Possible Bush Administration Talks with Iran

We'll see what Bush means by 'robust diplomacy' with Iran. David Sanger of The New York Times has an article on what President Bush and Secretary of State Condi Rice may be planning; here's a few excerpts with my comments (I'm using italics for all of Sanger's article):

During the past month, according to European officials and some current and former members of the Bush administration, it became obvious to Mr. Bush that he could not hope to hold together a fractious coalition of nations to enforce sanctions — or consider military strikes on Iranian nuclear sites — unless he first showed a willingness to engage Iran's leadership directly over its nuclear program and exhaust every nonmilitary option.

There's a lot of assumptions and conditions in that paragraph. It's too early to know whether Bush is simply following the Iraq scenario of phony negotiations (for Blair's sake again?) or whether he's serious about negotiations. Real negotiations can take a year or two, or longer. Is Bush serious enough to stick with it?

And while the Europeans and the Japanese said they were elated by Mr. Bush's turnaround, some participants in the drawn-out nuclear drama questioned whether this was an offer intended to fail, devised to show the extent of Iran's intransigence.

If Bush is not serious about negotiations, how many people does he expect to fool this time?

Mr. Bush, according to one participant in those debates, told Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice several months ago that he needed "a third option," a way to get beyond either a nuclear Iran or an American military action.

Ms. Rice spent a long weekend in early May drafting a proposal that included a timetable for diplomatic choreography through the summer.

The fate of the world for years to come may depend on what Ms. Rice did on one weekend in May? I hope the process was a bit more serious than that. The 'timetable for diplomatic choreography through the summer' sounds too much like the timetable for public relations choreography in the late summer and fall of the 2002 midterm campaign. If the Bush Administration expects to have the negotiations wrapped up by Labor Day, we know this latest gesture by Bush is not serious.

In the end, said one former official who has kept close tabs on the debate, "it came down to convincing Cheney and others that if we are going to confront Iran, we first have to check off the box" of trying talks.

Mr. Bush offered a more positive-sounding account: "I thought it was important for the United States to take the lead, along with our partners, and that's what you're seeing. You're seeing robust diplomacy."

Let's see, in 2002, Bush checked off the box for going to Congress and the box for going to the UN. There was nothing serious about the process and we were misled into an unnecessary war. If Bush and Condi Rice are serious about 'robust diplomacy,' they need to take concrete steps to establish their credibility and even their competence. Americans and the rest of the world need a lot more than the usual rhetoric if Bush expects anyone to believe his policies are changing; there will have to be tangible evidence of the Bush Administration's sincerity. Firing Cheney and Rumsfeld would make Bush believable. Not much else will.

I'll have more to say in the next few days.