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.
You think my comments about Rice are soley related to Iran? Under Rice our State Department has been wrong in every major change in the Middle East since she came in and appointed Nicolas Burns.
Cheney and Rummy want, and have wanted stronger sanctions by us on Syria, for the continued flow of men, material and money for insurgents from Syria into Iraq. Rice and Burns have blocked stronger diplomacy, stronger military threats and stronger sanctions. The Syrian role in Iraq has grown.
A year ago, our military generals, Rummy and Cheney had the same message for Bush vis-a-vis strong steps with the leading Shia representatives in Iraq that Sadr must be disarmed and Iranian activities in Iraq must be strongly countered by the coalition and by Iraqi representatives who want to claim they will stand up for an independent Iraq. They failed. Foggy bottom's answer is to do nothing and just let the Iraqis pay the price if they alone cannot negotiate with Iran to get it to stop interfering. Iran now has its own fully operational defacto government in southern Iraq where its consulates, bring in the money and the IED's for its Shia militia groups and its bullies tell the Iraqi government officials what to do and assassinates them when they don't. The entire operation is reported in the west as pertaining to rival Shia groups but it is Iran.
Due to Rice and Burns our generals in Iraq are now in the same situation we put our generals in in Vietnam - a war conducted to support the State Department's image of its capabilities; capabilities in war it does not have. Our military conduct in Iraq is now totally dependent on the political decisions of the State Department and its failed and continuing to fail over-reach of what it can and cannot achieve, by "diplomacy".
Rice was told by Israel and by Abbas that if the PA elections proceeded on Burn's insistance of the timetable, Abbas would loose and Hamas would win. Her and Burn's mythical image of their vision of what would happen outweighed the best advice they had. Then, as now, she pretended to be surprised at the outcome. Why? Because her chief advisor, Burns, had assured her of a different outcome.
While one-half of the blame for some of the mistakes in the recent class with Hezbolla can be placed on Olmert, in Israel, the fact is that his biggest mistake was allowing Israel to be pulled around by the nose - should they or should they not take a particular action, and when they should or shouldn't take it - by Burns and Rice's flunkies at State. Her big and very public demand was that "a cease fire should not return everything to the status quo ante". And where is everything regarding Hezbolla now? Back at the "status quo ante". Still armed, still being rearmed by Syria and Iran; redigging new bunkers and new missle launch pads; no UN force is going to enforce the UN resolution to disarm them and not even the Lebanese army is going to disarm them. Status quo ante.
Ditto Korea - status quo ante. Ditto Darfur - status quo ante. Ditto Burma - status quo ante. Ditto all of South America - not even "status quo ante" but outright reversals. Ditto NATO and EU help in Afghanistan, not enough and no real US pressure to help.
Rice has got to be one of the worst Secretary of States in a period when the US is involved in so many crisis. Why? She doesn't have a clue. Burns and Foggy bottom are running her and as usual when Foggy Bottom runs things, either neither happens or what does happen is sold to be an even with substance when it is no more than a smokescreen.
As far as Iran and its nukes. You can forget it. Burns has won that one already. We are not going to do anything other than negotiate. We are not going to make sanctions. We are not going to "take out their nuke facilities". We are not going to threaten our commerical allies, like China, to get their vote with us. We are going to do nothing. Burns and his liberal friends in the RINOs and the Dims are setting us up to "live with a nuclear armed Iran" as if the situation was no different than a nuclear armed Russia. They don't know what they are talking about and unless Bush wakes up and fires Burns and Rice, and puts someone like Bolton as Secretary of State, then he is going to be no better than Clinton and just hand the problem of Iran to the next POTUS, more dangerous than when he started. Not only will she be nuclear Armed, she be in charge of a good portion of Iraq if the Iraqis - left by Burns and Rice on their own - cannot get their act together.