Reversing Course on Iran: Thanks, Condi

The Bush administration's decision to reverse course and engage in talks with Iran is the first positive news out of Washington since . . . I don't know when.

This assessment has additional oomph because the decision is atypical of an administration that has been maddenly averse to reverse.

Yes, President Bush had no other good options.

Sanctions were not an option since Russia and China, among other nations, would never play along, and the administration has been notably poor at coalition building to begin with.

Although there are a frightening number of right-wing yahoos out there who want to nuke the mullahs, going to war was not an option.

Doing nothing was an option, but Secretary of State Rice had been pressing hard for engagement and obviously prevailed.

I will leave deeper analyses of this development to the punditocracy, but it seems to me that this is a setback for Vice President Cheney, who has opposed engaging with Teheran, and a victory for Rice and the State Department, which has been marginalized over the last six years and played little or no role in the Iraq debacle despite having the most accurate intelligence on what the U.S. could expect if it went after Saddam Hussein.

Mind you, the whole thing may be a ploy.

"Okay," the reasoning goes. "We'll make like we want to talk and if Iran does not respond, we can check off that option and go back to Plan A."

Trouble is, there is no Plan A. And the Iranis are going to have to do some course reversing of their own.

But in the meantime, Thanks Condi.

'GUESTS OF THE AYATOLLAH'

This development gives me an opportunity to again plug a timely new book, "Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America's War With Militant Islam" by Mark Bowden, the author of "Blackhawk Down" and a former colleague and all around good guy.

"Guests" is currently ranked 33rd on Amazon's non-fiction best seller list. You can learn more about and order it here.