Condi's Iran Offer Upsets Conservatives

Since 06-19-06

The Bush administration's offer to negotiate with Iran over its nuclear weapons program has spurred concern from the right that American foreign policy is weakening.

While some have praised Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's conciliatory approach, conservative commentator Michael Ledeen of National Review Online - under the headline "Is Bill Clinton Still President?" - compares President Bush's conditional offer to Iran with the Clinton administration's "appeasement" of North Korea in the 1990s.

And Paul Richter writes in the Los Angeles Times: "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."

In addition to the Iran move - which some believe will only give Tehran more time to develop its nuclear capabilities - conservatives are displeased over America's normalization of ties with Libya, the proposed nuclear deal with India and the handling of the Iraq war.

"In conservative circles there's an unease; I wouldn't call it a rebellion at this point, but an unease," Marshall Wittmann, a former aide to Sen. John McCain, told the Times.

"There's an increasing fear that the State Department has taken over foreign policy, and there's been a retreat from first-term foreign policy tenets."

Many conservatives are unhappy that Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld have seemingly lost prominence in foreign policy matters, according to the Times.

In a recent editorial, The Wall Street Journal suggested that Bush is being misguided by less hawkish advisers in his dealings with Iran.

"Perhaps Ms. Rice is right that direct diplomacy is essential to expose Iran's real purposes," the Journal states. "But given Iran's track record, we'd say the secretary has walked her president out on a limb where the pressure will soon build on him to make even more concessions."

Michael Rubin of the conservative American Enterprise Institute also compared the Bush administration's offer of light-water nuclear reactors to Iran with the stalled nuclear negotiations with North Korea under Clinton.

In an interview, Rubin said: "We can try to put a nice patina on it, but it's rewarding intransigence" on Iran's part.

He cited the Iran offer's lack of explicit sanctions.

"We're not really threatening them with anything," he said, calling the U.S. approach "abject surrender."