On Negotiations

At Jewish World Review, Caroline B. Glick has an article titled "If Iran Gets the Bomb." This is an excellent piece which lays out why the world should get busy and stop Iran from developing nuclear capabilities. Her first two paragraphs read as follows:

With the Bush administration now happily basking in the glory of positive coverage in The New York Times and enjoying the warm embrace of the James Baker/Brent Scowcroft wing of the Republican Party, it is hard to imagine that it will reconsider its decision to abandon the Bush Doctrine. That doctrine, named after President George W. Bush and most forcefully enunciated by him, eschewed appeasement of terror supporting, weapons of mass destruction proliferating enemies of the free world.

Today, what Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice refers to as a "diplomatic initiative" aimed at appeasing terror supporting, and weapons of mass destruction proliferating Iran, and its terror supporting, and weapons of mass destruction proliferating Syrian colony is about to take off in Baghdad. So too, this week the US began normalizing its relations with the terror supporting, weapons of mass destruction proliferating Stalinist dictatorship in Pyongyang.

She goes on to explain the consequences of following this appeasement/negotiation pathway. Read the piece and see what you think.

Also at Jewish World Review is this article by Michael Ledeen titled "The Negotiations Hoax." In this piece, Mr. Ledeen demonstrates the falsity of the Left's position that negotiations have not been tried in the Middle East or elsewhere by the United States. He begins by saying:

A great hoax is being perpetrated on the world, the hoax of negotiations as an untried method to "solve" the "Iranian problem." In fact, we have been negotiating with the mullahs ever since—indeed even before—the 1979 revolution that deposed the shah and brought to power the Islamic Fascist regime of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. In the intervening 28 years, we have participated in countless face-to-face encounters, myriad "demarches" sent through diplomatic channels, and meetings—some on the fringes of international conferences—involving "unofficial" representatives of one government or the other. The lack of any tangible result is obvious, yet the chatterers, led by James Baker and Lee Hamilton, and cheered on by intellectuals, editorialists, and instant experts on Iran, act as if none of this ever happened.

and concludes with this:

Those who still dream of the grand bargain—including those in the G.W. Bush administration who have pursued it avidly, and have gotten kicked in the same place as the Clinton pursuers—must explain to us simple souls why there is anything different today that might make a bargain with the Iranians more likely than it has been for the last 28 years. Certainly the Iranians have shown no desire for reconciliation; quite the contrary, unless you think killing Americans at a rate considerably faster than the tempo of murder in the Clinton years represents some odd form of mating dance. The Supreme Leader is the same fanatic as he was then, in terrible health to be sure, but no friendlier towards satanic negotiators. The only big change in Tehran personnel is the president. Instead of Khatami-the-Reformer we've got Ahmadinejad, Hitler's great admirer. I don't think that is an improvement.

If they were forced to answer these questions, the advocates of negotiations would resort to the hoax—we haven't tried negotiations, and it's worth a try. But the real history of U.S.-Iranian relations suggests very strongly that the only possible winners in such talks will be the mullahs. They will gain more time to organize their war against us, and to build atomic bombs.

All those who think we haven't tried negotiating with our enemies and that if we would, we could solve all the problems, should read these two articles. Talk about a wake-up call!