Bush and the Iran Dance

If there's the slightest chance Bush is serious about negotiating with Iran, I'll give him a few days to demonstrate his seriousness. But the signs are not good. If Bush wants to be taken seriously, he needs to establish credibility. Right now, his credibility has about as much life in it as road kill. Nobody has damaged Bush's credibility more than Bush himself. Only he can repair his credibility and as far as I can see, he has only days in which to show clearly that he is serious about negotiations with Iran and serious about rebuilding his credibility.

Part of rebuilding his credibility is getting his foreign policy team under control and that includes John Bolton. Any administration figure who is not serious about negotiations should be fired or kept away from the media. Even the idea of entering into negotiations makes little sense if the chaos, incompetence and delusions we have come to expect of the Bush Administration are not brought under some visible control. If Bush thinks the minor staff changes of the last two months are adequate to establish that control, there can be little reason to expect much for the remainder of his presidency.

Bruce W. Jentleson of TPM Cafe raises some interesting concerns in his post on Iran:

First is the framing that we’re only doing this because we had no other choice. The message is either (a) I don’t want to do this, I don’t really believe in it, so don’t expect me to be all that serious about it, or (b) boy, you’ve really got me over a barrel. The first sounds like just a gesture. The second weakens your hand. Neither is a very good way to start a negotiation.

(snip)

Third is the reluctance still to take regime change off the table. One of the most applicable lessons of the Libya case is that the continued pursuit of regime change can be counterproductive to achieving policy change. The repeated reassurances the United States and Britain gave Libya of policy change not regime change were absolutely crucial. .... There need to be security assurances, and they need to come from us. This doesn’t preclude support for human rights and democratization, but it does mean taking regime change off the table.

For me, the crucial point Jentleson is making in the second paragraph above is that security assurances of some minimal sort have to be made for the negotiations to be real and taking regime change off the table is one of the possible assurances that can be given. We can't realistically talk about taking the military option off the table for the simple reason that our major military presence in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf speaks louder than anything Bush could say. But negotiations need breathing room. For both sides. If Bush wants the world to take his new policy of 'robust diplomacy' seriously, he has to do more than just talk.