In keeping with President Bush?s stated intention to put aside his swaggering cowboy lingo, he has finally agreed to join European and other allies in trying to talk Iran out of building nuclear weapons.
The offer, under pressure from them, is highly conditional, tied to the Iranian regime?s willingness to stop efforts to enrich the uranium essential to make a weapon. And, as spelled out by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, it carries an unspecified threat of “or else.”
In an interview on the PBS Newshour before departing for talks with European allies in Vienna, Rice pointedly said that while “the diplomatic track has a lot of life left in it … nothing suggests that the president takes military force off the table” if the Iranians do not agree to stop their uranium enrichment.
Nevertheless, the initiative represents a change in Bush?s previous posture of letting the major European Union powers ? Great Britain, France and Germany ? carry the negotiations ball. Bush calls it “robust diplomacy” and says “I?m going to give it every effort to do so.”
That?s about a 180-degree turnaround from his pre-war approach to Iraq. In his run-up to the Iraq invasion, the president charged that the United Nations would be “irrelevant” if it stayed on the diplomatic track and failed to join him in forcefully ridding Iraq of weapons of mass destruction that turned out not to exist.
The switch is perhaps an unspoken recognition that American public opinion, and the world?s, are not likely to swallow easily another U.S. invasion in the Middle East, no matter what the rationale, unless a much stronger dose of diplomacy, in concert with others, is first truly exhausted.
The willingness to join the talks with Iran is also no doubt a measure of Bush?seroding political support at home, which for so long sustained his preference for unilateralist solutions in a world in which the United States is recognized as the remaining superpower.
The inability to put down the insurgency in Iraq, the continuing American casualties there and a public sense of stalemate have all contributed to the poll findings that a majority of Americans now say the war in Iraq was a mistake, and the aftermath badly handled.
Rice?s comments in her television interview underscored a sensitivity not to have the new policy seen as an indication of weakness or any softening of American resolve to achieve change in the general behavior of the Iranian regime, still classified as a supporter and accommodator of terrorism.
“It?s time to give the Iranians a clear choice,” she said. If they?re not prepared to negotiate, she said, “then we need to get on with the kinds of penalties that can be brought through the Security Council” to pressure them “to make a different choice.” And she emphasized U.S. participation will constitute multilateral, not the bilateral, talks the Iranians had long sought.
Rice also reiterated that it would in no way legitimize the regime in Tehran in the administration?s eyes. It is not talking about, she said, “a grand bargain here, not about the normalization of relations, not about something that somehow legitimizes activities of the Iranian regime that we find abhorrent and dangerous.” Rather, the talks are “aimed at stopping a nuclear weapons program for a regime that is dangerous.”
Asked about the prospect of the United States giving the Iranians “security guarantees” ? presumably that they would not be attacked ? Rice finessed the question. “We and the Iranians are not in a position to even talk about security guarantees, because the Iranian behavior is what is causing the security problem,” she said.
In contrast to Bush?s blatant pre-war objective of ousting Saddam Hussein from Iraq, when Rice was asked whether “this administration wants to see regime change in Iran,” she allowed only that “we are working to change the behavior of a regime that … has nuclear ambitions ? . And we hope, over time, to change also Iranian behavior on terrorism and towards its own people.”
After once failing to give diplomacy an adequate chance, I guess this is progress ? unless this latest offer was made to be refused, just to assuage the Europeans.
Jules Witcover, a Baltimore Examiner columnist, is syndicated by Tribune Media Services. He has covered national affairs from Washington for more than 50 years and is the author of 11 books, and co-author of five others, on American politics and history.
