Tuesday, December 5, 2006

As Rice's Iran strategy fizzles, Cheney waits

A Good Piece

By Gareth Porter
Asia Times

"WASHINGTON - US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's months-long diplomatic effort to get five other powers to agree to a tough United Nations Security Council resolution on sanctions against Iran now seems certain to fail, because of Russian and Chinese resistance........

Rice was given the Iran portfolio when she became secretary of state in January 2005, and has apparently sought to move administration policy away from the option of using military force. She even indicated privately to a few figures outside the administration this year that she hoped her move to offer talks with Iran in the context of EU-Iran talks on the nuclear issue would result in broader US-Iran negotiations.

But Rice's diplomatic track on Iran was narrowly constrained from the beginning by a broader Bush administration policy of refusing any diplomatic compromise with Iran. Cheney and then-secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld apparently agreed to let Rice go down that track in early 2005 because they knew that any diplomatic effort through the Security Council to get sanctions against Iran would end in failure and that such a failure was a necessary prelude to any use of force.

According to an article by the neo-conservative Lawrence F Kaplan in The New Republic on October 2, aides to Cheney have been convinced from the beginning that Rice's Iran strategy would not be an obstacle to their own plans because they knew it would fail.

The aides to Cheney insisted that the administration was not yet prepared politically for a shift to the military track, according to Kaplan. But once Rice's diplomatic effort becomes a highly visible failure, Cheney and his allies in the administration are poised to begin the process of ratcheting up pressure on Bush to begin the political planning for an eventual military attack on Iran. "

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