You've asked the 64 million dollar question that many conservatives and some conservative Bush supporters have been asking for months. Unfortunately, none of his major well-known conservative supporters have yet been willing to breach this question in public. I have been told, in Email answers from two conservative members of Congress that therew are GOP conservatives in Washington who have been asking themselves this question. Until they publicly ask Bush, we won't get an asnwer.
This may surprise you, but Bush and Rice determined long ago that the Iranian regime wanted the atomic bomb, and war. The Hezbollah War of July was Iran's penultimate answer to her efforts. This round of diplomacy is mere window dressing, and I think she knows this. However, due to the collapse of CIA efforts in Iraq and our inability to find WMD there, we have to be absolutely sure that we play out the diplomatic line in Iran before we go in. The voting public will demand answers, proof, and accountabililty. The information from the Israelis must be on the order of absolute.
Understand the stakes here. We will be acting alone, in concert with the Israelis. By the time we have to strike, the Blair Government will have fallen. We shall get moral support from John Howard's Australia only, and perhaps from the Abe Government in Japan. Otherwise, the new Netanyahu Government of Israel will be the only ones at our side. Rice wanted a larger coalition. She will not have it. Persian diplomacy has been elegantly simple, but effective. He has aped Hitler and Ribbentrop. It is 1938 all over again.
People who say that Nicholas Burns is running Condi Rice don't know what they are talking about. No one runs Rice except the President. Not even Dick Cheney has been able to run Condi out of town. We are dealing with an aggressively theocratic fascist state that wants to provoke a war with us on its terms, and expects us to fight a war of pinprick strikes. Rice believed that it was possible to enlarge any possible coalitiong against Iran by forcing the Iranians to refuse generous terms. Naturally, we were betrayed by the French, and held up for naifs by the Russians and the Chinese. The only thing she gets out of this whole process is to add validity to the claim, "well, we tried".
I strongly suspect that the Iranians will get far more than they bargained for, and that Rice's diplomacy is an effort to forestall the inevitable, which she knows in her heart of hearts must, of needs be, come. It must come because of the wicked nature of the regime.
Henry Kissinger spoke the truth. He said that Iran had a choice. It could be a nation, or it could be a cause. If it chose to be a nation with normal national interests, the U.S. would have no problems with it. However, its leaders have chosen to be a cause. Matters are worse.