Body language, or, "passing strange"

The president grimaces and a war is, if not avoided, delayed.

WASHINGTON, June 3 — On a Tuesday afternoon two months ago, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sat down to a small lunch in President Bush's private dining room behind the Oval Office and delivered grim news to her boss: Their coalition against Iran was at risk of falling apart.

A meeting she had attended in Berlin days earlier with European foreign ministers had been a disaster, she reported, according to participants in the discussion. Iran was neatly exploiting divisions among the Europeans and Russia, and speeding ahead with its enrichment of uranium. The president grimaced, one aide recalled, interpreting the look as one of exasperation "that said, 'O.K., team, what's the answer?' "

That body language touched off a closely held two-month effort to reach a drastically different strategy, one articulated two weeks later in a single sentence that Ms. Rice wrote in a private memorandum. It broached the idea that the United States end its nearly three-decade policy against direct talks with Iran.

Mr. Bush's aides rarely describe policy debates in the Oval Office in much detail. But in recounting his decisions in this case, they appeared eager to portray him as determined to rebuild a fractured coalition still bearing scars from Iraq and find a way out of a negotiating dynamic that, as one aide said recently, "the Iranians were winning."

If this story is accurate then I'm glad Condi's realism, which somehow vanished in 2002, has returned and may be holding sway over preznit. But at the same time, I shudder to think we are governed by people whose job it is to decipher George Bush's facial tics.

The only problem is, is this for real or just another box checked off on the way to another front in the middle east...now with added Persians?

It is unclear how much dissent, if any, surrounded the decision, which appears to have been driven largely by the president, Ms. Rice and Mr. Hadley, with other senior national security officials playing a more remote role. Both White House and State Department officials say Vice President Dick Cheney, long an opponent of proposals to engage Iran, agreed to this experiment. But it is unclear whether he is an enthusiast, or simply expects Iran to reject suspending enrichment — clearing the way to sanctions that could test the Iranian government's ability to survive.

I don't think "sanctions" are what Cheney and the rest of the neocon glue sniffers still haunting the halls of the White House have in mind.

Furthermore, Rumsfeld, as usual, has not gotten the memo. Or is he just playing his signature role as the bad cop?

“It strikes me as passing strange that one would want to bring into an organization that says it is against terrorism one of the leading terrorist nations in the world: Iran,” Mr. Rumsfeld said.

His pointed comments were made at an important moment in American diplomacy. This week, the Bush administration reversed a refusal to hold direct talks with Iran that had lasted decades. The administration said it was willing to join European allies in negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program if Teheran first suspended its efforts to enrich uranium.

I'll say this for Rumsfeld. He sends me to the reference books now and then.