{"id":4114,"date":"2007-12-12T11:20:25","date_gmt":"2007-12-12T18:20:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2007\/12\/12\/4114\/"},"modified":"2007-12-12T11:20:47","modified_gmt":"2007-12-12T18:20:47","slug":"4114","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2007\/12\/12\/4114\/","title":{"rendered":"Key Neocons Giving Up on Iran Attack?"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>Visit Lobelog.com<\/a> for the latest news analysis and commentary from Inter Press News Service’s Washington bureau chief Jim Lobe.<\/i><\/p>\n

While hard-line neo-conservatives associated with the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Commentary, and the Wall Street Journal <\/em>editorial page (See Bret Stephens column, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The NIE Fantasy<\/a>\u00e2\u20ac\u009d) continue to rage against last week\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, two key \u00e2\u20ac\u201d if more pragmatic \u00e2\u20ac\u201d movement leaders appear to now be resigned to the fact that, barring a particularly provocative move by Tehran, the Bush administration is highly unlikely to carry out an attack against Iran before its term expires.<\/p>\n

I hope to write an article about this development for IPS in the coming days, but Robert Kagan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s column, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Time to talk to Iran<\/a>,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d which appeared in the Washington Post last Wednesday (but which I read only over the weekend as I was catching up with a two-week accumulation of newspapers), marks a major turning point in the debate over Iran policy. Not only does he state flatly, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153[t]he Bush administration cannot take military action against Iran during its remaining time in office, or credibly threaten to do so, unless it is in response to an extremely provocative Iranian action,’\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 but he goes on to argue that there is now \u00e2\u20ac\u02dc\u00e2\u20ac\u2122a good case for negotiations\u00e2\u20ac\u009d on a range of issues, including those which Iran offered to talk about in April-May, 2003 (to which, however, he does not allude). In other words, Robert Kagan, co-founder of the Project for the New American Century, believes it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s worth testing the notion that a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153grand bargain\u00e2\u20ac\u009d is possible. He\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not happy about it, but that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s his conclusion.<\/p>\n

While his PNAC co-founder, Bill Kristol, doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t go nearly as far in embracing the notion of negotiations with Tehran, his lead editorial <\/a>in the latest edition of the Weekly Standard<\/em>, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153What Happened in 2003?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, offers a mixture both of indignation against the NIE and resignation that it marks the end of the chances for a U.S. attack on Iran before Bush\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s term expires. Bush\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s task over the next year, he argues, is to try to restore U.S. credibility \u00e2\u20ac\u201d including military credibility \u00e2\u20ac\u201d by achieving \u00e2\u20ac\u0153victory\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in Iraq. Here\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the last paragraph:<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153The complete and unequivocal defeat of al Qaeda and of Iranian-backed proxies in Iraq is the best way to show Iran that the United States is a serious power to be reckoned with in the region. Resisting the temptation to throw away success in Iraq by drawing down too fast or too deep is the greatest service this president can render his successor. Only if Bush wins in Iraq will the next president have a reasonable chance to defeat the threat of a nuclear-weapons-seeking Islamic Republic of Iran.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So Kristol appears to have given up \u00e2\u20ac\u201d however reluctantly (Remember, it was his publication which featured Kimberley Kagan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s piece late last summer that lay the groundwork for a military attack on Iran based on its alleged interference in Iraq) \u00e2\u20ac\u201d on the idea of a military attack on Iran in the next year.<\/p>\n

Kristol and Kagan have obviously been the leading lights of the \u00e2\u20ac\u201d for lack of a better word \u00e2\u20ac\u201d \u00e2\u20ac\u0153moderate\u00e2\u20ac\u009d wing of the neo-conservative movement since the mid-1990s when they co-authored their influential article, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy<\/a>\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in Foreign Affairs <\/em>and went on to found PNAC the following year. Unlike neo-con hardliners like Norman Podhoretz or Richard Perle and his numerous proteges \u00e2\u20ac\u201d some of whom, like Danielle Pletka and Frank Gaffney and Podhoretz himself, have all but accused the NIE\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s authors of deliberate deception \u00e2\u20ac\u201d scattered around Washington, the two have generally been less wedded to the views of former Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. For example, while the hardliners opposed former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s disengagement from Gaza, Kristol and Kagan lined up behind Sharon, even when he deserted Likud to form Kadima.<\/p>\n

Of the two columns, Kagan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s is, of course, the more notable, simply because he believes Washington has no choice at this point but to engage with Iran in a way that the administration until now has never considered. That Kagan has been close to Elliott Abrams since they worked together in the State Department back in the 1980s makes his latest position \u00e2\u20ac\u201d which now approaches that of Americans for Peace Now (which called this week <\/a>for unconditional U.S. engagement with Iran) \u00e2\u20ac\u201d all the more remarkable.<\/p>\n

Kagan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s advice has also been echoed in recent days by two other influential voices identified with or previously embraced by the neo-conservative movement. In a column in the Washington Times <\/em>today. Roll Call<\/em> columnist Morton Kondracke called for Bush to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153drop his objections to direct talks with the Iranians,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d even while he insisted that Washington should continue to push for more sanctions against Tehran. He still sounds very hawkish on Iran but appears to have given up on the idea that Bush will take military action against Iran, arguing, \u00e2\u20ac\u02dc\u00e2\u20ac\u2122the question of whether to go to war \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6is gone.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Over the weekend, British historian Niall Ferguson, whose neo-imperial views have long been embraced by the neo-conservatives, explicitly agreed in his Financial Times <\/em>column <\/a>with Kagan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s analysis \u00e2\u20ac\u201d that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the time may well have arrived to rethink US policy towards Iran,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d although he thinks \u00e2\u20ac\u0153it just is not in this president\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s nature to beat his sword into a plowshare\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and that, in any event, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153it seems doubtful the Iranians would take such a volte-face seriously.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d He goes on to call for Bush\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s successor to offer Tehran \u00e2\u20ac\u0153a grand bargain\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u201d economic assistance and diplomatic rapprochement for a renunciation of nuclear weapons and terrorism.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d He thinks John McCain is the candidate who could best pull that off.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Visit Lobelog.com for the latest news analysis and commentary from Inter Press News Service’s Washington bureau chief Jim Lobe. While hard-line neo-conservatives associated with the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Commentary, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page (See Bret Stephens column, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The NIE Fantasy\u00e2\u20ac\u009d) continue to rage against last week\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[676],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-4114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-antiwar-movement"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/49"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4114"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4114\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4114"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=4114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}