Reality, of the military and petroleum-based variety, forced the administration to change course. Now Bush sounds like Obama.
By Juan Cole
link: http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2008/07/31/iran/index.html?source=newsletter "July 31, 2008 | Pundits and diplomats nearly got whiplash from the double take they did when George W. Bush sent the No. 3 man in the State Department to sit at a table on July 19 across from an Iranian negotiator, without any preconditions. When Bush had addressed the Israeli Knesset in May, he made headlines by denouncing any negotiation with "terrorists and radicals" as "the false comfort of appeasement." What drove W. to undermine John McCain by suddenly adopting Barack Obama's foreign policy prescription on Iran?
snip:"It was just a year ago that war with Iran seemed imminent. Last August David Wurmser, a major neoconservative figure who had just left Cheney's staff revealed that the vice president was talking about having Israel hit Iran's nuclear research facilities. At the same time, Afghanistan expert Barnett Rubin went public with what he was told by a Bush administration insider -- that Cheney would make a big push for a strike on Iran in the fall of 2007. Journalist Seymour Hersh reported that Cheney was attempting to reconfigure the Iraq war as a struggle with Iran. And, indeed, Cheney did make threats against Iran at institutions of the Israel lobby such as the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
In December 2007, however, the intelligence community pushed back. Key findings from the National Intelligence Estimate, released that month, showed that Iran had mothballed any weapons-related research since early 2003. The Cheney push for one more war was effectively blocked."
snip:" Mullen seemed to warn hawks in the U.S. and Israel against a strike on Iran of the sort Cheney had earlier envisaged, saying that in light of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, "opening up a third front right now would be extremely stressful on us." Mullen admitted when pressed that the Iranians "have capabilities which could certainly hazard the Strait of Hormuz," though he was confident that the U.S. could reopen it. Despite that confidence, Mullen said that he was worried about instability in the Middle East, and about anything that might contribute to it. "
snip:
"Both the U.S. and its European allies know that the negative fallout from a war could be immense. Its effect on the world oil supply would be catastrophic. Iran's perennial threats to close the Strait of Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf in the event that it is attacked have to be taken especially seriously when oil supplies are as tight as they are now. Some 40 percent of the world's petroleum flows through that choke point, and any significant interruption of supply under today's conditions could send prices skyrocketing so far as to threaten the world with another Great Depression. In short, Iran is far more powerful when petroleum is $127 a barrel than when it is $25 a barrel, and that power makes it more prudent to negotiate with it than to rattle sabers.
The opening to Iran was not a victory of the realists, but of realism. That in the aftermath, Bush's Iran policy looks more like that of Barack Obama than that of John McCain, is just an indication that Obama is more realistic about the increasing constraints on U.S. foreign policy toward the Middle Eastern oil states than is McCain. link to full article:
link:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2008/07/31/iran/index.html?source=newsletter
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
