BUSH TALKS PEACE?
Mickey Kaus salutes Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal for prompting Bush to start making noises about being a "peace president."  Andrew Sullivan is afraid Bush is becoming incoherent:

THE WAR, OR, ER, PEACE PRESIDENT: Bush seems to be changing his tune a little on the campaign trail:

Mr. Bush noted: "The enemy declared war on us. Nobody wants to be the war president. I want to be the peace president. The next four years will be peaceful years." He repeated the words "peace" or "peaceful" many times, as he has done increasingly in his recent appearances.

How does he know? What if Iran gets a nuke? What if there's another major terror attack? The president has obviously been worrying about his hard-edged image with women. But he needs to avoid lapsing into incoherence.

Sullivan is a hawk on Iran and offers links like this National Review column by Michael Leden-- which make me a bit ashamed of my own angle on this, which is that I like Iran, mostly because of the allure of Persian culture; I find Khomeini a mysterious and somewhat alluring figure; and the idea of an "Islamic republic" seems to me an intriguing experiment, with a certain latent idealism in it, e.g. young people can vote from the age of 15.  Note the word "vote," too: while the disqualification of lots of candidates by conservative judges prevents Iran from being a democracy, voting is real in Iran, as the election of Muhammad Khatami, a reformer, showed.

In the 20th century we were often saved from our own isolationism and self-delusion by our enemies, who attacked us and thereby resolved our foreign policy debates in favor of honorable self defense. Check this one out with the Germans regarding World War I, with the Japanese regarding World War II, with Stalin regarding the Cold War, and with Saddam concerning two Gulf wars. Osama bin Laden made a terrible mistake on 9/11, sealing the doom of the Taliban and a goodly number of his own killers, and depriving the remnant of vital support. If the Iranians approved yet another attack on Americans or on American soil, they might, let's say it as delicately as possible, no longer benefit from the benevolent shelter offered by the Middle Eastniks in the CIA and State, supported by the likes of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Maybe that would finally produce an Iran policy worthy of the name: support for democratic revolution against the mullahs.

This hawkish paragraph of Leden's has the opposite effect on me-- this is just why Iran won't attack the US.  It would be suicide and Iran is not suicidal.  Iran is just civilized enough, even democratic enough, to be brought to its knees by a war of ideas.  And they're right about some things.  The Palestinians are getting a raw deal.  Even about the nuclear monopoly they have something of a point: it is a double standard for the Big Five to have nukes and forbid them to everyone else.

Reagan turned from a Cold War president to a spectacular peace president.  If Bush's pressure on Sharon finally yields dividends in the form of a Palestinian state, if Iraq emerges as a democracy, with Sistani the good ayatollah explaining how Islam is compatible with democracy, peace and tolerance (I'd link to the Weekly Standard here but there's a subscriber firewall), if the military stops bleeding in Iraq and Afghanistan and instead settles into long-term bases, if Iran's obvious nuclear ambitions allow the International Atomic Energy Commission to pull the Europeans into supporting a confrontation, then Bush might find himself in a position for the kind of face-off with Iran that Reagan had with the Soviet Union.  And if Iran underwent a transformative conversion to liberalism and freedom, it would break the back of the Islamofascist movement.  One of the many things to hope for in a second Bush Administration.