They're broken men, so don't let them take us to a new war

I wrote a long time ago about the similarities between George Bush and Ahmadinejad of Iran. As time has passed those similarities have only increased, as Henry Porter notes in an opinion piece in today's Guardian.

This is unsurprising: though not political equivalents, the two are really quite similar. Both had little experience of government or international affairs before being carried to power on a tide of populist, religious conservatism. Neither travelled abroad much, but they both had certain views about the world and the destiny of their nations. They had all the answers, yet there was also a dangerous lack of seriousness in them which has now earned them both the scorn of their people and rebuffs from their elders.

We think of Bush as being the more unpopular of the two. His approval ratings are at the level of Nixon's just before he left the White House. After an unconvincing performance in the State of the Union Address, his plans for the troop surge in Iraq were rejected by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and may now be voted down by the entire Senate. Senior Republican senators such as Chuck Hagel and John Warner are furious that sensible suggestions contained in the Iraq Study Group Report have been ignored. Although the President looked receptive when the report was delivered to him by James Baker, there has been no progress in policy, no evidence of any kind of deeper thinking in the White House. Nothing except that familiar foggy, narrow-eyed truculence of Bush Junior in a tight spot.

This would be a depressing but for similar difficulties experienced by Ahmadinejad over the last few weeks. Just as the senior Republican elders have turned on Bush, so Iran's religious leaders are moving to restrain their President. They criticise his bellicose foreign policy and the exceptionally poor record on promised reforms at home. There is a sense of embarrassment among sophisticated Iranians about their President's pronouncements, which surely rings a bell with Americans.

The most important sign-off disenchantment came in Jomhouri Islami, the newspaper owned by Iran's supreme religious leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, which said in an editorial: 'Turning the nuclear issue into a propaganda issue gives the impression that to cover up the flaws in government you are exaggerating its importance.'

So both Iran and the US are currently being run by men spectacularly unqualified for the position they now hold. And both are inching towards a confrontation that is much more serious than the invasion of Iraq, serious though that was.

Ahmadinejad is about to open a new uranium enrichment plant and Bush is being prodded by his Israeli friends - led by the extremist Netanyahu with his ridiculous talk of a "new Holocaust" - to strike Iran before it acquires this new nuclear capability.

We are on the brink of a terrifying confrontation and both the US and Iran are being led by second raters. The Iranians have already offered the US a comprehensive peace package that the vile US Vice President has swatted away.

It is time for saner minds to take hold.

Bush may have refused to follow the eminently sensible advice of James Baker regarding Iraq, but Blair and others should be pushing for at least the opening of some form of dialogue with Iran, one of the suggestions that the Iraq Study Group proposed.

There is no reason why Tony Blair should not add to the call from the head of UN inspectors, Mohamed ElBaradei, for a time out in which sanctions would be suspended. Blair still has a voice that is heard in the US. He should consider making a speech which insists that Bush initiates direct diplomatic relations with Tehran as well as a renewed effort to create the two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. He owes something to the cause of peaceful resolution and, besides, these are hardly controversial views: both have already been expressed by James Baker's Iraq Study Group.

On the present Dick-Cheney-inspired-course confrontation between Iran and the US is guaranteed. We must never lose sight of the fact that this is what Cheney and lunatics like him want. He wants either capitulation or war. Ahmadinejad, who is now wounded at home in a very similar manner to the way in which Bush is wounded, cannot capitulate without losing his Presidency.

Both of these losers now need to be saved from themselves. For all of our sakes. It is time for wiser men to intervene.

The Iranians, despite Netanyahu's deranged rhetoric, are a decade away from acquiring a bomb. There is time for us to ensure that Iran's nuclear ambitions are peaceful. Any attack on Iran's nuclear facilities is almost guaranteed to fail in it's objective and harden any latent Iranian intent to acquire the bomb.

We must ensure that these two weak men don't lead us all down a path that results in an attack on Iran with all the dreadful consequences that would ensue.

It is said that Blair is looking for a legacy that isn't limited to the word, "Iraq". He could get one labelled "Iran" if he has the courage to pull George and Dick back from the brink.

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tag: Tony Blair, Bush, Cheney, Ahmadinejad, Iran