Time for Bush to Stop Holding Our Breath and Turning Us Blue
So far, the Bush administration policy of freezing out governments who disagree with it and “enemy-izing” them is — who would have thought — not working. With North Korea and Iran, it’s taken us closer to nuclear annihilation. It’s made formerly friendly Central and South America defy us. European allies who thought that maybe the U.N. inspectors could be right about Saddam not having weapons of mass destruction have been turned into alienated exes.
The Baker/Hamilton Iraq Study Group is expected to suggest we commit to pulling troops out of Iraq. It will also say we need to stop acting like four-year-olds using the silent treatment on playmates who didn’t share their ice cream cones.
James P. Pinkerton in the Dallas Morning News says the Baker Commission will be right.
[Baker] started the controversy in October: “I believe in talking to your enemies. I don’t think you restrict your conversations to your friends.” Then, anticipating his critics, he added: “In my view, it’s not appeasement to talk to your enemies.”
…Baker was doing his best to clear a path toward negotiating with players in the Middle East – most notably Syria and Iran – without those negotiations being tagged with the scarlet letter “A,” for appeasement.
It didn’t work. On Monday, the hawkish Wall Street Journal editorial page sounded the alarm [and] worried that Baker and the “foreign policy establishment” might pressure Bush to “appease” Syria.
But there’s no good alternative to diplomacy, Pinkerton says. […]