Iran: a Cheney end run?

Larry Johnson/Susan Hu and Pat Lang, as well as their commenters, have been doing a good job summarizing and analyzing recent speculation among foreign policy analysts as to what’s likely to happen.  Steve Clemons, Salon says:

The left — and much of the old-school, realist right — fears that Bush means to bomb Iran sometime between now and next spring. Both would like to rally public opinion against the strike before it happens. The neoconservative right, meanwhile, is asserting that we will bomb Iran but that we need to get to it posthaste. …

One member of Cheney’s national security staff, David Wurmser, worried out loud that Cheney felt that his wing was “losing the policy argument on Iran” inside the administration — and that they might need to “end run” the president with scenarios that may narrow his choices. The option that Wurmser allegedly discussed was nudging Israel to launch a low-yield [i.e., nuclear!] cruise missile strike against the Natanz nuclear reactor in Iran, thus “hopefully” prompting a military reaction by Tehran against U.S. forces in Iraq and the Gulf. …

As it stands today, he [Bush] wants that “third option,” [besides a military strike or the current campaign of destabilization] even if Cheney doesn’t. Bush’s war-prone team failed him on Iraq, and this time he’ll be more reserved, more cautious. That is why a classic buildup to war with Iran, one in which the decision to bomb has already been made, is not something we should be worried about today.

What we should worry about, however, is the continued effort by the neocons to shore up their sagging influence. They now fear that events and arguments could intervene to keep what once seemed like a “nearly inevitable” attack from happening. They know that they must keep up the pressure on Bush and maintain a drumbeat calling for war.

Steve Clemons does have a fault, namely relying on “insiders” like Joe Klein for understanding how the White House operates. But in this case, I suspect Klein got it right: the military doesn’t want to do the strike, intelligence inside Iran is poor, and the Iranians would have the capacity to wage asymmetric war that would impose unacceptably high costs on the US.  

There is no real “third option,” besides admitting that we have approached the problem of proliferation in Iran wrongly from the beginning and cutting our losses. I am sure that Bush knows that, and also that he won’t take the real third option.