ARTICLE: "Strategy On Iran Stirs New Debate At White House: Military Option At Issue; Officials Cite Questions on Diplomatic Bid to Halt Nuclear Program," by Helene Cooper and David E. Sanger, New York Times, 16 June 2007, p. A1.
Cheney's people are pushing hard to get the military option on the table by next spring. My fear of an October surprise seems less fantastic by the week.
Rice, in her role, naturally opposes. But having no more control than Powell did, the outcome is unlikely to differ . . . except for the Iraq tie down, which is where I got off the bus. Once you commit yourself to the Big Bang, you have to play the board as it unfolds, not just keep adding stuff with little consideration for the commitments already made.
Managing Iraq's journey from fake state to real ones is the reality we set in motion. The Middle East can never be the same as a result, which was the whole point of the Big Bang in the first place: set in motion changes that cannot be stopped and thus force new combinations.
Iraq is its own constellation now, with catalytic capabilities to alter the House of Saud and Iran and Turkey even. Palestine is now politically split into two pieces to match its geographic split (remember how well East and West Pakistan once worked?).
The paranoids among us will argue this is all part of Bush's grand plan to remap the Middle East--naturally, to Israel's benefit.
But there is no such plan, as evidenced by the WMD redux on Iran, which gets marketed almost shamelessly as the redirection from Iraq.
I've said it before many times: Bush and the neocons came into office gunning for the Russians and Chinese, or what I called the "big pieces" strategy. As great power types, it was what they knew.
9/11 redirected, and we got great power thinking applied to the "axis of evil" medium-sized powers. We can, in this era, pursue unilateralism only at such levels. It simply doesn't work with a China that's connecting itself so strongly in trade, technological and financial terms with the U.S. Ditto for Russia with Europe.
If Bush had pulled off Iraq on some level, the leeway from other great powers would still be there. But in failure, it's been withdrawn, so the rerun on Iran leaves us oddly isolated, and our progress--such as it is--on North Korea is by committee only.
But this is bouncing rubble.
We need this administration to black out just like Tony Soprano did. In a parliamentary system, Bush would be gone. His government would simply collapse and elections would be forced. But we are forced to live with this interregnum. We have no choice. So we fantasize about the next president, and we grow increasingly numb to this one's lack of strategic imagination, which is almost self-fulfilling in its impotence, as no one is willing to give us anything right now--and frankly, shouldn't.
The early Bush post-presidency will be remembered as one painful stretch.
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