May 16th, 2008 by Pasha

The Washington Post’s Karen DeYoung reports that Secretary Gates seems to agree with Thomas Friedman’s position in The New York Times that the US should negotiate with Iran, but only after accumulating more bargaining chips “by creating economic, diplomatic or military incentives and pressures that the other side finds too tempting or frightening to ignore.”

Democracy Arsenal’s David Shorr suggests that the Bush administration’s condemnation of “appeasement” is misplaced, in that “no serious political figure” takes that condemned position, and that the “moral clarity” offered by the administration is “self-satisfying” but distracts us from what the US’s goal should be: “discrediting terrorists, exposing their grisly hollowness, and draining their public sympathy” as argued by Philip Gordon in Winning the Right War. Shawn Brimley agrees, lamenting President Bush’s “conflation of diplomacy with appeasement.”

Michael Cohen also agrees, noting that analogies to Neville Chamberlain’s diplomatic acumen are misplaced because “he didn’t appease Hitler because he talked to him - he appeased him because he gave him half of Czechoslovakia.”

Redstate’s Pejman Yousefzadeh explains that Bush’s statement is “relatively banal… because it has been repeated in some form or another by Western leaders ever since it became indubitably clear that Neville Chamberlain did not quite have things right at Munich.”

Mark Green of the Huffington Post is dismayed, and argues that refusal to engage in talks, “provides an unpopular Iranian government with a convenient outside enemy to rally nationalistic support to its side.”

Matthew Yglesias questions the popular meme that negotiations enhance prestige, rejecting the premise of the idea altogether: bolstered prestige “in the eyes of whom? And what does this enhanced prestige allow him to do?” Yglesias notes Senator Liebrman’s support of Bush’s speech, and suspects that Lieberman will be characterized as drifting further right, while in reality “his is the sort of rhetoric New Dems regularly engaged in back in 2002-2005 when it was cool.” 

J Street takes offense to Bush’s allusion to appeasement, arguing that the Bush Administration policies “have fueled the fires of extremism rather than dampening them. His delusions led us into a disastrous war in Iraq. His disdain for diplomacy has alienated friends and emboldened enemies.”

Abu Muqawama sees Bush’s current efforts to persuade the Saudi royal family to increase oil production to lower gasoline prices as hypocritical given his stance against appeasing”terrorists and radicals.”

Posted in Iran, Saudi Arabia |