President Bush keeps insisting that he would like to see these “diplomatic†endeavors — as he describes them — succeed, but he has yet to bring up a single proposal or incentive that might offer any realistic prospect of eliciting a positive Iranian response.
And so, knowing that his “diplomatic†efforts are almost certain to fail, Bush may simply be waiting for the day when he can announce to the American people that he has “tried everythingâ€; that “his patience has run outâ€; and that he can “no longer risk the security of the American people†by “indulging in further fruitless negotiations,†thereby allowing the Iranians “to proceed farther down the path of nuclear bomb-making,†and so has taken the perilous but necessary step of ordering American forces to conduct air and missile strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. At that point, the 80 planes aboard the Nimitz — and those on the Eisenhower and the Stennis as well — will be on their way to targets in Iran, along with hundreds of TLAMs and a host of other weapons now being assembled in the Gulf.