Bush would love to take out the Iranian regime. The thing stopping him is the international left and our home grown Dems and their relentless defeatism and isolationism. That is potent enough politically that he does not think he can afford direct Iranian action, if he can avoid it.
The international left called for EU-led diplomacy, so he let the EU have the lead on the matter. He was giving them rope, certainly. His way of clearing the irresponsible opposition is to give them responsibility and make it clear to everyone they have nothing to offer.
Chirac is simply preparing the French public for his acceptance of Iranian nuclear weapons. He intends to support Russian stall tactics, to avoid any referral of Iran to the UN and any meaningful sanctions, let alone actual military action. Since this means Iran will get nukes and France will have helped them do so, this opens Chirac up to charges of world-historical irresponsibility and utter lack of any coherent policy on Islamic terrorism and proliferation.
His attempt at a policy is the fall-back one of deterrence. Since he can't stop Iran from getting nukes, he wants to make clear France's policy is to respond to nuke terrorism with its own nukes, if and when France itself is ever hit with them. This means if anybody else is hit by terrorist nukes, France will sit on its ass. And if terrorists are merely getting the ability to hit people with nukes, France will sit on its ass and encourage everyone else to do likewise, and also collect large bribes.
The policy will blow up in their face as soon as several terrorist states have crossed the proliferation barrier. Because then, they won't have any idea what the return address for their retaliation, is supposed to be. But Chirac doesn't care about that, he figures he will be dead by then anyway. And maybe the US will stop things in the meantime, or that shitty little country will (hopefully getting itself nuked in the process, perhaps).
The important thing is to get the embarassment of being humiliated by Iran's outright defiance off the front page. And to do so without crawling to the Americans and admitting their were right, which would be at least as humiliating. Avoiding humiliation without actually getting off their ass, is of course the lodestar of French policy in all things.
[Bush would love to take out the Iranian regime. The thing stopping him is the international left and our home grown Dems and their relentless defeatism and isolationism.]
My take is that it is the isolationist FReeper contingent that is stopping him.
Conservative Europeans are with us on this, but this time around we have to get creative. We must clearly have tens of thousands of Muslim fighters seen invading. Even if they are invading sectors that are not important (only the oil fields are important...and maybe Tehran).
We will need to give the Saudi Royal Family an offer they cannot refuse: Saudi Army participation in an attack or we support the Iraqi Army 2 years from now in taking Mekka after we liberate Iran ourselves.
One must understand that we actually allowed Saudi Arabia to not be onboard with the Iraq Liberation.
We could have told the Royals that we would f$*k them if they did not send the Saudi Army in to put down the Sunni insurgency. But we correctly saw the complications in having Saudis involved in Iraq. No such complications or excuses exist for Iran!
A big wildcard here is Venezuela and their open threats to cut off oil to the USA if an Iran invasion happens.
And we are still horribly weakened by our liberals who have been blocking the Alaska drilling for a generation.
Interesting point that Chirac is caving on Iran. Please post a thread when you see more direct evidence of this. I assumed that Chirac was preparing his public to "feel" a threat and escalation of tension...to state without actually putting it into words that Paris is in great danger now or the near future.
And you will have to admit: a Parisian will take Chirac's words the way the Parisian takes his words. If it makes them more nervous about Iran getting nukes, then Chirac's plan to get them to accept Iranian nukes just backfired.
And somehow I don't see the French thinking tonight: "Yup...it looks like we might as well accept the fact that Iran will get nukes...because the submarines will get revenge when they kill us all on land." I don't see Chirac's apparent declaration of a "New Cold War" as being something conservative Frenchpeople would be in agreement with tonight. Remember that half of France is Le Pen country. Their only reason for stopping the USA in the UN is to make the USA look bad while the USA, of course, overthrows the Iranian regime anyway.
This is the problem: we have "allies" whose interest it is to get rid of the Iranian regime...but they will want to extract a pound of flesh from us as we do exactly what they want and NEED to have done.
Saudi Arabia's ruling family is running out of excuses not to help us in the WOT. If they are not really afraid of Iran's government now...it can only mean that they are allied with that government via Al Qaeda...and then we need an Iranian government that they *would* be afraid of.
I want to really underscore that there were really good reasons why Sunni regimes were allowed to "disagree" with our Iraq policy, mostly dealing with keeping their streets from protesting the Sunni leaders themselves who would be seen, correctly, as helping reverse 1000 years of Sunni political dominance in the Middle East. Sunni leaders couldn't have survived if they directly helped us reverse Sunni political power in the Middle East via Iraq.
But an Iran invasion would weaken the prospects of Shiite dominance in the Middle East. That can be sold well to the Sunni streets. Why is this not happening now? Partly because Iranian oil money is buying a lot of Sunnis off.
And it is apparent that Al Qaeda is working with the Iranian regime against their common enemy the USA.
Whose side is Al Jazeera really on now? Does the management there need to get into a car accident right now?
Meanwhile we need that Iranian oil money flow to anti-USA people cut off.