September is Progress Month in Iraq. After APEC, Bush has to head home, write receive the report from General Petraeus, and then get Congress to approve the supplemental funding he wants for Iraq. If he is able to get the funding through with relatively little pain - which seems possible, given the weak-willed displays from Congressional Democrats (and Presidential candidates) so far - then chances are escalation with Iran will follow after he has secured the resources for ongoing deployment.

If the Democrats press the issue and won’t fund without fixed benchmarks and/or timetables for Iraq, then my concern is that escalation with Iran will be brought into the mix sooner to justify the ongoing commitment of money and troops to the Middle East.

I’d feel a lot more comfortable with all of this if there was coherence and consistency in the foreign policy approach - but the contrast between the relative openness to diplomatic work with North Korea (albeit with some tough talk thrown in) and the “we don’t negotiate with terrorists” approach to Iran suggests that there are motives that extend beyond the nuclear issue.

I see your dangerous provocative act and raise you some inflated statistics about our nuclear advancement!

The ball is back in your court, Mr Bush.

“re the Iranians …. probably very, very nervous about falling victim to Al-Qaeda themselves, and so open to co-operation with the US, in a way they hadn’t been since the Islamic Revolution. But Bush blew it by including them in the Axis of Terror.”

Agree. The Australian government could have opened a dialogue with the Iranians on this but instead chose not to do so.

More likely, at that period of his life, he was staging pantie raids from Princeton University upon some nearby women’s college.

We need to separate the two issues. [a]The failed presidency of Mr Air Guard AWOL. [b] A war between the U.S. and Iran …. and its allies.

[a] Don’t underestimate the Americans. They know they’ve got a born-loser and a bunch of crooks/puppeteers running the show. They realize now that Pelosi and the Congress have squibbed out on getting rid of Bush and Cheney and so have failed in their manifest duty. My guess is that a lot of patriotic intelligent Americans are now compelled to work out how to save their country without it looking like a coup-de-etat; too many good people have been hurt for Bush and Cheney to be allowed to remain in power. The concept of Liberty and the national memory of the Civil War are burned so deeply into the American psyche that a military take-over, with Americans shooting Americans, would be intolerable so I reckon that whatever happens will be short, sharp, bloodless and decisive - with an immediate resoration of normality.

[b] A war between Iran - and its allies -and the United States looks inevitable, no matter who is in the White House. If, by some miracle, Bush is still president, it will be a war launched by stupidity and its conduct will be even worse than the invasion of Iraq, with massive American casualties and the utter ruin of the U.S. economy. If launched by a competent president, it will be well-planned, well-resourced and well-led but it will still be a struggle to the death; a struggle where Iran is the battle-ground and where the main enemy of the U.S. will be Iran’s allies rather than Iran itself.

I hope and pray that I am wrong …. and that Iran and the U.S. can sort out their differences by negotiation rather than by war.

One of the reasons Kennan was so influential in the development of strategic containment (not the Cold War, it takes two sides to make a “war” and the Soviets were rather willing to dance) was that so much of what he said turned out to be true. The “Long Telegram” and “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” were accurate and insightful, and Kennan made a series of predictions about Soviet actions based on his theories and observations, most of which did come to pass. If Kennan was an architect of the Cold War, then he built something that prevented things far worse.

w/r/t yr insights about Iran/Bush, well, some of those things are plausible, I guess, but I don’t see history as a flow chart, certainly not one that can be reverse-plotted. Just because Mr. Bush has been consummately unwise, it does not make Iran the font of wisdom and trust.

You’re quite wrong about the ‘rationality’ of nuclear deterrence, by the way.

I was thinking of the political scientists, such as Herman Kahn and Thomas Schelling, who did devise a theory of nuclear deterrence that was perfectly rational. I emphasise the word ‘theory’.

Shawn: Iran see nukes as a deterrent.

Leinad: Deterrence really didn’t work either. … Both sides were in a constant twitchy paranoid state and their estimates of the other’s strength and motivations were informed by nothing resembling rationality.

Precisely. Do you see the problem here, folks?

Deterrence is a construct that is perfectly logical in theory, highly questionable in practice. And yet it’s all that will stand in the way of Armageddon once Iran gets the bomb.

I just don’t have enough faith in the practical application of the concept that I’d entrust to it the future of an entire region, and millions of lives. That’s why anything — and I mean anything — must be done to stop Iran getting the bomb. Diplomatic means are highly preferable, but no measures must be off the table.

Damn, now I’ve got the bug. I’ve got work to do, so I need to make this short. I’ll try one more…

So, each side thinks the other’s earned payback.
Which makes us much too nervous to lay back.
While Teheran takes its two cents
From Islam’s jurisprudence,
Mr. Bush just hears voices from AIPAC.