If Bush is now gunning for anyone, it’s Syria not Iran

The Times UK, Comment - Andrew Sullivan:

What will be the Bush administration’s foreign policy in the second term? Condoleezza Rice, the newly confirmed secretary of state, will have briefed her British counterpart by now but much of Washington is out of the loop. ...

We know that the United States plans to keep 120,000 troops in Iraq for the next two years. To put it bluntly there are not enough troops to invade Iran or anywhere else as long as the US remains tied down in Iraq.

Surgical strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities are equally problematic: they would probably fail to remove Iran’s nuclear capacity and would rally popular support for the regime.

Bush’s obvious strategy, and one long pioneered by the neoconservatives, has always been to use a democratic breakthrough in Iraq to leverage change in Iran.

That is especially true if a Shi’ite-dominated government emerges in Baghdad which insists on more secularism than Tehran’s theocratic dictators. No American bomb could scare Tehran more than the triumphant Iraqi elections.

Hence Bush’s careful words in his state of the union speech. He encouraged Arab and Muslim autocracies to liberalise but there was no reprise of the “axis of evil”. With Iran he appealed over the heads of the mullahs to the people: “And to the Iranian people I say tonight, as you stand for your own liberty, America stands with you.”

The speech’s focus on human rights — a blend of Jimmy Carter and Woodrow Wilson — also implied a rhetorical strategy aimed at pressurising Iran on human rights rather than military intervention. “America will not pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains, or that women welcome humiliation and servitude, or that any human being aspires to live at the mercy of bullies,” Bush declaimed.

Get the message? Even Dick Cheney, the vice-president, recently commented that the administration’s first order of business over Iran’s nuclear aspirations would be to go the United Nations security council.

All this requires considerable co-ordination with Europe, which can hardly cavil at pressurising the mullahs to liberalise. The strategy rests on the vast, restless younger generation of Iranians, who are more pro-American than anyone in Europe. If they control the future, that future will be pro- western. ...

Then take the latest gossip inside the beltway: John Bolton and Paul Wolfowitz are both under consideration for the ambassadorship to the UN. Sending the chief neocons to New York has a long pedigree. Jeane Kirkpatrick and Daniel Patrick Moynihan were blunt and aggressive rhetoricians in that corrupt institution. Wolfowitz would be an inspired choice.

Doug Feith, perhaps the most febrile of the neoconservatives, recently announced that he would be leaving his Pentagon job this summer. Rice’s appointees at the State Department have been realist career civil servants. That leaves the neoconservative position to be championed by Cheney and Rumsfeld, two men who also have strongly realist streaks.

If I had to pick one flash-point that could prompt limited military action, it would be Syria. That country received the toughest words in Bush’s speech: “To promote peace in the broader Middle East, we must confront regimes that continue to harbour terrorists and pursue weapons of mass murder. Syria still allows its territory, and parts of Lebanon, to be used by terrorists who seek to destroy every chance of peace in the region.

“You have passed, and we are applying, the Syrian Accountability Act — and we expect the Syrian government to end all support for terror and open the door to freedom.”

Syria matters because it has become a base for the jihadists and Ba’athists trying to destroy Iraq’s fledgling and fragile democratic experiment. Its human rights record is appalling and its de facto occupation of Lebanon, strangely ignored by European elites, remains a sore point. Assad has been put on notice.

All this shift depends on a vital premise, however. That is the absence of another terror attack on the United States. Any prediction of Bush’s foreign policy made early in his first term became irrelevant on September 12, 2001. The same applies with equal force now.

There is unmistakably a new tone here: more maturity, more confidence. That tone deepened after the vindication of last Sunday in Iraq. Bush sounded almost wistful at times in his speech to Congress last Wednesday. “We see a little grey in the mirror — or a lot of grey — and we watch our children moving into adulthood,” he mused.

The words of a revolutionary — or of a man seasoned by new confidence and eager to pivot the radicalism of his first term into the consolidation of his second? I would bet on the latter.

Andrew and I appear to be on the same page on these issues.