Facilitating Jihadists? Really?

"If I thought, as Pat does, that there was a useful analogy in the Cold War experience, I might nevertheless agree with the “let’s negotiate” partisans. I don’t agree, for the reasons that Ken has so effectively marshalled. But I’d like to get beyond that for a second and bring this back to some of the points stressed by Steve and Michael – the points about the problem being the regime, not the nukes. If I agreed, for argument’s sake, that negotiations were the way to go, the next problem I would confront is that “negotiations” is a hopelessly promiscuous term. Who knows what’s on the table when we’re told: not to worry, we’ll be tough.

Let’s get down to cases. Americans were told very little this past summer about the State Department’s gambit of negotiating directly with the Iranians (in the context for the multi-party talks) over the nuclear program. Nonetheless, when the fine-print emerged (in the foreign press), it became clear that this was a shameful offer. We did not stay tough and play hardball over the nukes. We offered them everything including the kitchen sink if they would just please, please agree to look like they were suspending activity – not actually stopping, but making a verbal commitment to stop which would be “verified” by the IAEA, in whose demonstrated ineffectiveness and slavish deference to the regime lies much of the current problem.

For this nigh-useless commitment, we offered, among other things, security assurances; economic aid; high-technology; and aviation, energy, telecommunications and agriculture assistance. When they, predictably, laughed at us, we unilaterally pressed ahead with the aviation assistance anyway. More to the point, we were dealing with the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism – the nation that has targeted Hezbollah against us for three decades, kills Americans in Iraq, harbors al Qaeda, and gave safe passage to the 9/11 hijackers – and yet our offer in connection with nukes made no demands about facilitating jihadists."