Last week, I noted that the [tag]Bush[/tag] [tag]administration[/tag]’s new-and-improved policy towards [tag]Iran[/tag] is not just a fundamental shift; it’s an approach that embraces some of the same ideas that it flatly rejected in recent years. Indeed, the same Bush administration that said it would isolate Iran and never negotiate with its regime, has offered Iran a very handsome package, including international aid on a nuclear reactor, airplane parts, and an enrichment program of its very own.
How would the right respond? So far, not very well.
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 [tag]Condoleezza Rice[/tag] 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.
At a minimum, I give [tag]conservative[/tag] critics at least some credit for intellectual consistency. They lambasted Kerry for taking these positions, so it’s reassuring to hear the same critics complain when Bush adopts the same positions.
The administration knew this was coming and the LAT article mentioned that Rice’s senior staff contacted “influential conservative editors and pundits” to try and help sell Bush’s policy reversal. Nevertheless, the WSJ editorial page, National Review, AEI’s Michael Rubin, and former Reagan administration official Frank Gaffney, among others, publicly questioned the wisdom of the administration’s “historic about-face.”
The conservative movement was already rather dejected. If leading far-right voices are denouncing Bush’s policy towards Iran, chances are empty rhetoric about gay marriage probably won’t smooth things over.
