It now seems this will not happen, largely because of complications during the negotiations with the Nouri Maliki government in Baghdad over the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA). White House officials were convinced that Iranian pressure was to blame for Prime Minister Maliki's insistence on the earliest possible departure. Perhaps they were right; well-placed sources have cited hard intelligence‚ to this effect, and the latest Bob Woodward book reports that U.S. intelligence was routinely bugging the Iraqi premier.

But it reveals yet again the kind of civil war over policy that has constantly bedeviled U.S. policy in the wider Middle East, and not just Iran. On the one hand, we had Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who wanted at least to start some kind of negotiating process with Iran. In the other hand, we had the powerful office of Vice President Dick Cheney who simply wanted to bomb the place.

Similarly, Rice's state department has sought since before last year's Annapolis summit to support and use the Saudi proposal for a broad Arab peace agreement with Israel as a way to break the Middle East logjam. Cheney's office fought a clever bureaucratic war to derail this, ranging from legal objections to any U.S. contact with terrorists‚ to suggesting that the Saudis demonstrate goodwill by increasing oil production.

Were it a patient on the psychiatrist's couch (and there's an interesting idea) the Bush administration would probably have been diagnosed as schizoid, suffering from a split personality.

In fact, this division of approach is hard-wired into the American political system. Its Constitution was devised to institutionalize a separation of powers between the lawmakers in Congress and the executive arm in the presidency, with the separate judicial function in the Supreme Court.

This division of powers is echoed within the government, with the State Department supposed to get along with foreigners, the Commerce Department to do good business with them, the CIA to spy on them and the Pentagon to be ready to crush them.

This has always been the American way of government and usually the White House resolves these differences and crafts a coherent policy. The problem of the Bush administration was there often seemed to be two White Houses, one led by Bush and the other by Cheney. As a result, the system has broken down. The constitutional experiment of an over-mighty vice-president has been found wanting, and the United States as well as the Middle East has paid the price.