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Rice's Offer to Iran Spurs Unease From
Right
By Paul Richter
LA Times Staff Writer
June 12, 2006
The
move to hold talks on nuclear activities worsens fears that the secretary
of State is leading foreign policy down a weaker path.
WASHINGTON — While the
Bush administration's offer to negotiate with Iran was winning praise from
many quarters, conservative commentator Michael Ledeen sat down last week
to write a column with a far different point of view.
Under the title "Is Bill Clinton Still President?" Ledeen compared
President Bush's conditional offer to Iran to the Clinton administration's
"appeasement" of North Korea in the 1990s. Then, he wrote, it won't be
long before Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice borrows one of former
Secretary Madeleine Albright's trademark big hats "and goes to Tehran to
dance with the dictator" — an allusion to Albright's controversial trip to
Pyongyang in 2000.
As Ledeen's column for National Review Online suggests, the Bush
administration's Iran move has compounded many conservatives' concerns
about the direction of U.S. foreign policy under the leadership of Rice's
State Department. Many fear the administration has lost some of its
forcefulness. They are unhappy with the normalization of ties with Libya,
the proposed nuclear deal with India, the seeming slowdown in U.S. efforts
to democratize the Middle East — which was a cornerstone of Bush's second
inaugural address — as well as the handling of the Iraq war.
Bush's slide among foreign policy conservatives came as he was completing
a round of attention to domestic base-voter issues such as same-sex
marriage, flag burning and estate tax repeal. However, disaffection among
his conservative foreign policy critics may not be as easy for Bush to
address.
"In conservative circles there's an unease; I wouldn't call it a rebellion
at this point, but an unease," said Marshall Wittmann, a former aide to
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). "There's an increasing fear that the State
Department has taken over foreign policy, and there's been a retreat from
first-term foreign policy tenets."
Last month, as Rice rolled out the Iran proposal, her senior staff
contacted influential conservative editors and pundits in hopes that a
full explanation of the deal would head off criticism from the right.
The effort helped mute reactions, commentators said. But the new
initiative has drawn criticism, if not wholesale condemnation, from
conservative opinion leaders such as the Wall Street Journal editorial
page and the National Review magazine, and conservative stalwarts such as
American Enterprise Institute scholar Michael Rubin and former Reagan
administration official Frank J. Gaffney Jr., among others.
So far, only a few conservative members of Congress have joined the
conservative foreign policy experts' complaints — in public, at least.
This is partly because they believe Bush has a weak hand and few options,
said Wittmann, now with the centrist Progressive Policy Institute.
Nevertheless, the discontent marks a challenge for Bush at a time when he
is trying to rebuild conservative support. Wittmann predicted that elected
officials would "eventually follow the lead of the intellectuals" in
questioning the administration approach.
State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the Iran proposal had
strong support, with the "vast majority saying they favored it, or 'let's
wait and see how it turns out.' "
Some conservative analysts say the underlying source of concern is the war
in Iraq, which some fear America may lose. They say the administration
seems to lack the energy or resolve to take tough positions with
adversaries, and may become immersed in drawn-out negotiations with Iran
that give Tehran more time to develop its nuclear capabilities.
Many are unhappy that Vice President Dick Cheney has been less of a force
on foreign policy, and that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has also
stepped back from his prominent perch during the first term.
At the same time, some conservatives have gone after Undersecretary of
State for Political Affairs R. Nicholas Burns, who has been Rice's point
man on Iran and India, contending that the veteran diplomat is too ready
to compromise. But others say that Burns has become a target in part
because conservatives don't want to publicly attack his boss, Rice, who is
close to the president and one of the most popular Republican figures in
the country.
Several of the conservative analysts say it's unsettling that the Iran
deal resembles the stymied nuclear negotiations with North Korea under
Clinton, including the offer of light-water nuclear reactors and the
possibility of six-nation talks. In 2000, when Albright visited, she was
whisked away by leader Kim Jong Il — to a dance exhibition in his honor.
Rubin, of the American Enterprise Institute, said in an interview that the
offer of the reactors showed "we're doing the same thing" in Iran.
"We can try to put a nice patina on it, but it's rewarding intransigence"
on the part of Tehran, which has refused to give ground on its nuclear
activities, Rubin said.
He criticized the offer to Iran in part for its lack of explicit
sanctions. "We're not really threatening them with anything," he said,
calling the U.S. approach "abject surrender."
In an editorial this month, the Wall Street Journal suggested Bush might
be allowing himself to be set up by less hawkish advisors in his approach
to Iran.
"Perhaps Ms. Rice is right that direct diplomacy is essential to expose
Iran's real purposes," the newspaper said. "But given Iran's track record,
we'd say the secretary has walked her president out on a limb where the
pressure will soon build on him to make even more concessions."
The unease besets not just neoconservatives, who believe the United States
must assert itself in reshaping undemocratic regimes, but also more
traditional conservatives, who tend to be dubious about such ambitious
efforts.
The National Review, which expresses a more traditional conservatism, said
in an editorial that the Iran deal would have been justified if it
persuaded the ruling clerics to dismantle their nuclear program.
"But the reality is that we have probably given up more than we have
gained," the magazine concluded.
Gaffney, a former Reagan administration Defense official who disagrees
with the Iran policy, said drastic changes had taken place both in
administration policies and the people in charge.
"This presidency is mutating before our eyes, in ways that will only
exacerbate the president's problems with his base," said Gaffney, now
president of the Center for Security Policy, a think tank.
In addition to their worries about Iran, conservatives have complained
about the administration's civil nuclear deal with India, contending that
overlooking India's past infractions will encourage other countries, such
as Iran, to build nuclear arsenals in defiance of international norms.
Others have charged that the United States has been not moved strongly
enough to halt Russia's trend toward authoritarianism. And critics have
argued that the administration has done too little to stop antidemocratic
moves by the governments of Egypt, Libya, Lebanon, Syria and China —
despite the president's commitment in the second inaugural to spreading
democracy abroad.
Rubin and Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute wrote in a
recent Los Angeles Times op-ed piece that Libya alone changed everything.
If the lofty, pro-democracy rhetoric of Bush's inaugural speech defined
the president's second term precepts, the normalization of U.S. relations
with Libya "marks an effective end to the Bush doctrine," they said.
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