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| Syria-Lebanon-Iran |
| Andrew McCarthy: Negotiate with Iran? |
| 2006-12-09 |
| How many Americans do they need to kill before we get the point? The Iraq Study Group’s call for negotiations with Iran and Syria as “a way forward” has been widely derided. It is, abjectly, a return to September 10th thinking — to the days when terror masters like Yasser Arafat were feted as statesmen at White House galas, when terror organizations like al Qaeda operated with impunity from well-known safe havens, and when our government’s idea of countering atrocities was the filing of indictments against a handful of savages. It is wrong, though, to lay that rap on the sages of this bipartisan, blue-ribbon panel. When it comes to “dialogue” with Iran, the ISG merely recommended a more transparent version of what the Bush administration has already been doing, just as its predecessors had long and naively done. To be sure, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, President Bush conveyed the right message: Terrorists and their state facilitators, animated by a murderous, totalitarian ideology, cannot be negotiated with. They must be defeated. If not, they are emboldened. That translates, always, into dead Americans. The administration followed through on its rhetoric with respect to al Qaeda — the public would have accepted nothing less. But as for Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah, the approach has been strictly old school — as in, recklessly passive. That is a growing catastrophe. In their relentless anti-American jihad, Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and al Qaeda are one. There is no rational justification for negotiating with Tehran’s mullahs or Syria’s Bashar al-Assad that would not equally validate a sit-down with Hezbollah’s Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, or with bin Laden himself. Still, negotiating, appeasing, and looking the other way is exactly what we have been doing. And long before the ISG ever got involved. |
| Posted by:.com |