Active Appeasement
ACTIVE APPEASEMENT
by Michael A. Ledeen
NRO
October 9, 2006
Our Iran policy.
It may come as a surprise to Sy Hersh — who is hard at work on yet another fantasy claiming we are preparing to wage war on Iran — but the latest evidence points in the direction of active appeasement, masked by some kind of deal.
The New York Times reported Sunday:
James A. Baker III, the Republican co-chairman of a bipartisan commission assessing Iraq strategy for President Bush, said today that he expected the group to depart from Mr. Bush's call to "stay the course."
In an interview on the ABC News program "This Week," Mr. Baker said, "I think it's fair to say our commission believes that there are alternatives between the stated alternatives, the ones that are out there in the political debate, of ‘stay the course' and ‘cut and run.' "
Baker, who served Mr. Bush's father as secretary of state and White House chief of staff, did explicitly reject a rapid withdrawal from Iraq, which he said would only invite Iran, Syria and "even our friends in the gulf" to fill the power vacuum.
The key word there is "rapid." Withdrawal is obviously very much alive in the mind of the legendary deal-maker who achieved immortality by brushing off suggestions he was not qualified to be secretary of State with the happy thought that politics is politics, whether at home or internationally. He is also a man who loves stability, and who famously sent his friend George H. W. Bush to deliver a stern warning to the Ukraine to abandon any thought of independence from the Soviet Union. I mean, if you don't have a Soviet Union, with whom are you going to make a deal?
It looks more and more to me that David Frum's sensitive political nose was right, that the Bush administration is looking for an exit strategy, and that the strategy requires only a bit of verbal cooperation from the friendly mullahs in Tehran. If they will promise to behave, and "work with us to guarantee security" in Iraq, we will get out of their way, abandon the Iraqis to their doom, and leave the life-and-death question of how to deal with Iran to the next administration.
There does not seem to be any forceful effective opposition to this course within the administration. Baker is no fool; he would not be making such statements to the Times unless he were confident of consensus. And indeed, in the London Telegraph we see that our brave democracy advocates in the State Department have been trying to set up the mechanism for our surrender:
The Bush administration made secret overtures to former Iran president Mohammed Khatami during his visit to the United States last month in an attempt to establish a back channel via the ex-leader.
American officials made the approach as part of a strategy to isolate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Mr Khatami's hard-line successor, by using the former president as a conduit to the Iranian people.
They also hoped that Mr Khatami would report his conversations to senior members of Iran's theocratic regime who are wary of the current president. Diplomatic sources said that "third parties" were authorised by Nicholas Burns, the US under-secretary of state responsible for relations with Iran, to talk to Mr Khatami in a step towards "engagement" with senior Iranians.
This needs a bit of deconstruction. The most important sentence is the last. It tells us that the secretary of State (Burns, like Baker, is no fool; he would not authorize talks with the mullahs without Condoleezza Rice's say-so) has approved (still more) talks with the mullahs. Notice also that there is no reference to the celebrated nuclear question. This is all about "engagement," which is a baby step this side of "normalization."
Finally, there is the disinformation that consists of the astonishing (even for a journalist) second paragraph. No adult can possibly believe that secret talks (of which there have been many, throughout this administration) could isolate President Ahmadinejad. For us to ask for such talks will be seen in Tehran, and throughout the region, for what is is: retreat. And a great part of the credit for bringing us to our knees will go to Ahmadinejad, who has been guaranteeing this outcome in very forceful terms.
So it seems we are hell-bent on making a deal that will put some sort of honorable patina on our delivery of Iraq into the hands of the Islamic Republic. It will be interesting to see if the deal can be made. Even close friends of Baker, such as Brent Scowcroft, are on the record saying (after an encounter with Ahmadinejad) there is no hope of reaching a reasonable modus vivendi with Tehran. And on the Iranian side, it is dangerous to be seen dealing with Washington. Those who have tried it in the past have come to grief, because the Islamic Republic is based in large part on hatred of America. That is why Iran has been waging war against us for 27 years. So while the Iranians may recognize that this is a delicious victory, it is poisoned by the risk of fracturing their own ranks, and even encouraging their restless people to view the whole charade as an Iranian surrender to an American diktat.
None of this is likely to dampen the enthusiasm of the Rices and the Bakers, who, let it be recalled, fought as hard as they could to preserve the territorial and political integrity of our ancient Soviet enemy. And once the Soviet empire imploded, Secretary of State Baker and President Bush warned against any American celebration of its downfall. Baker is not the sort of man who welcomes world-historical events, or, for that matter, world-historical figures who prefer victory to a good deal. In his (very lengthy) memoir of his years at State, Baker did not deign to mention the role of Pope John Paul II.
It may be that the mullahs, now more convinced than ever that history is running in their favor, will not be interested in providing us with a fig leaf to cover our feckless nakedness, and will press on to humiliate us. They might well reason that only a clear-cut victory would give them the boost they need in their quest for regional hegemony, itself a way station on Ahmadinejad's announced intention to rule the world in the name of the 12th Imam.
One might ask the Brits what they think about the likelihood of Iranian cooperation in providing the long-suffering Iraqis with decent security. I see in the Telegraph that the Queen's Royal Hussars in Iraq have found a way "to double the time spent watching the porous border with Iran for smugglers carrying bombs, funs and cash to fuel the insurgency..."
What a pity! We first failed to see that we would inevitably have to fight a regional war if we were to win in Iraq. Then, insisting on our myopia, we designed tactics to play defense in Iraq alone. And now we seem to have turned to the diplomats to "solve" the problem. They can't do it. They can only guarantee the war will expand, the Iranians will become stronger and more aggressive, and many more people will die even as the diplomats celebrate their own surrender.
On the other hand, the template of American foreign policy seems to dictate that we be saved by our enemies, and rarely through our own brilliance. It may seem paradoxical that our best hope lies with the fanatics in Tehran, but there you have it.
www.benadorassociates.com/article/20115
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Originally Posted by Rick Donaldson
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