Bush's Gamble On Iran

President Bush handed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and German Chancellor Angela Merkel a significant foreign policy victory and put new distance between himself and Vice President Cheney with last week's decision to dangle the carrot of U.S. participation in talks with Iran. But it is a victory of process rather than of substance and could still come undone.

Cheney has been outflanked by the diplomats of Foggy Bottom before, most notably in the summer of 2002, when Bush agreed to let Colin Powell take the case for a preventive strike against Iraq to the United Nations. But we know now that Bush had accepted the substance of Cheney's argument for war even as he let the diplomats ply their trade in New York.

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