Bush Cannot Seem To Do Anything The Easy Way

Bush's Realization on Iran: No Good Choice Left Except Talks

Up until just yesterday President Bush's stance on Iran was that the US would not engage Iran in direct talks. But that is the way Bush and his gang seem to do everything:

1. Do not engage those that oppose us in any meaningful dialogue.

2. Always entrench the administration into a mindset and perspective that leaves no alternatives open.

3. Stubbornly refuse to move out of an entrenched position until forced to do so.

4. Abandon solid principles of effective negotiation and choose coercion over reasoned discourse.

In the case of Iran, absent of support from the UN, NATO and the rest of the world, Bush's stubborness and entrenchment has become untenable... useless... unworkable... and now he, and the United States, appear impotent in terms in international dealings and foreign policy. But that has been the case since before the invasion of Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq. If we stop to examine recent events, we see a series of issues and events that make US seem impotent and ineffective:

a. Abu Ghraib and other detainment centers in Iraq and Afghanistan where abuses, injuries and deaths have occurred.

b. Gitmo and the mounting evidence that the US, under the Bush Doctrine, has violated international law, ratified treaties, its own Constitution and basic doctrines/principles of humanity.

c. The failure of policy and stances against North Korea and its military and nuclear build-ups.

d. The failure of US foreign policy in dealing effectively with China on issues of trade, human rights (because we have no moral grounds), international intellectual property rights, international policy, etc.

e. The failure of US freign policy in dealing with Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and pretty much the rest of the Middle East and North Africa.

f. The implausible approach to nuclear expansion in India and the effort to negotiate a deal with a nation that lacks the political and economic stability to be a player in terms of nuclear power.

g. The failure to find and capture Osama bin Laden, to deal effectively with Al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations (despite over 5 years of concentrated efforts), and the willingness to engage in terrible deals with regimes and political entities that are as bad as the terrorists in order to continue the "war on terror."

h. The willingness to allow prisoners and captives to be directed/re-directed to nations willing to employ methods of torture under the umbrella of "extraordinary rendition" in order to obtain questionable and totally unreliable intelligence information.

i. The violation of the Constitution under the umbrella of putting forth national security, all the while demonstrating to the world that the US is hypocritical in its stance on human rights, civil liberties and its claim that it is a "nation of laws, not of men" and a nation of "liberty and justice for all."

j. etc., etc., etc.

It seems that the only way the Bush gang responds in an appropriate manner is when it is forced to do so or is so embarrassed by its blunders that it has to do something to improve its image.

After 27 years in which the United States has refused substantive talks with Iran, President Bush reversed course on Wednesday because it was made clear to him — by his allies, by the Russians, by the Chinese, and eventually by some of his advisers — that he no longer had a choice.

During the past month, according to European officials and some current and former members of the Bush administration, it became obvious to Mr. Bush that he could not hope to hold together a fractious coalition of nations to enforce sanctions — or consider military strikes on Iranian nuclear sites — unless he first showed a willingness to engage Iran's leadership directly over its nuclear program and exhaust every nonmilitary option.

Few of his aides expect that Iran's leaders will meet Mr. Bush's main condition: that Iran first re-suspend all of its nuclear activities, including shutting down every centrifuge that could add to its small stockpile of enriched uranium. Administration officials characterized their offer as a test of whether the Iranians want engagement with the West more than they want the option to build a nuclear bomb some day.

And while the Europeans and the Japanese said they were elated by Mr. Bush's turnaround, some participants in the drawn-out nuclear drama questioned whether this was an offer intended to fail, devised to show the extent of Iran's intransigence.

Either way, after five years of behind-the-scenes battling within the administration, Mr. Bush finally came to a crossroads at which both sides in the debate over Iran — engagers and isolaters, and some with a foot in each camp — saw an advantage in, as one senior aide said, "seeing if they are serious."

Mr. Bush, according to one participant in those debates, told Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice several months ago that he needed "a third option," a way to get beyond either a nuclear Iran or an American military action.

Ms. Rice spent a long weekend in early May drafting a proposal that included a timetable for diplomatic choreography through the summer.

"Nobody wants to get to that kind of crisis situation — whether it is us or the next administration — where you either accept an Iranian weapon or you are forced to do something drastic," said the participant, who declined to speak on the record about internal White House deliberations.

The idea of engagement is hardly new. When Colin L. Powell was secretary of state, several members of his senior staff argued vociferously that the United States needed to test Iran's willingness to deal with the United States — especially in the aftermath of Sept. 11.

There was strong opposition from the White House, particularly from Vice President Dick Cheney, according to several former officials.

"Cheney was dead set against it," said one former official who sat in many of those meetings. "At its heart, this was an argument about whether you could isolate the Iranians enough to force some kind of regime change." But three officials who were involved in the most recent iteration of that debate said Mr. Cheney and others stepped aside — perhaps because they read Mr. Bush's body language, or perhaps because they believed Iran would scuttle the effort by insisting that the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty gives it the right to develop nuclear fuel. The United States insists that Iran gave up that right by deceiving inspectors for 18 years.

In the end, said one former official who has kept close tabs on the debate, "it came down to convincing Cheney and others that if we are going to confront Iran, we first have to check off the box" of trying talks.

Mr. Bush offered a more positive-sounding account: "I thought it was important for the United States to take the lead, along with our partners, and that's what you're seeing. You're seeing robust diplomacy."

As part of the diplomatic timetable, Ms. Rice will be in Vienna on Thursday to endorse an international offer to Iran that includes several plums. Among them will be the dialogue with Washington that Iran has periodically sought, a lifting of many long-standing economic sanctions, and even light water reactors for nuclear power with Russia and the West controlling access to the fuel.

Yet skepticism abounds. "It's true that the conditions are significantly different than they were four or five years ago, but candidly they are not as favorable now for the United States," said Richard Haass, who as the head of the State Department's policy planning operation during Mr. Bush's first term was a major advocate of engagement with Iran.

First, the new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinijad, "has vowed that the country will never back down on enriching uranium.

"Oil's at $70 a barrel instead of $20, said Mr. Haass, now the president of the Council on Foreign Relations. "And we are bogged down in Iraq," where the United States is vulnerable to Iranian efforts to worsen the violence and arm the insurgents.

But the internal debates in the White House included vigorous discussion of the risks associated with any effort to negotiate with foes suspected of seeking nuclear weapons. And in this, Mr. Bush already has bitter experience.

In its dealings with North Korea, which Mr. Bush branded a member of the "axis of evil" along with Iran and Iraq, the administration also decided a few years ago to try limited engagement, locked arm-in-arm with neighboring nations.

But North Korea has kept making weapons fuel, and the allies have not stayed united: China and South Korea continue to aid the North. The Iranians have doubtless noticed.

The question now is whether there is any middle ground between Mr. Bush's demand that Iran give up everything, and Iran's insistence that it will give up nothing. Without breaking that logjam, the American-Iranian dialogue may never begin.