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.
Bush has his answer, which is simply to insist that we are winning. And the neocons have their answer, which is to take the “regime-change” crusade into Syria and Iran.
But in the wake of the midterm elections, the American people seem interested in contracting the fighting, not expanding it.
And back in the good ol’ days before that spoiled child who is our president took over, Pinkerton added, talking to people used to work.
The North Korean government was – and for that matter, still is – as evil as any regime on the planet, and yet we sat down to talk to Pyongyang in the middle of the Korean War. On July 27, 1953, after nearly 34,000 Americans had died in combat, we signed a deal with the killers of those Americans. And that deal has held for more than a half-century.
Similarly, the United States was willing to parley with the North Vietnamese once the Vietnam War turned south. The first peace-talking session was in Paris in May 1968, and so little trust existed between the opposing sides that it took a year to resolve a dispute over the shape of the negotiating table, square versus circular. Yet a peace accord was eventually signed in January 1973.
Our current Secretary of State has been largely MIA since the elections, perhaps fearing a Rumsfeld-esque reckoning. But it’s time for some ideas to start flowing from Rice’s office, and for a new approach based on the pragmatic reality, not on bluster.
