Prospect of Iran war looms large

With Iran's President Ahmadinejad planning to attend the U.N. General Assembly's opening session next Tuesday in New York City, diplomacy over Iran's nuclear program is entering a critical stage.

Over the last several weeks, the Bush administration has turned up the rhetoric on Iran, emphasized by Gen. Petraeus testifying to Congress that Iran was engaged in a "proxy war," training Shiite militia in Iraq and providing weapons, including Improvised Explosive Devices, or IEDs, to terrorists in Iraq.

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For months, the Bush administration has maintained a three-carrier task force presence in the region.

Currently, the USS Enterprise is on station in the Persian Gulf, while the USS Nimitz and the USS Kitty Hawk are not far away, currently patrolling the South China Sea, having just participated in Operation Malabar, an exercise with the Indian navy that included the active participation of naval forces from Japan, Australia and Singapore.

Over the past weekend, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner warned again the world must prepare for war with Iran.

Meanwhile, U.N. nuclear watchdog International Atomic Energy Agency is meeting in Vienna with IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei once again arguing that Iran is willing to negotiate, granting renewed access to IAEA for nuclear inspections.

Yet once more, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is headed to the Middle East, with a publicly announced mission of boosting the talks between Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas.

This all too familiar drama has played out time and again, with no visible progress, ever since President Bush in his second term reversed direction on Iran and decided to move away from confrontation in the hope that negotiation would produce progress.

Now, disappointed that the negotiations route proposed by Rice has achieved no visible progress, the Bush administration has begun giving hints to select reporters on background that the Iran portfolio is about to move from Rice's desk into the office of Vice President Cheney.

This move signals a hardening of the Bush administration position, an impression reinforced by the suggestion that the U.S. military might establish a new base on the Iranian border to stem the tide of terrorists and weapons into Iraq.

Conceivably, unless Rice performs an 11th-hour miracle on this deja-vu trip, the beginning of the shooting may have been marked by last week's air strike by Israel at a base in Syria.

While the Bush administration has acknowledged that Israel did launch a military air strike in Syria, the exact nature of the target has remained unspecified by all sides, allowing international speculation that the object may have been to destroy nuclear material delivered to Syria by North Korea.

The limiting factor in allowing the negotiation dance to continue with Iran is that Iran is continuing to enrich uranium, and the Bush administration is almost down to its final 15 months.

Leaving office while Iraq remains in turmoil and Iran continues to threaten Israel is surely a favorable formula for building a presidential legacy of failure, a lesson that is painfully evident from the experience of Lyndon Johnson leaving office while the war in Vietnam still raged.

As long as diplomacy is the policy of choice, the likely winner remains Iran.

Always the masters at negotiation, Iran appears on the path to use ElBaradei as the willing accomplice in its effort to ease U.N. sanctions, avoiding yet another round of sanctions the U.S. will certainly seek to obtain.

For Ahmadinejad and the clerics who continue to support his presidency, easing the economic pain inflicted by the sanctions remains a key objective.

Meanwhile, the Ahmadinejad regime continues to imprison dissidents and conduct public hangings of Iranians judged criminals, determined to rule with an iron hand a population that increasingly is suffering everyday economic hardship.

For Iran, the possibility of proxy wars remain multiple, especially given the economic support Tehran continues to provide not only to terrorists and insurgents in Iraq, but also to Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.

If Olmert fails to win meaningful concessions from the Palestinians by November, the deadline set by the Bush administration for progress in those negotiations, the domestic pressure from Binyamin Netanyahu, the hawkish opposition leader of Likud, is certain to ramp up.

I expect the diplomatic dance to continue, likely to the end of the year.

After that, Bush will be in his final 12 months and each day the likelihood of military action will almost certainly increase.

The tragedy is that the Bush administration never seriously supported the Iranian freedom fighters within Iran and around the world that might have changed Iran peacefully from within.

For months, Bush has ushered nuclear aircraft carrier battle groups in and out of the Persian Gulf, missing the chance to send the real weapons of change into Iran – computers, satellite dishes, fax machines and cell phones.

Remarkably, even today, the State Department still refuses to declare regime change to be our policy in Iran.

More even than failure in Iraq, the likely legacy of George W. Bush in the Middle East will be that the only two policy options the administration ever seriously considered with Iran were diplomacy or war.

If my predictions in writing "Atomic Iran" continue to prove true, the end game here will be the "Samson Option," a complete breakdown of diplomacy followed by a military strike on Iran that Israel feels compelled to make, with the active military assistance of the United States.

This, as I wrote in that book, will be tragic for all involved. Once again, we will end up realizing too late that war in the Middle East is always the problem, never the solution.

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