Let’s look back to Jan. 11, when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sat at the witness table in Hearing Room 106 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building explaining why “those who talk about engagement with Syria and Iran” are all wet. “That’s not diplomacy — that’s extortion,” she said.
Three months later, when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi met with senior Syrian officials, the administration and its allies launched a vicious attack, accusing her of undermining U.S. policy. As far as the administration was concerned, any kind of direct contact with Syria was a terrible mistake.
Now, as we talked about earlier, the administration that lambasted Pelosi for chatting with Syrians has decided to start chatting with Syrians. And as for the policy about not engaging with Iran, that unshakable position is being thrown under the bus, too.
The United States is looking forward to talking to Iran at the forthcoming international conference on Iraq in Egypt this week, a senior U.S. diplomat said Wednesday.
The United States and Iran have not had any meaningful contact in a generation, even though the country has a central role in four major crises confronting America in the Middle East, U.S. Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns said in comments delivered at the British think-tank, Chatham House.
He said he hoped U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice would be able to speak directly to her Iranian counterpart at Egypt’s Sharm el-Sheik resort. He noted that while Tehran has still not decided whether to accept face-to-face talks, the two parties had much to discuss.
When Democrats said the Bush administration should engage Iran and Syria directly, Republicans said Dems were dangerously clueless. When the Iraq Study Group said the Bush administration should engage Iran and Syria directly, Republicans said the ISG were fools.
And now the Bush administration believes it should engage Iran and Syria directly. I can’t wait to get the right’s apology, can you?
Just to be clear, Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns indicated that he wasn’t just talking about some exchange of pleasantries with Iranian officials; he was referring to active negotiations.
“We look forward to a good discussion around that table in Sharm el-Sheik,” he said. “It’s been 30 years since the United States and Iran have been able to negotiate on serious issues.”
Relations with Iran have been frozen since the 1979 storming of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, a situation that Burns said had given America its “most unusual diplomatic relationship with any country in the world.”
“Since that time,” he said, “we’ve literally had no contact, of any meaningful sort, with the Iranian government.” […]
Burns said that while containing Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad remained one of the United States’ biggest challenges, conflict between the two could still be avoided.
“Surely it is better for us to take the time now to see diplomacy play out, both on the nuclear issue, and on the issue of Iraq, and see if it’s possible to build a few bridges with our two countries,” he said, adding that the summit offered both countries a chance to collaborate on an issue of common concern.
“This is an opportunity for us to be talking together, directly, and to be working together, directly, for the good of the people of Iraq,” he said. “We hope the Iranians will take advantage of this opportunity that all of us in the international community are giving it.”
In 2004, John Kerry raised nearly the identical points. George W. Bush and his cohorts said Kerry was not only wrong for supporting talks with Iran and Syria, but was dangerously wrong.
Indeed, taking a step back, Bush ended up embracing the Democratic policy on North Korea, and the Democratic policy on increasing the size of the military, too. Now the administration has come to realize we’re right about negotiations with Iran and Syria as well.
I’m hard pressed to understand how the right thinks Dems lack credibility on foreign policy when the Bush White House keeps “borrowing” our ideas.