LAT: Rice's Offer to Iran Spurs Unease From Right

[spindrifter]

By Paul Richter, Times Staff Writer
June 12, 2006

WASHINGTON — While the Bush administration's offer to negotiate with Iran was winning praise from many quarters, conservative commentator Michael Ledeen sat down last week to write a column with a far different point of view.

Under the title "Is Bill Clinton Still President?" Ledeen compared President Bush's conditional offer to Iran to the Clinton administration's "appeasement" of North Korea in the 1990s. Then, he wrote, it won't be long before Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice borrows one of former Secretary Madeleine Albright's trademark big hats "and goes to Tehran to dance with the dictator" — an allusion to Albright's controversial trip to Pyongyang in 2000.

As Ledeen's column for National Review Online suggests, 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. They are unhappy with the normalization of ties with Libya, the proposed nuclear deal with India, the seeming slowdown in U.S. efforts to democratize the Middle East — which was a cornerstone of Bush's second inaugural address — as well as the handling of the Iraq war.

<snip>

... the discontent marks a challenge for Bush at a time when he is trying to rebuild conservative support. (Marshall) Wittmann, (a former aide to Sen. John McCain) predicted that elected officials would "eventually follow the lead of the intellectuals" in questioning the administration approach.

<snip>

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-rice12jun12,0,7401284.story?coll=la-home-nation

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It's scary that the neocons seem to think the "intellectuals" should have the lead in foreign policy. What did we elect all those other people for?

[tanyev]

1. More bombs! Less talk! That's why they voted for him.

One thing you can always count on with George Bush--no matter who you are, he's going to disappoint you.

[lyonn]

2. Ledeen speaks like a true PNACer

[spindrifter]

3. Ah, but they are supposed to be going

away!
Condi was never truly the PNAC choice for SoS. They always thought she was going to sell them out. She has to work quickly if she is going to achieve that Nobel prize, which I am sure she sees when she wakes up in the faceless countries she visits on those trips that accomplish so little.

[teryang]

4. Ideologue vice intellectual

interesting that people with no military experience wish to dictate a path to war. The fact is that the monied elites are scared at the prospect of another war which will, at best, lead to quaqmire, crisis, and bankruptcy. The people with money still rule America. If the parvenue ideologue servants of the defense contractors want to retake control they better get out their remote controls and their biological warfare vans again.