Negotiations with Iran: What's Up?

What is going on? In The New York Times Michael Slackman and David E. Sanger report that Iran has invited the United States to hold negotiations on “how to halt sectarian violence and restore calm in Iraq.”

So what does this mean? Does it mean that Iran feels that they have the whip hand in Iraq and that the militias they have sponsored have the power to take over? Are they offering the United States a face-saving way to get out of an untenable position? Iran’s man Ali Larijani said

"I think Iraq is a good testing ground for America to take a harder look at the way it acts," Mr. Larijani said in his office shortly after making the announcement. "If there's a determination in America to take that hard look, then we're prepared to help."

Or do they see that the new political and security establishment in Baghdad is gradually stabilizing Iraq and that they need to get some sort of a deal with the United States to prevent its power from turning next against them?

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in Sydney, Australia, that talks with Iranian envoys in Baghdad could be "useful" but would be limited to discussions on Iraqi security. "This isn't a negotiation of some kind," she said.

In the Washington Times, as reported by Joseph Curl, it looks like it might be the Iraqis who are pushing the talks.

Iraqi Shi'ite leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim had urged Shi'ite Iran to become involved in the talks in an effort to address U.S. accusations that Iran is meddling in Iraq.


"We will accept the proposal to help resolve the problems in Iraq and establish an independent government there as it was made by Mr. Hakim," said Ali Larijani.

What is going on? Obviously, something is up. But we ordinary mortals don’t know what it is, and probably won’t know for a while.

UPDATE: But here’s an interesting take from James Kurfeld of Newsday. He’s upset that the administration is sounding just like it did in the runup to the Iraq invasion.

It was that same combination of a bellicose National Security Review and saber rattling from Cheney that set the stage for the invasion of Iraq.

Back then it just looked like a threat—until Bush and Cheney actually went ahead and invaded. Kurfeld is afraid that they really mean it this time too.

But suppose that the Iranians agree with Kurfeld. They might want to tame the beast by accomodating the US in Iraq.

Iraq: Two Views

It is now three years since the invasion of Iraq. What was the point, and what have we gained?

At Princeton University, former Secretary of State George Schultz called for a dual track of military strength and diplomatic outreach, according to Regina Lee of the Daily Princetonian.

"The world has never been in a situation of better promise than now," Shultz, who served as secretary of state for seven years under President Ronald Reagan, said. "The terrorists must not be allowed to abort this opportunity. We win the war against them by positive action and helping people see these improvements."

Schultz noted the three stages of the terror war. First was the period prior to 9/11 when the US did nothing. Second was the active phase when the US invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, and the third phase of consolidation requires “economic and military sustainability.”

In the London Times Gerard Baker relates what might have happened if the US had not invaded Iraq.

in Iraq Saddam strengthened his hold. Shia “enemies” disappeared by the tens of thousands; even Kurds no longer felt safe.



Outside Iraq, in the Middle East, it was business as usual. The region remained immune, as it had done for 600 years, to the currents of democratic change that had swept through the rest of the world. Syria tightened its grip on Lebanon, with targeted murders and intimidation.

And in Iran the mullahs took Saddam’s ability to escape attack as a green light for them to proceed with their expansionary adventure.

It’s easy to point to all the mistakes made in Iraq. It is always easy to criticize any endeavor. But the fact is that the US has got Iran and Syria surrounded by inserting itself into Afghanistan and Iraq. If you were a mullah in Iran you would regard the US occupation of Iraq as a very serious obstacle for your plan to rule the Middle East.

Maybe that is why Iran wants to talk to the United States about Iraq.

Teachers' Unions Say the Darndest Things

A couple of weeks ago ABC’s house libertarian John Stossel did a “TV special on education, Stupid in America, which was critical of union work rules.” Stossel is an advocate of school choice.

Pretty soon, a posse of teachers-union types turned up at his office to protest. They came to make “a demand for respect for teachers and students.” (Why should this be necessary, anyway?)

