Steve Clemons reported last night that the Bush administration will ask Congress today to remove North Korea from the “terrorist watch list.” According to his post at The Washington Note, Vice President Cheney’s office was not in support of the move. Clemons reports the recommendation is

a major victory for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Deputy Secretary John Negroponte, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and others — but the real winner is Department of State Asst. Secretary for East Asia Affairs Christopher Hill — who has been under almost constant assault from John Bolton and others opposed to deal-making with North Korea.

Just two weeks ago, Clemons wrote “Cheney Winning the Inside Battles Again” in a post at TPM. He asserted,

David Addington, Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, is winning on virtually every battle he is fighting — from not moving forward on new legal protocols that would be more internationally palatable on combat detainee rights to shelving the Law of the Seas Treaty ratification.

Eight months earlier in a piece at Salon called “Why Bush won’t attack Iran,” Clemons wrote that Bush was favoring the influence of the team at State over the OVP and neo-conservative pressure for bombing Iran.

So does Steve Clemons know what he’s talking about? Has the U.S. Executive Branch Foreign Policy become a frighteningly unpredictable tug-of-war between two power centers in Washington? We’ll get more insight next year when out-of-work administration insiders begin writing their memoirs. But in the meantime, recent back-and-forth on Iran may be illustrative.

I’ve written a few posts recently on the building drumbeat for war with Iran. Over the weekend the administration was publicly quieter, but the rhetoric continued from supporters:

  • Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard and New York Times columnist, suggested on Fox News Sunday that President Bush might be more likely to bomb Iran if he thinks that Senator Obama is going to win the election.  A post at Think Progress also cites earlier examples of this thinking.
  • John Bolton, former controversial U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, followed up on Kristol’s argument on the same program.  He suggested “I think if they [Israel] are to do anything, the most likely period is after our elections and before the inauguration of the next President… I don’t think you’d hear the Arab states say this publicly, but they would be delighted if the United States or Israel destroyed the Iranian nuclear weapons capability.”
  • “Yes, Iran Wants a Bomb,” said Marty Peretz at The New Republican on Monday, asserting, “The fact is that almost no one believes that the National Intelligence Estimate of Iran’s nuclear program.”
  • On Monday the European Union imposed new sanctions on Iran, “including freezing assets of the country’s biggest bank,” Bank Melli.

So what’s this discordant note? “Toehold in Tehran?” At the Washington Post Fred Hiatt told us on Monday,

Senior officials at the State Department and beyond are mulling a proposal to open an interest section in Tehran, similar to the one the United States has operated in Havana since 1977. This would fall short of full diplomatic recognition, but it would open a channel to the Iranian people and, maybe, eventually, to the regime as well.

Iran responded quickly, indicating that “in principle, Iranian officials will consider requests they receive through formal channels.”

Whichever side you take in these debates on policy toward Iran, it would be difficult to argue that our Foreign Policy apparatus is united on how to project U.S. power in the world. For myself, I continue to hope that Secretary Rice’s faction has the power to keep the neocons away from President Bush for seven more months.