Bush's Lie

"Aides said Bush convinced his quarry that he would have a seat and voice at the table, and the President seemed to underscore that during his Rose Garden announcement by saying that Paulson 'will be my principal advisor on the broad range of domestic and international economic issues that affect the well-being of all Americans.'"

But Daniel Kadlec writes for Time that "there is no guarantee that Paulson can live up to his reputation as a get-it-done boss. 'We'll have to see if he signed a pre-nup,' says Ethan Harris, chief economist at Lehman Brothers. That's a pointed reference to the limited role that Snow was allowed to play in shaping economic policy under Bush, who has preferred to keep his own counsel and that of Vice President Cheney and top adviser Karl Rove. Snow was widely seen as a pitchman for policies that others wrote."

Iranian Turnaround

Michael A. Fletcher and Glenn Kessler write in The Washington Post: "The Bush administration offered for the first time yesterday to join European talks with Iran over its nuclear program, but only if the Iranian government suspends efforts to enrich uranium and reprocess spent nuclear fuel, which the administration calls part of a covert attempt to make bombs. . . .

"The Bush administration previously refused to engage in direct talks with Iran on its nuclear program, preferring to let three European Union nations -- Britain, France and Germany, known as the E.U.-3 -- conduct negotiations. But Germany lately has increasingly urged Washington to deal with Tehran directly, as have a growing roster of foreign policy experts and at least two U.S. senators."

In a news analysis for The Post, Kessler calls it "perhaps the biggest foreign policy shift" of the Bush presidency, coming from "an administration stocked with officials who have made little secret of their desire to overthrow the government in Tehran."

David E. Sanger writes in the New York Times: "During the past month, according to European officials and some current and former members of the Bush administration, it became obvious to Mr. Bush that he could not hope to hold together a fractious coalition of nations to enforce sanctions -- or consider military strikes on Iranian nuclear sites -- unless he first showed a willingness to engage Iran's leadership directly over its nuclear program and exhaust every nonmilitary option."

But wait. Here's what I suspect is the real story, deeper in Sanger's article: " '[Vice President Dick] Cheney was dead set against it,' said one former official who sat in many of those meetings. 'At its heart, this was an argument about whether you could isolate the Iranians enough to force some kind of regime change.' But three officials who were involved in the most recent iteration of that debate said Mr. Cheney and others stepped aside -- perhaps because they read Mr. Bush's body language, or perhaps because they believed Iran would scuttle the effort by insisting that the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty gives it the right to develop nuclear fuel. . . .

"In the end, said one former official who has kept close tabs on the debate, 'it came down to convincing Cheney and others that if we are going to confront Iran, we first have to check off the box' of trying talks."

You know what this reminds me of a bit? That Blair-Bush summit in the weeks before the invasion of Iraq. Bush came out of the meeting ostensibly seeking a second United Nations resolution. But in fact, as Don Van Natta Jr. wrote for the New York Times in March, Bush was so dead-set on war that he was secretly talking about "ways to provoke a confrontation, including a proposal to paint a United States surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of drawing fire, or assassinating Mr. Hussein."

Haditha Watch

Thomas E. Ricks writes for The Washington Post: "The U.S. military investigation of how Marine commanders handled the reporting of events last November in the Iraqi town of Haditha, where troops allegedly killed 24 Iraqi civilians, will conclude that some officers gave false information to their superiors, who then failed to adequately scrutinize reports that should have caught their attention, an Army official said yesterday. . . .

"President Bush, in his first public comment on the Haditha incident, said yesterday that if an investigation finds evidence of wrongdoing, those involved will be punished. 'I am troubled by the initial news stories,' Bush said after a meeting with Rwandan President Paul Kagame."

The investigation "is likely to be explosive on Capitol Hill, because it focuses on questions that have haunted the Bush administration and the U.S. military since the scandal over abuse at Abu Ghraib prison emerged two years ago."