When senior Iranian clerics seemed to rebuke the country’s president this week for his belligerent stance toward the West and his flouting of international concern on nuclear weapons, the Doomsday Clock seemed to click back a notch or two. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad serves at the pleasure of Iran’s theocracy, and the ayatollahs seemed none too pleased.

The episode offered a glimpse into the complex politics of Iran and should give pause to any commentator or decision-maker who sees only a military solution to crippling Tehran’s nuclear ambitions. In recent days a number of U.S. lawmakers have been urging the White House to click back its own rhetoric toward Iran and consider other means for containing Iraq before settling on the military option. Representatives from both parties introduced resolutions in recent days reminding the president that he must seek congressional approval before authorizing military action on Iran — in congressional parlance, a message to go slow.

The qualms being expressed in these resolutions are not moral qualms but strategic ones — reflecting the voters’ concerns that one ill-conceived and ill-prosecuted war is quite enough at this time, thank you. As New Jersey Democrat Rep. Steve Rothman told our James Besser: “Given the weakened strategic position in which President Bush has put our country with his failed prosecution of the war in Iraq, we should not allow this president to unilaterally take our country to war against another nation.”

No one understands the threat of a nuclear Iran better than America’s Jewish and pro-Israel groups, who have learned from history to take dictators who threaten genocide at their word. Ahmadinejad, after all, is a leader who both denies the Holocaust even as he hints that it was not such a bad idea.

The trick in the next few months is to keep up the pressure on the Iranians while continuing to explore all military, diplomatic, and economic alternatives. For example, Rothman has joined Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) in introducing legislation that calls for the United Nations Security Council to charge Ahmadinejad with violating the world body’s own charter in calling for the destruction of the State of Israel. And others point to a mounting cooperation among Western nations in instituting sanctions against the regime, noting that Iran’s religious leaders are impatient with the country’s skyrocketing inflation.

A nuclear Iran is a mortal threat to Israel and the world. In addressing that threat, decisive military action must remain an option — but not the only option.