With Richard Perle's ridiculous
unilateralist manifesto in the news last week, one would have thought the neo-cons were starting to sweat. They must have been worried about Baker and Powell in ascendancy (
hunting quail with the boss and
writing NYT op-eds on New Year's day, respectively), worried about Iraq going to shit and turning off the American public to further invasions, worried about getting chummy with Libya, and worried about the U.S. caving in to the "Axis of Evil" instead of confronting them.
On all points, one would have been correct.
A couple of stories in the news today accentuate the last point, especially:
North Korea Invites U.S. to Nuclear Site
North Korea has invited a delegation of U.S. nuclear experts from outside the Bush administration to visit its main nuclear complex next week, U.S. officials said Friday.
It will be the first exposure by outside experts to the site since Pyongyang expelled U.N. monitors at the end of 2002, the officials said.
The administration is doing nothing to facilitate the mission but would welcome any new information about the activities at the site, located north of Pyongyang.
The delegation is expected to include Sig Hecker, former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, a nuclear weapons research center.
Scheduled to accompany him are Jack Pritchard, a former State Department official, and Frank Januzzi, a senior aide to Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware, the ranking Democratic member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Now, obviously this delegation does not have the overt support of the administration. But there's no way this could have been planned this far without some sort of approval from the State Dept. and further up. And it flies directly in the face of Perle's call for a naval blockade.
In Iran, on the other hand, a terrible human tragedy has appeared to open up a chance for reasonable people to make headway within both fundamentalist regimes:
Bush Considers Sending Sen. Dole to Iran
The Bush administration is weighing the possibility of sending Sen. Elizabeth Dole to Iran as part of a mission to deliver earthquake relief assistance, an administration official said Friday.
If Dole does make the trip, it would send a clear signal of American interest in providing more earthquake-related assistance as a prelude to a possible political opening to Tehran. Dole, R-N.C., is a former president of the American Red Cross.
The administration also may send a member President Bush's family to accompany Dole if the mission receives a green light, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Unlike the North Korea delegation, this is obviously planned by the uppermost levels of the administration. Witness the talk of sending a Bush family member (although maybe that's just a ruse to "get rid" of Neil?). If this happens, it will be the first real US government delegation to visit Iran since the revolution (Ollie North and friends aside).
The neo-con hawks must be upset about North Korea, but they must be absolutely fuming about Iran. Put these both together with Libya, and it's seems like there's more than a subtle change in foreign policy coming out of the administration these days.
Are we seeing an election year detente with the Axis of Evil as part of a strategy to move Bush to the internationalist center again? Are PNAC's wet dreams going to go to shit in 2004?
One can only hope. Politically, such a move would be nothing but a winner for Bush, unfortunately. But globally, it would be nothing but good news for everyone, reducing tensions around the globe and providing a glimmer of hope that we will rejoin the international community in full.