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At White House, facts get in the way

THREE decades ago, the president of the United States was close to a decision that his foreign policy and military advisers thought would be a major mistake. Jimmy Carter came into office saying that U.S. troops should be withdrawn from the Korean Peninsula. Wiser heads thought such a move would be destabilising and dangerous. But how to walk the cat back? Then, as now, the president had a ferocious stubborn streak.

As someone who was involved in that long-ago affair said to me recently, if the bureaucracy wants to change a president's mind, you can't just argue. You need "a new fact." You need something to change the whole equation.

That new fact, as it turned out, was a fresh intelligence report unearthing evidence of a much more serious North Korean military threat than had previously been perceived. In those days, intelligence estimates were never made public, but they were leaked to the Press. Carter's national security team used the new estimate to turn the president away from a course of folly.

After grumbling and chafing, Carter agreed to a face-saving postponement of troop withdrawals, and there the matter died.

Back then it was an overly dovish decision that got the bureaucracy moving to change policy. I suspect our current president's overly hawkish stand on Iran has caused similar concern among his team, although nothing like the near-unanimous bureaucratic revolt that Carter faced.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice Secretary of Defence Robert Gates and many of his generals may not have seen the president's belligerent course of confrontation with Iran as the best way to handle the problem. I suspect they are more reluctant to go to war than the vice president and many of the neoconservatives still in the administration. The new National Intelligence Estimate presents a "new fact" with which to manoeuvre towards a policy change.

As for the intelligence community, it seemed determined this time not to let political pressure push it towards conclusions Vice President Dick Cheney and President George W. Bush might want to hear. The false reporting of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, aided by Cheney's pressure visits to CIA headquarters, is a blot that will not be lived down.

When the new evidence that Iran had no nuclear bomb programme was presented to the most senior members of Bush's national security team, including Cheney, the discussion was described by one participant as "a pretty vivid exchange."

I'll bet it was. The hawks need a nuclear Iran to fit into their world view. They need the fear factor to motivate the American public. Cheney would not have gone quietly into that good night of no Iranian bomb.

There are those sympathetic to Cheney's views whose faith in American power is such that using military force is seen as an objective in itself, not just to be used as a last resort in support of vital national interests. Using force, it is argued, will engender fear among our potential enemies, and should be employed to deter a hostile world. Therefore bombing Iran, the need to humiliate, would serve a metaphysical end, not just damage Iran's bomb-making capacity.

Marry this to what the writer Ron Suskind called the "one per cent doctrine" — Cheney's view that even if there is only a one-per cent chance of risk, it is still unacceptable — and you have a formula for striking Iran while Bush and Cheney are still in charge. Only they would have the courage to attack Iran, it would be argued, ridding the world of another danger as they rid the world of Saddam Hussein. Israel has been urging just this line of reasoning, and the new National Intelligence Estimate has not been well received by the Israeli government.

Of course, some of the super hawks who got it so wrong in Iraq are gone now. And Washington is not quite so willing to align its policies completely with Israel's as before — witness Rice's recent unprecedented sharp response to Israel over settlement activity.

Cheney might not wield the same influence he did in the first administration, but the drumbeat towards war with Iran, the same familiar tactics used in the run-up to Iraq, must have alarmed those in the administration who saw that an attack on Iran would bring disaster.

Iran still needs watching, and a long-range threat may still be there. But there is now an opportunity for real diplomacy from Washington. What is lacking is an excuse for war.

H D S Greenway's column appears regularly in The Boston Globe

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