Howard Fineman >> Iran again holds hostages — Bush and the GOP

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http://msnbc.msn.com/id/12285630/

Iran again holds hostages — Bush and the GOP
President lacks ‘political capital’ as he confronts Tehran's nuclear threat

WASHINGTON - A generation ago, the Iranian hostage crisis cost Jimmy Carter and the Democrats the White House. Now, 26 years later, another Iranian hostage crisis threatens to do the same thing to George W. Bush and the Republican Party.

In 1979, young Islamic radicals (Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may have been one of them) imprisoned 52 Americans in Teheran for 444 humiliating days. Today, the whole world is hostage – not only to Iran’s fanaticism but, ironically, to America’s diminished power, and the president’s diminished standing, in the aftermath of the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

A nuclear-weaponized Iran is every sane person’s worst nightmare. And yet talking to politicians, diplomats and military types here, you get the sense that President Bush is trapped in every direction. A “war president” can’t launch a strike if the country isn’t behind him, if the likely costs in blood and treasure are obviously too high, and if voters are dubious about the benefits – in terms of their own safety – of the battles he’s already chosen to fight.

For as long as I’ve known him, Bush has liked to muse aloud about his theory of “political capital.” His dad’s mistake, he told me more than once, was to have not spent the vast political capital he accumulated in 1991 as the “liberator of Kuwait” – a failure that led, in his son’s mind, to Bill Clinton’s victory in 1992.