We're Not Going To Iran [View All]

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Looking small and humbled on the big stage, trying to appear at once defiant and reasonable, President Bush yesterday addressed the United Nations General Assembly with few arrows in his quiver. Never before has the United States had so few allies, never before has an American president appeared before the world body so utterly bereft of credibility. The sprawling wreckage of American foreign policy was figuratively strewn across the room as Bush spoke. And when he addressed the central diplomatic question of the day—namely, what to do about Iran’s quest for nuclear technology and its likely plans to build a bomb—the president appeared naked and unarmed.

After three years of bluster, after three years of menacing Iran with military options ever “on the table,” after three long years of declaring forcefully that Iran will never gain access to nuclear technology, the president’s stunningly mild-mannered comments on the topic yesterday—“we’re working toward a diplomatic solution to this crisis”—may be a sign that the corner has been turned on Iran. It may be a sign that once and for all that the realists have won, that the international community has triumphed, that the opposition of Russia and China to sanctions on Iran has been victorious, and that Western Europe’s far more level-headed approach to Iran has prevailed.

For the neoconservatives, David Frum—Mr. “Axis of Evil”—wrote soon after Bush’s speech: “Make no mistake: boring as it was, the president's speech to the U.N. today was one of the most important of his presidency. It marks the final fizzling out of his Iran policy of the past three years.” Indeed.

Tom Paine