J. McCutchen "JmacSF"

San Francisco. CA

I hope Josh and Kate get around to fixing this thing...

[pearls of wisdom lost to the ages}

There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again."

I just posted on this on Steve Clemons's site, but it seems appropriate to post it here as well:

My sense is that Iran should counter the US opening gambit, and keep the hope of negotiations alive, by seeking to turn the US "precondition" into a gesture of good will, and offer a temporary suspension of enrichment (one or two months perhaps) in exchange for an accompanying gesture of good will on the part of the Americans - perhaps redeploying certain Air or Naval forces in the region, or returning the USS Abraham Lincoln or the USS Enterprise to its port of call?

The US is trying to maintain assymmetry by suggesting that the only opening good will gesture they need make is the bare willingness to negotiatiate. But either that is good enough for both sides or not good enough for either. If the US is entitled to demand some opening gesture to test Iran's seriousness, then the Iranians are entitled to ask for a similar seriousness-proving gesture.

I also have a question for experts. Would the suspension of enrichment and reprocessing render Iran's nuclear facilities more vulnerable to attack? What I had in mind is whether ongoing enrichment activity in those facilities means that an attack on them would produce: (a) more nuclear fallout or (b) higher casualties. If so, then a US attack would be a greater political/public relations disaster if enrichment is going on than if it occurred during a period of suspended activity, and continuing enrichment would have deterrent value for Iran. Iran, understanding this, would then reasonably regard the suspension of enrichment as dropping a glove and exposing themselves to an early attack, and not want to take this risk without some gesture from the other side.

I think the Rummy/Cheney faction will have us in a war with Iran.

I am not sure they will do it before or after the mid-term elections. But, it may be sort of like Hitler going for Russia after failing to subdue England.

::JRBehrman

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.

I agree that this a poor negotiating tactic, but I think that this is public posturing for domestic consumption.  Jacksonians are not big fans of multilateralism and diplomacy, and certainly the Jacksonians on the Bush team - Rummy and Cheney have been fighting a multilateral diplomatic approach to Iran all along.

Despite the certainty of the paranoid left that the current situation with Iran will play out exactly like the run-up to the Iraq war, there are strong reasons to think to contrary.  First, the facts are fundamentally different here:  (1) The Iranians are far further along in their pursuit of nuclear weapons than Iraq was in 2002; (2) our European allies take the Iranian threat far more seriously than they did the Iraq WMD threat (which suggests that there is far less intelligence cooking going on this time); (3) Iran presents a much harder military target than Iraq did (Iraq was clearly the lowest hanging branch on the "Axis of Evil" ); and (4) the US has far less capacity for a unilateral military response than it did prior to the Iraq war.

All of these things suggest that a unilateral approach to Iran is ever crazier than a unilateral approach to Iraq was.  At best, it can serve as a looming stick with which to prod Russia and China to support aggressive diplomacy.  Rice has shown every indication that she sees unilateralism is a preferred option and not ideological necessity.  Contrary to the conspriacy theorists assumptions, if Iran was just a repeat of Iraq - Bush wouldn't have waited this long.  The Administration certainly wouldn't have let the EU take the lead in negotiations.  Even for this Administration, reality does intrude sometimes.  When it does, we should applaud it.

President Bush has no credibility on the issue of threats to America. He has an established track record where he decides to throw a punch and then postures with his cronies that he's trying to do the honorable thing, when he's really just trying to pick a fight.

Like the entitled preppie with a chip on his shoulder, he caterwauls on and on about how that guy over there has this attitude, and that, "he's just waiting to pop me in the jaw," followed with a crescendo of, "but damnit--he keeps looking at me...I'm gonna teach him to stop lookin'..."

A country that is serious about negotiating an agreement does not insist that the other side first concede what the country wants before the negotiations begin.  Obviously if Iran stops its nuclear program and starts negotiating, there is no pressure at all on our country to reach a mutually agreeable settlement - we will already have gotten what we say we want.  To me that means our offer is aimed solely at Bush's base, for domestic consumption only.  I'm no diplomat, but I can easily see this, so the diplomats for other countries certainly see it too.

The Iran situation can be guaranteed not to follow the Iraq situation exactly.  Iran and Iraq differ by one letter.  That just means our inevitable attack on Iran will follow a different path. 

