Over at Mosaic Magazine, former Bush aide Michael Doran claims that the Obama administration has had a secret strategy to engage Iran from the time it took office. He’s right, but he neglected to mention that George W. Bush and his national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, adopted the same strategy from the same source in November 2006, after the Republicans got crushed in the 2006 congressional elections. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld got a pink slip, Vice President Dick Cheney got benched, and “realist” Robert Gates–the co-chairman of the 2004 Council on Foreign Relations task force that advocated a deal with Iran–took over at Defense. Michael Doran reports all of this, all, that is, except Gates’ central role in the plan. That would place a good deal of the blame at Bush’s doorstep.
You will definitely want to read the whole thing.
If true — and I have no reason to doubt Doran — I wouldn’t be in the least surprised. Iran had been waging war indirectly against us in Iraq since at least 2004, and Bush did nothing. Rather than use forces on two fronts (Iraq and Afghanistan) to put the squeeze on Tehran, our “small footprint” meant we were unable to even keep a lid on Iraq until the 2007 surge. That left Iran free to mess with us, while making the Bush White House hostage, so to speak, to the necessity for a deal. Now we have an Obama White House which acts objectively in favor of a nuclear Iranian hegemony over the Persian Gulf.
On yet another issue, Bush’s fecklessness opened the door wide for Obama’s anti-American destructiveness.
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