Another word on Iran. Hawkish-minded commentators seem to be observing that the Iranian regime doesn’t appear especially frightened by the prospect of American air strikes. They’re concluding from this what they invariably conclude from everything — that we need to be more hawkish in our posture in order to frighten Teheran. They assume that the Iranian leadership’s lack of fear is based on their estimation of our military capacities, our resolve, or something along these lines. They ought to consider another possibility — Bush’s threats aren’t very scary.

American experts disagree on the extent to which air strikes can destroy or set back the Iranian nuclear program. I have no idea what anyone is basing their estimates of this question on. There’s universal agreement, however, that we can’t destroy everything if for no other reason than we can’t be sure where everything may be. Thus, the Bush administration’s démarche amounts to the following — either abandon your nuclear program or we’ll partially destroy your nuclear program. This is not a very difficult choice to make. In addition, the regime in Teheran probably believes that unilateral American strikes on Iran will create the opportunity for an enormous propaganda win for Teheran, both domestically and internationally. All else being equal, they’d prefer not to have their nuclear program even partially destroyed. But since not having the program destroyed isn’t on the table, and the administration isn’t putting anything else of note on the table in exchange for voluntary disarmament, it’s a no-brainer to just let the bombs fall where they may.

Michael Hirsch outlines what one can only characterize as an appealing fantasy scenario in which George W. Bush suddenly comes to his senses and decides to have a “Nixon in China” moment and strike a grand bargain with Iran. This is grounded in a fairly sound analysis of the actual situation, but it’s pretty obviously not in the cards. Nixon, for all his many flaws, did have a grasp of the basic concept of the Cold War — that it was about containing the Soviet Union — whereas Bush’s approach to the “war on terror” seems grounded exclusively in fantasy life. We’re so far from a diplomatic opening with Iran, that we hear “It’s fair to say that Dr. Rice thought this was a bad idea. A really, really bad idea” when the idea was merely for the President of Iran to talk to members of the Council on Foreign Relations about stuff.

Rice, of course, is the moderate foreign policy voice in the administration. So where the impetus for this is going to come from, I couldn’t quite say. Realistically, the only question on the table is whether Bush is going to totally shit the bed by starting a war with Iran (to be sure, with bombs and missiles rather than soldiers and tanks, but still — it’d be a war) or whether things will drift along dangerously and unsatisfactorally until someone else takes office and gets the chance to try to fix things.

UPDATE: For more on this, you have to read Lawrence Kaplan’s explanation of why he doesn’t think there’ll be a war with Iran soon. Roughly speaking, according to Kaplan, Bush is determined “to go the last mile” with diplomacy “in the name of mollifying the Europeans” and that will take a long time. But this is just the point. The conception of diplomacy held by Bush and what passes for doves in the administration is an odd one. In essence, the White House is willing to give Iran a variety of opportunity to pre-emptively surrender on all issues in order to demonstrate that “diplomacy has failed” and war is necessary. What they’re not willing to do is conduct diplomacy, i.e. make good-faith efforts to resolve outstanding issues in US-Iranian relations in a cooperative, mutually beneficial manner.

In essence, then, diplomacy has been taken off the table. Iran will be given time to decide whether or not it wants to surrender, and Bush will be given time to try and shape US domestic opinion in a favorable direction. The policy, however, is one of confrontation and the administration — like Kaplan — persists in seeing the crucial variable here as Iran’s subjective assessment of American resolve.

I think Democrats really ought to be worried about poll results indicating that “Republicans have nearly doubled their lead when voters are asked which party they trust most to protect the nation against terrorism.” In particular, I think you’ve got to worry that some time in late October, Osama bin Laden is going to release a new tape or letter which is going to say something like “things are looking up, the Bush administration is discredited and the Democrats are poised to take control of the United States congress soon.” It’s clear that OBL and his collaborators have a reasonably sophisticated understanding of western domestic politics, and one of the most undercovered stories of the year has been Ron Suskind’s revelation that the CIA concluded that bin Laden’s fall 2004 missive was designed to help secure Bush’s re-election.

The good news is that fully 61 percent of voters say the war in Iraq is “diverting resources that could be used in other ways to fight terrorism” whereas only only 26 percent regard it as “the most effective way to fight terrorism.” I think it’s clear that there should be an opening here to argue that what we need to do is stop diverting resources and start using them in a more focused, but still aggressive manner.

As “everyone” . . . um . . . “knows” the UN is weak, useless, and ineffectual. And, certainly, it looks that way if, like most American observers, you only harp on problems and failures while giving absolutely know consideration to the objective difficulties the organization faces. The UN Dispatch exists, in part, to counter that sort of remorseless spin and over there Mark Goldberg’s pointing out that Kofi Annan’s been completing some extremely successful diplomacy that’s making the resolution of the Israel-Lebanon War look much more hopeful than I would have thought it reasonable to expect.

I keep talking about this with people in real life, but it deserves a blog mention as well — Mahmoun Ahmadinejad has a pretty sweet hipster style. It all starts with a beard not unlike the one I and many of my twentysomething male friends sport. But it goes deeper. The man went without a tie to address the UN General Assembly. And I was in a bar where the TV was showing his interview with Anderson Cooper (it’s DC, these things happen) and while there was no sound, he certainly looked witty and charming. There was also this clip of him walking down some hallway shooting the shit with Kofi Annan. It’s like diplomacy! Bush should try it. One gets the sense that he’s getting his stody red tie-wearing ass kicked this session by sundry third world goons and it’s really not a proud moment for the United States