WASHINGTON - If you're feeling
increasingly confused about whether the
administration of US President George W Bush is
determined to go to war with Iran or whether it is
instead truly committed to a diplomatic process
with its European allies to reach some kind of
modus vivendi, you're not alone.
On
the one hand, a growing number of informed voices
are arguing that the administration is simply
going through the diplomatic motions to convince
domestic and international opinion that it has
acted in good faith before it pulls the plug and
launches attacks
on
Iran's suspected nuclear facilities and related
targets some time before the end of Bush's term.
Other evidence, including an account of
the advanced state of war planning and actual
preparations in this week's Time magazine, points
to a statement by Bush himself during an interview
with a group of right-wing journalists last week
as indicative of his real intentions.
"It's very important for the American
people to see the president try to solve problems
diplomatically before resorting to military
force," Bush told the group in what
neo-conservative Washington Post columnist Charles
Krauthammer characterized as an "unmistakable"
signal that "an aerial attack on Iran's nuclear
facilities lies just beyond the horizon of
diplomacy".
On the other hand, a second
group of analysts, also increasing in number,
believes that the administration has in effect
discarded the military option on Iran and has
instead resigned itself to a protracted diplomatic
process that will likely end in Washington's
adoption of a "containment" strategy designed to
curb Tehran's regional influence and delay as long
as possible its acquisition of a nuclear-weapons
capacity.
That was the conclusion of the
Post's Glenn Kessler in an analysis published
after Bush's speech to the United Nations General
Assembly on Tuesday. "With the United States
ensnarled in an increasingly difficult campaign in
Iraq, war is no longer a viable option," he wrote,
noting the administration's apparent acquiescence
in the passing of an end-of-August Security
Council deadline for Iran to freeze its
uranium-enrichment operations.
Kessler was
in part echoing David Ignatius, a longtime Middle
East specialist at the Post, who, after a
one-on-one interview with Bush last week,
suggested not only that the president was
committed to a diplomatic solution, but that he
may also be prepared to recognize Iran's regional
security interests.
Bush "made clear that
the administration wants a diplomatic solution to
the confrontation over Iran's nuclear program -
one that is premised on an American recognition of
Iran's role as an important nation in the Middle
East", Ignatius wrote.
While it would
appear difficult to reconcile these apparently
opposing views of Bush's intentions, they can
perhaps be best explained by the ongoing conflict
within the administration between a familiar group
of hawks led by Vice President Dick Cheney on the
one hand and a realist faction led by Secretary of
State Condoleezza Rice on the other.
"Faced with internecine conflicts of this
sort, President Bush has a striking tendency to
avoid making a decision and to let the factions
fight it out," wrote Fred Kaplan, the
national-security correspondent for Slate, an
online magazine.
"It's possible, in other
words, that the administration is playing both
approaches - mobilizing as a tool of diplomatic
pressure and mobilizing as an act of impending
warfare - not as a coordinated strategy but as
parallel actions, each of which will follow its
inexorable course."
Indeed, some of the
evidence marshaled by Ignatius and others in
recent weeks in support of their view that Bush is
committed to a diplomatic solution suggests that
the president has given Rice considerably more
flexibility in dealing with Iran - even if
indirectly through the Europeans - than he ever
considered giving her predecessor, Colin Powell.
Thus soon after taking office in early
2005, Rice offered official US backing to European
efforts to negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran,
something Powell had tried and failed to obtain.
One year later, Bush gave her authority to offer
direct talks with Iran if Tehran agreed to an
indefinite suspension of its uranium-enrichment
activities, an offer denounced as "appeasement" by
neo-conservative hawks close to Cheney and
Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld.
More
recently, Bush, on Rice's recommendation,
personally authorized the issuance of a visa to
former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami for a
series of unprecedented public appearances around
the United States this month - another action that
drew howls of protest from the hawks. He also gave
permission to a congressionally appointed task
force on Iraq chaired by former secretary of state
James Baker to meet with a "high representative"
of the Iranian government (see Door to Iranian dialogue creaks
open, September 21).
"I know
that the more we can show the Iranian people the
true intention of the American government," Bush
told Ignatius last week, "the more likely it is
that we will be able to reach a diplomatic
solution to a difficult problem."
While
these signals, as well as Washington's continued
backing for European efforts to engage Iran
despite the passage of last month's Security
Council deadline, suggest that Bush is committed
to diplomacy, the hawks have also been active.
According to Time, among other accounts,
extensive planning and even preparations for war
are well under way. The news weekly cited "Prepare
to Deploy" orders that went to the navy last week
for warships, including minesweepers that would be
needed to prevent a blockade of the Strait of
Hormuz, to be ready to move from their bases as of
October 1.
Retired US Air Force Colonel
Sam Gardiner, a well-connected analyst who has
been extensively involved in government war-gaming
on Iran, reported this week that war plans had
moved from the Pentagon to the White House,
suggesting that preparations for an attack on Iran
were much more advanced than previously assumed.
Gardiner, who just completed a report,
"Considering the US Military Option for Iran", for
the New York-based Century Foundation, also told
CNN that the evidence that military operations -
confined mostly to intelligence-gathering - had
been under way inside Iran for "at least 18 months
... is overwhelming".
At the same time,
analysts who believe that the administration sees
war as inevitable cite the creation by the
Pentagon last spring of a new office on Iran
staffed by some of the same individuals who worked
for the Office of Special Plans (OSP), a group of
mainly political appointees that sent questionable
and now discredited intelligence regarding
Baghdad's alleged programs for weapons of mass
destruction and ties to al-Qaeda directly to
Cheney's office and the White House in the run-up
to the invasion of Iraq.
"It seems like
Iran is becoming the new Iraq," one unnamed "US
counter-terrorism official" told the same
reporters from the McClatchy Newspapers (formerly
Knight-Ridder) who first uncovered OSP's
operations last week in an article titled "In a
replay of Iraq, a battle is brewing over
intelligence on Iran".
One difference
between Iran now and the run-up to Iraq, however,
is that the hawks lack the same eagerness for war
that they showed in 2002 and 2003. While they saw
the invasion of Iraq as a no-lose proposition,
they clearly recognize that the costs of attacking
Iran will be, in Krauthammer's words, "terrible" -
yet slightly less than acquiescence in a
nuclear-armed Tehran.
But if Kaplan's
thesis is indeed correct - that the two
administration factions are pursuing parallel,
rather than coordinated tracks - then the chances
of a miscalculation by Tehran's leaders are likely
to be enhanced.
They, after all, are
likely to be at least as confused and divided by
the maneuvering and speculation in Washington as
the experts are becoming here.
