Fallon's Resignation Is Not Seen as Step Toward Attack on Iran

Fallon was hardly the only administration figure to express reservations about military action on Iran, and today similar concerns are said to be held by Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Ray Takeyh, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the removal of Fallon theoretically gives Bush an opportunity to replace him with a commander more open to the idea of military strikes. "It made the task bureaucratically simpler," Takeyh said, though he stressed he doubts that is the direction the administration will go."

"There's no international consensus. There's no domestic consensus. There's this whole NIE situation," Takeyh said. Others said that a decision on Fallon's replacement is not likely to be made in coming days.

Danielle Pletka, the vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, agreed that it would be "overreading" the situation to say that Fallon's resignation raises the possibility of a military strike on Iran. "I don't think anything is happening right now," she said, while adding a caution: The key unknown variable is Bush, who has repeatedly indicated he does not want to pass on problems to his successor.

"I think there is a possibility that the president would feel that he could not leave without trying to address this problem," she said. "Nobody knows what the president thinks, and all I can say is to go by what he says -- and he has always said he thinks he has to deal with this problem."

Staff writers Karen DeYoung, Glenn Kessler and Josh White contributed to this report.