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What An Appeaser!
June 4, 2008 | Posted by Dr. iRack - 12:15am | 115 Comments
Maliki plans to travel to Iran next week. Word is that he will confront the Iranian leadership over their lethal assistance to Shia militants in Iraq in an attempt to get them to stop.Hmmmm. Direct, high-level diplomacy with Tehran by the leader of a democratic country! Sounds like appeasement! After all, as Bush told the Knesset:
Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: "Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided." We have an obligation to call this what it is -- the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.Well, if it is appeasement, the U.S. military seems to think it's a great idea for Maliki to move in this direction.
And SecDef Gates thinks we should do some high-level chatting with Iran too:
I think that the one area where the Iraq Study Group recommendations have not been followed up is in terms of reaching out [to] the Iranians. . . . We need to figure out a way to develop some leverage and then sit down and talk with them. If there’s going to be a discussion, then they need something, too. We can't go to a discussion and be completely the demander, with them not feeling that they need anything from us.Oh, and so does Petraeus.
Seriously, the political debate in this country over Iran is nonsensical. Of course we have to talk to Iran about their activities in Iraq (indeed, we already do through back channels and at the working level). And, no, it isn't appeasement to talk. Appeasement is giving in to an aggressor. Tough diplomacy, on the other hand, is trying to get them to give in to you. Now Dr. iRack knows that there is a legitimate debate about the requirements for effective, tough, diplomacy . . . so let's have the debate about that rather than whether we should talk to Iran at all.
All that said, now that the two presidential nominees are set, expect silly season on Iran to kick in to a whole new gear.
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