US:US officials see no prospects for any action against Iran despite the departure of a naval chief who has publicly opposed military intervention, write JOBY WARRICKand MICHAEL ABRAMOWITZin Washington
THE ABRUPT resignation of the Pentagon's top Middle East commander has silenced one of the Bush administration's fiercest opponents of a unilateral military strike against Iran, yet top administration officials themselves do not see real prospects for any kind of military action before the end of president George Bush's term, current and former US officials say.
Admiral William "Fox" Fallon, who quit on Tuesday as head of the US Central Command, had irked the White House in recent months by publicly opposing possible military action against Iran. But support for a military strike within the administration has eroded steadily in recent months, and the departure of Fallon will do little to change that, officials said.
Instead, in the absence of an unforeseen precipitating event, the current policy of seeking multilateral diplomatic and economic sanctions against Iran as punishment for its nuclear weapons-related work will continue until Bush leaves office and beyond, according to administration officials and independent experts.
Bush has publicly maintained that he wants to use diplomacy to persuade Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions, but he has pointedly refused to take the military option off the table. Some experts cautioned that Bush's fairly hawkish views could still trump contrary views by his advisers.
Yet, the administration's ability to execute such a strategy has been weakened in recent months, according to former officials and Iran experts, in large measure because a November intelligence estimate on Iran lessened anxieties that the threat of Iranian nuclear weapons capability is imminent. "The way [ White House officials] see Iran has not gone away," said Vali Nasr, an authority on Iran at Tufts University. "Their capacity to do something has been cut down."
The intelligence report - a consensus document reflecting the views of 16 US intelligence agencies - concluded that Iran had frozen its research on nuclear weapons design in 2003, even though it has steadily increased its capacity to make enriched uranium, an essential ingredient in both nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants.
Fallon, the officer in charge of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars for the past year, had been seen by administration critics as a powerful check against White House hawks who have pushed for a military confrontation against Iran's ruling clerics. In an article last week in Esquire magazine, Fallon's opposition was depicted as the chief reason Bush had not decided to launch a strike against Iran's nuclear facilities.
The Esquire article said that if Fallon left his job, it would signal an impending attack against Iran. Administration officials, including defence secretary Robert Gates, have publicly rejected the article's contention as absurd.
While officials have reiterated that the National Intelligence Estimate said Iran could eventually produce nuclear arms, former and current officials said the White House is aware that many believe there is plenty of time for diplomacy to work. Unlike the situation in 2003, when the administration invaded Iraq without the backing of many allies, action against Iran would need both congressional and allied support not evident now, the officials said.
While many outside experts believe the war in Iraq has empowered Iran, some senior Bush administration officials insist that Iran has never been more isolated. They contend that financial sanctions have begun to pinch the Iranian elite and that Tehran's diplomats are nervously roaming the Arab world seeking to forestall a US-inspired, anti-Iranian alliance.
Fallon was hardly the only administration figure to express reservations about military action on Iran, and today similar concerns are still said to be held by Gates and secretary of state Condoleezza Rice.
Ray Takeyh, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the removal of Fallon theoretically gives Bush an opportunity to replace him with a commander more open to the idea of military strikes, though he stressed he doubts that is the direction the administration will go.
Danielle Pletka, the vice-president for foreign and defence policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, agreed that it would be "overreading" the situation to say Fallon's resignation raises the possibility of a military strike on Iran.
"I think there is a possibility that the president would feel that he could not leave without trying to address this problem," she said.
"Nobody knows what the president thinks, and all I can say is to go by what he says - and he has always said he thinks he has to deal with this problem."