WASHINGTON — While the Bush administration's offer to negotiate with Iran was winning praise from many quarters, conservative commentator Michael Ledeen sat down last week to write a column with a far different point of view.
Under the title "Is Bill Clinton Still President?" Ledeen compared President Bush's conditional offer to Iran to the Clinton administration's "appeasement" of North Korea in the 1990s. Then, he wrote, it won't be long before Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice borrows one of former Secretary Madeleine Albright's trademark big hats "and goes to Tehran to dance with the dictator" — an allusion to Albright's controversial trip to Pyongyang in 2000.
As Ledeen's column for National Review Online suggests, the Bush administration's Iran move has compounded many conservatives' concerns about the direction of U.S. foreign policy under the leadership of Rice's State Department. Many fear the administration has lost some of its forcefulness. They are unhappy with the normalization of ties with Libya, the proposed nuclear deal with India, the seeming slowdown in U.S. efforts to democratize the Middle East — which was a cornerstone of Bush's second inaugural address — as well as the handling of the Iraq war.
Bush's slide among foreign policy conservatives came as he was completing a round of attention to domestic base-voter issues such as same-sex marriage, flag burning and estate tax repeal. However, disaffection among his conservative foreign policy critics may not be as easy for Bush to address.
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