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A year from now, the Bush Administration will be emptying its desks into cardboard boxes and preparing to hand over to its successor. And, it’s a relatively safe bet that the menu of foreign policy crises and challenges it will leave in the in-trays of its successors will be largely unchanged from that facing the Bush Administration today. A combination of the traditional lame-duck effect of the final year of a presidency, and the decline in relative U.S. influence on the global stage — a product both of the calamitous strategic and tactical mistakes by the Bush Administration and of structural shifts in the global political economy that will limit the options available to his successor — suggest that even as he goes scurrying about the Middle East in search of a “legacy,” very little is going to change in the coming year. Indeed, the recurring theme in many of the crises Washington professes to be managing is the extent to which it is being ignored by both friend and foe.
On Iran:
While the Administration insists that the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nuclear program changes nothing, plainly it represents a neutering of the hawks by the military establishment, which as we’ve suggested all along, was going to be a lot more active this time around in preventing another episode of disastrous adventurism for which men and women in uniform would pay the price (on the American side). The fallacy of the neocon and Israeli hysteria about Bush having 12 months to stop a new holocaust, which we’ve long challenged on these pages, has been laid bare by the U.S. intelligence community. Absent some insanely provocative action by the Iranians, there is unlikely to be any military action against Iran in the coming year.
Moreover, the finding also makes an escalation of sanctions an even more remote possibility — and there’s little reason to believe that Iran would be likely to reverse course in the coming year as a result of any sanctions the U.S. could impose alone, or via the United Nations. What the NIE makes clear is that the Iran’s nuclear program would give it the potential to build nuclear weapons — as would any full-cycle civilian nuclear energy program — but at the same time, concludes that Iran is not currently pursuing that option. (Bush has essentially been arguing all along that Iran can’t be allowed to master the technology of uranium enrichment because that would give it the means to build a bomb should it choose to do so. But the Iranians appear to have mastered that technology already.) The NIE also makes clear that Iran will make its decisions over whether or not to pursue the strategic nuclear option based on a rational calculation of its national interests.
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