrots: an unspecified incentive package that will be delivered if Iran agrees to obey the council’s dictates.

“Threats will not force the Iranian nation to back down,” the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said in response yesterday, Iranian state-run radio reported. “We will continue on our path with power and will not allow the oppressors to deny this nation’s right.” For an increasingly emboldened Iran, then, any challenge to its beloved nuclear project, even one packaged as incentives, is a threat.

Its protestations aside, few believe Iran’s nuclear program is peaceful. The Persian-born Israeli transportation minister and former defense chief, Shaul Mofaz, warned during a visit to America last week that Iran could have a bomb by next year. Israeli intelligence to that effect reportedly is being shared with America, and the chief of Britain’s MI6, John Scarlett, will be briefed on it during an upcoming visit to Israel by his Mossad counterpart, Meir Dagan, according to the Sunday Times of London.

Mr. Bush and the major presidential candidates, including Mr. Obama, have said repeatedly that they will not allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon, but do they, or Israel, for that matter, have a plan?

Tehran’s strategists know their country’s population and depth makes the old slogan “mutual assured destruction” moot. It only takes one bomb to wipe tiny Israel “off the map,” and much more to “obliterate” Iran. By the time America gets enough gumption to attack Iran in retaliation for a nuclear assault on Israel, the Jewish state will be gone. Would a mere threat deter Iran, though? MAD works for sane leaders who want their people to live, but how about a country led by mullahs who introduced the suicide bomb to modern warfare?

Mr. Ben-Eliezer’s and Mrs. Clinton’s threats may have been intemperate, but the question is not how softly we speak, but how big a stick we carry. Any military strategy on Iran has to be based on pre-emption, and the time to move from a toothless, consensus-based U.N. strategy to other means may be fast approaching.

bavni@nysun.com