UPDATED Iran Analysis: And The Nuclear Sideshow Goes On...And On...And On

UPDATE 1200 GMT: The US side of this nuclear dance just gets stranger. In a clear sign of the bureaucratic in-fighting, the Pentagon has issued an official statement repudiating the Secretary of Defense's reported three-page memorandum denouncing a lack of clear US strategy. Spokesman Geoff Morrell said the Obama Adminsitration has "spent an extraordinary amount of time and effort considering and preparing for the full range of contingencies".

So who was the original mischief-maker (and from which agency) who fed the Gates story to The New York Times?

The first day of Tehran's 48-hour nuclear disarmament festival, a response to Barack Obama's Washington summit, dazzles the non-Iranian media this morning. Even the top analyst Juan Cole follows the lead, with attention to the Supreme Leader's declaration that the use of nuclear weapons is forbidden (haram) in Islamic law:

An American audience just assumes that Khamenei is just lying and they feel (with some justification) that he is simply engaged in anti-American propaganda, and so he words fall on deaf ears here. But in much of the world, Khamenei’s speech will be taken as devastating to the US position.

I'm not sure how much rhetorical devastation has taken place --- I suspect that shrewd onlookers, despite the media brouhaha, will see both the Washington and Tehran gatherings as posturing in the US-Iran political contest.

However, our old friend David Sanger at The New York Times, fueled by the US Government, has his own mini-explosion to contribute:

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has warned in a secret three-page memorandum to top White House officials that the United States does not have an effective long-range policy for dealing with Iran’s steady progress toward nuclear capability, according to government officials familiar with the document.

Several officials said the highly classified analysis, written in January to President Obama’s national security adviser, Gen. James L. Jones, came in the midst of an intensifying effort inside the Pentagon, the White House and the intelligence agencies to develop new options for Mr. Obama. They include a set of military alternatives, still under development, to be considered should diplomacy and sanctions fail to force Iran to change course.

Officials familiar with the memo’s contents would describe only portions dealing with strategy and policy, and not sections that apparently dealt with secret operations against Iran, or how to deal with Persian Gulf allies.

One senior official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the memo, described the document as “a wake-up call.” But White House officials dispute that view, insisting that for 15 months they had been conducting detailed planning for many possible outcomes regarding Iran’s nuclear program.

If Sanger took a moment's retreat from his dramatic prose, he might realise he is being given a walk-on part (see the precedent of Rosencrantz and Guildestern in W. Shakespeare's political case study Hamlet) in a bureaucratic battle over Iran policy. Gates isn't entirely happy with the State Department's diplomatic approach, so he fires off some paragraphs to the NSC to ask them to have a look at military options. Some of his staffers or allies in other departments pick up the phone to Sanger so he, as reporter, could put on some public pressure. Other officials (NSC? State Department? White House?) counter with the assurance that the US policy is being thoughtfully and carefully formulated.

Beyond this internal battle, Gates' "military alternatives", contrary to Sanger's implication in his lead paragraph, does not mean attacking Iran but strengthening the "containment" of Tehran in the region through a bolstered US presence and through the now ever-present rationale of tying the nuclear issue to "terrorism". That is not that distant from the policy being considered in other parts of the Obama Administration; the issue is one of degree --- how far to consider Iran as rival to be contained? how far to think of Tehran as a power who can be approached in discussions, to the point of pursuing a rapprochement over issues such as Iraq and Afghanistan?

Needless to say, Sanger never countenances the possibility that Iran is far from marching --- a la Khamenei's own theatrical declaration --- toward an atomic bomb. And he sprinkles in, from his unnamed Government officials, generalisations such as, "[Gates] wrote the memo after Iran had let pass a 2009 deadline set by Mr. Obama to respond to his offers of diplomatic engagement."

(Set aside Iran's media spin that it is taking the lead in diplomatic engagement to pursue disarmament. Tehran's reiterations that it wants discussions on a swap of uranium fuel --- albeit still murky as to whether that occurs inside or outside Iran --- is enough to puff away this US Government-supported article.)

Oh, well. Another 24 hours in Tehran of poses and declarations today. Then we'll be back to the rat-a-tat-tat, with no "That's All, Folks", of sanctions, sanctions, sanctions v. Iran's declarations that it stands tall in the face of Western provocation.