Hoppy in Sacramento

>> France, others, and the UN as a body had their share of blame

You surely must be joking!
This is like saying that the rape victim wore a miniskirt so she had her share of the blame.

The evidence you give in your essay is that France appeared to want to counter the hyperpower.

No shit it did! To stop us from doing the dumbest thing we've done in 40 years!

The US bears 100% of the responsibility for this war!
France should be, if anything, thanked for doing all it could to stop that disaster from occurring.

So, don't try to pass on the blame to others.
We own this one!

We caused this war. At least let's not be cowards about it and avoid the Jentlesonesque "the world screwed up" mantra.

Nope, we, the US, screwed up!

"Contrary to the conspriacy theorists assumptions, if Iran was just a repeat of Iraq - Bush wouldn't have waited this long. The Administration certainly wouldn't have let the EU take the lead in negotiations."

Speculative.

The Iran issue has been on the IAEA table for three years or so, but only infrequently brought up on the US table because Iraq was the hot problem.

The Iraq issue was essentially on the table since Bush got into office in 2000, not to mention the previous ten years of sanctions and inspections and the like.

The ratcheting up of rhetoric on the part of the neocons and the Bush administration began last year. The ratcheting up of rhetoric on Iraq began shortly after 9/11 and continued for a year and a half.

So I don't see any evidence that the timing is wrong. Besides, Iran IS a harder issue, AND there is the problem of Iraq which complicates matters. Bush can't simply say, "Okay, attack!" Even the Pentagon would balk, not to mention everybody else in the world. So Bush has to play this one slightly more nuanced than he did Iraq - especially since everyone knows he lied about Iraq.

Clearly, from the rhetoric and behavior so far, not MUCH more nuanced - but somewhat. Mostly what Bush and the neocons seem to be doing is ratcheting up the rhetoric but at the same time downplaying the immediacy of military action - publicly, anyway - in order to keep the anti-war opposition off balance.

And that's working out fine, since most of the "anti-war opposition" are clueless or in denial.

As for the EU taking the lead in negotiations, the US has not talked to Iran for decades. Also, Iran has been approaching the US repeatedly. Obviously, from the neocon perspective, suddenly opening up direct negotiations would be counter to their agenda. There's not much difference between this and North Korea in this regard. The standard Bush policy has been "Axis of Evil - so we don't talk to them."

Not to mention that the "crisis" is manufactured in the first place, since there is NO evidence of any Iranian nuclear weapons program. So why would the US want to take the lead in negotiations when there is nothing to negotiate - other than for public consumption?

The more one looks at this offer, the more it seems like a "checkbox" on the way to a military strike within the next five months, if not sooner.

Laura Rozen has a report on the offer over at American Prospect Online.

Money quote:

"Far from being interpreted internationally as a sign of weakness, the U.S. move seemed to have the immediate effect of strengthening the U.S. position, particularly amongst international allies, including U.N. Security Council members Russia and China.

“I was surprised at the extent to which the reporting missed that the carrot took 30 seconds to agree to once we had agreement about the stick,” said Clawson. “The problem is getting the Europeans and the Russians on board about the stick. Once we got that, the Bush administration did not even have to blink its eye” about agreeing to come to the table.

Inside the U.S. government, one could detect Thursday a palpable sense of new energy being breathed into the diplomatic option, however uncertain the outcome or the Iranian response.

“I wasn’t here in the run-up to the Iraq War,” says an administration official who declined to be named. “But some of my colleagues who were have said it [the recent Iran track] has been déjà vu all over again. Something had to be done. And so [Rice] did it. And she had a lot of help; there have been some powerful voices in Washington making this case. She is sticking her neck out a little bit, trying to push this through, and leaving it up to the Iranians to do the right thing.”"

The only problem I have with this is the fact that the precondition made by the US is THE main sticking point on the whole issue.

So I'm not so sure Rice was "sticking her neck out" except possibly to the degree of attaching the offer of "direct negotiations" - a neocon sticking point - to the suspension of uranium enrichment.

It's moot anyway because the Iranians appear to have rejected the offer as "nothing new" - which it really isn't from the point of view of the conditions themselves.