WASHINGTON - In the seemingly never-ending internal battle between hawks and
realists in the administration of US President George W Bush for control of
foreign policy, the realists appear to have chalked up another win over their
once-dominant foes.
The decision to send the State Department's third-ranking official to Geneva on
Saturday to join talks between the other four permanent members of the United
Nations Security (France, China, Russia and Britain) and Germany, on the one
hand, and Iran, one of the three charter members of Bush's "axis of evil", on
the other, marks a significant relaxation of administration policy which, until
now, had insisted it would not participate in direct talks until Tehran froze
its uranium-enrichment program.
Combined with other recent actions and statements by senior
administration officials, the move also strongly suggests that Bush intends to
leave office next January without launching yet another military attack against
a predominantly Islamic nation, even if the future of Iran's nuclear program
remains unsettled by the time of his departure.
"What this does show is how serious we are when we say that we want to try to
solve this diplomatically," Bush spokesperson Dana Perino told reporters in
confirming that Under Secretary of State for Policy William Burns will sit at
the same table with Iran's nuclear envoy Saeed Jalili, even if his role will
formally be confined to "listening", as the White House insists.
Analysts compare the latest move to the realists' victory over the hawks, whose
most influential member inside the administration has been Vice President Dick
Cheney, to the evolution of US policy toward North Korea's nuclear program
since late 2006 when Pyongyang exploded a nuclear device.
Shortly afterward, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice helped convince Bush to
drop his opposition to direct engagement with Pyongyang in order to revive the
stalled six-party talks that were launched in 2003 to persuade Kim Jong-il to
abandon his nuclear program.
She was aided in that quest by the other members of the process - most notably
China and South Korea, as well as Japan and Russia - who had long argued that
the talks were unlikely to make progress unless Washington engaged Pyongyang
directly.
Despite repeated howls of protest and cries of "appeasement" by the hawks, most
recently given voice by former UN ambassador John Bolton in a searing column,
"The Tragic End of Bush's North Korea Policy", published by the Wall Street
Journal this month, Bush has stuck by his decision to give Assistant Secretary
of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Christopher Hill the flexibility he
has requested to give new life to the talks.
Similarly, hawks, most especially Bolton, who is widely seen as representing
Cheney's views, have complained loudly about the evolution of Bush's Iran
policy since Rice persuaded the president in May 2006 to offer to join
multilateral negotiations over Tehran's nuclear program if Iran suspended its
enrichment program. Until then, Bush had heeded hardliners who argued that
direct talks would be seen as legitimizing the regime and demoralize its
opposition.
As in the North Korea case, Rice was aided by Washington's foreign partners -
in this case, the European Union-3 (France, Germany and Britain), Russia and
China - who argued that they were unlikely to make any progress in persuading
Tehran to freeze its program unless the US at least made a conditional offer to
join the talks.
Despite co-sponsoring two rounds US-sponsored UN Security Council resolutions
imposing sanctions on Tehran for failing to comply with their demands to freeze
uranium enrichment, those same powers have since successfully prodded
Washington to make a series of other concessions, including offering more
attractive carrots as part of a negotiating package designed to lure Iran into
compliance, to get negotiations started.
When these did not have the desired effect, however, they privately urged the
administration to modify its pre-condition in a way that would permit
Washington to at least sit at the table in the forthcoming talks with Iran over
their latest proposal - the so-called "freeze-for-freeze", a simultaneous
suspension of international sanctions and uranium enrichment - as set forth by
their chief negotiator and the European Union's foreign policy chief, Javier
Solana.
Even before the State Department confirmed that Burns would attend Saturday's
talks, Bolton was complaining bitterly on the Journal's editorial page on
Tuesday about what he and his fellow-hawks consider a disastrous sell-out,
blaming the EU-3 and the State Department for "failed diplomacy". He argued
that if Iran proceeds with what the hawks are convinced is a nuclear arms
program aimed at Israel, it will change the "Middle East, and indeed global,
balance of power ... in potentially catastrophic ways".
To redress the situation, he called for the US to attack Iran's nuclear
installations or, at the least, to "place no obstacles in Israel's path" if it
decides to carry out such an attack.
That Bolton could be both so scathing and so apocalyptic even before the Burns
announcement suggests that the hawks are increasingly despairing about their
ability to influence, let alone regain control of, US Iran policy between now
and the end of Bush's tenure.
Indeed, as noted by Gary Sick, an Iran specialist at Columbia University who
worked in the National Security Council under presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy
Carter and Ronald Reagan, Bolton's analysis of the direction of US policy and
the balance of power within the administration is "unerringly accurate".
Indeed, despite the ritual invocation that "all options are on the table" with
respect to Iran, several moves in recent weeks have suggested a more
accommodating policy, not least the unrebutted suggestion by unnamed senior
State Department officials that Washington should open an Interests Section in
Tehran.
In addition, the official reaction to Iran's recent missile launches, voiced by
Burns himself, was unexpectedly muted.
But perhaps most significant was a series of statements by the chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, after a visit to Israel late
last month that any attack on Iran - whether by the US or Israel - would be
destabilizing to the region and "extremely stressful" on his military forces.
He also called for a "broad dialogue with Iran".
At the same time, Pentagon chief Robert Gates, who has made little secret of
his desire to engage Tehran, ordered one of the two aircraft carrier groups
stationed in the Gulf to deploy instead to the Arabian Sea off Pakistan in
light of the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan. The move not only helped
underline the military's conviction that the border regions of Afghanistan and
Pakistan have become the "central front" in the "war on terror", but also
appeared designed to reduce tensions with Iran.
Jim Lobe's blog on US foreign policy, and particularly the
neo-conservative influence in the Bush administration, can be read at http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/.
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