Republicans are breaking apart over Iran

[Rose Siding]

The neocons are afraid they've lost their cowboy. From the LAT:

Under the title "Is Bill Clinton Still President?" Ledeen compared President Bush's conditional offer to Iran to the Clinton administration's "appeasement" of North Korea in the 1990s. Then, he wrote, it won't be long before Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice borrows one of former Secretary Madeleine Albright's trademark big hats "and goes to Tehran to dance with the dictator" — an allusion to Albright's controversial trip to Pyongyang in 2000.

As Ledeen's column for National Review Online suggests, the Bush administration's Iran move has compounded many conservatives' concerns about the direction of U.S. foreign policy under the leadership of Rice's State Department......

So far, only a few conservative members of Congress have joined the conservative foreign policy experts' complaints — in public, at least. This is partly because they believe Bush has a weak hand and few options, said Wittmann, now with the centrist Progressive Policy Institute.
...
Some conservative analysts say the underlying source of concern is the war in Iraq, which some fear America may lose. They say the administration seems to lack the energy or resolve to take tough positions with adversaries, and may become immersed in drawn-out negotiations with Iran that give Tehran more time to develop its nuclear capabilities.

Many are unhappy that Vice President Dick Cheney has been less of a force on foreign policy, and that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has also stepped back from his prominent perch during the first term.