But the protesters turned out to be pretty clueless. They told Stossel that

school choice, whose value I had shown in the broadcast, would "take money away from . . . our union leaders" and a special program they had built to pay college tuition for a special-interest group within their union.

Oh my. That would never do. Then they told him that

a country without strong public schools "lends itself to authoritarian thinking."

...

I guess having a unionized government monopoly running most of our schools, and forcing students to attend those schools regardless of whether they or their parents approve of what's taught there, will make sure that the government can never indoctrinate our children -- and neither can labor unions.

One speaker insisted that public education was needed to ensure that children got an education “regardless of income . . . or geography.”

But that is exactly what school choice provides. It gives the parent the right to send their children to the schools of their choice, regardless of income, or geography, or the reigning fashions at the Department of Education.

How long till we free our children from the influence of these clueless timeservers?

You Can't Do That, Say Educrats

The provost of King’s College in New York City just couldn’t take it any more. So the provost, Peter Wood writing in NRO, decided to close the college’s undergraduate school of education.

Why bother with a bachelor’s degree in education, Wood decided? If you want to teach in New York state, you have to get a Master’s degree eventually. Meanwhile the state has mandated “that we offer dozens of intellectually vapid courses far below the College’s standards for the rest of the curriculum” for those students majoring in education.

Education majors would just have to take the same silly courses all over again in grad school. So Wood encouraged would-be teachers to major in the college’s “interdisciplinary politics, philosophy, and economics (PPE) program” and take a “concentration” in education instead of a full major.

Oh no you don’t, retorted the New York state educrats. The college

can adopt the five-course sequence with courses such as “The History of American Education,” “Philosophy of Education,” and “Educational Policy,” but we absolutely cannot call the sequence a “concentration in education.” That would be misleading.

Wood thought about it and then agreed with the educrats. To call his intellectually rigorous course by the same name as “New York applies to its approved pablum would indeed be misleading.” So he called it something else!

Anyone listening? Anyone paying attention? Does any of this bureaucratic pettifogging have anything to do with education? Don’t forget, we are paying the education establishment about $500 billion a year to come up with this nonsense.

Playing the Impeachment Card

Republicans learned an important lesson in 1998. Americans don’t want their president impeached. They figure that they voted for the guy. Now let him do his stuff.

Back then the MSM, or plain media as it was then, was delighted to tell the Republicans what Clinton-hating Puritans they were. And so, in accordance with the constitution, two Republicans had to resign to pay for Democrat Bill Clinton’s lie: “I did not have sex with that woman, Ms Lewinsky.”

That was then, this is now. Back then, the sense of annoyance that Republicans felt towards Bill Clinton was considered rather shabby and unattractive by the media. Today the spluttering rage of Democrats over President Bush is shared by the MSM. They hate the guy, just as Al Gore taught them to hate back in November 2000 when he decided to contest the Florida election.

Their boiling hatred is the energy that Senator Russ Feingold wants to exploit in his motion to censure the president. He hopes his motion will energize the left-wing netroots as he cranks up his run for the presidency in 2008. Elect Democrats to Congress, he seems to say, and we will impeach the president.

As The Wall Street Journal writes in an editorial, Feingold is doing us all a favor, and especially Republicans, by pushing his censure motion. He is telling us what a Democratic Congress would want to do if the voters elected one this Fall.

He's doing voters a favor by telling them before November's election just how Democrats intend to treat a wartime President if they take power.


Not only do they want to block his policies, they also plan to rebuke and embarrass him in front of the world and America's enemies.

Even The New York Times can see that there is a problem. Reporter David D. Kirkpatrick notes that the censure talk could work to the Republicans’ advantage. But don’t worry about impeachment:

Few lawmakers in either party think there is much chance of impeachment even if the Democrats do take the House. Carl Forti, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, called the idea "not realistic" but nonetheless useful. "It shows people how extreme the leaders of the Democrat Party actually are," Mr. Forti said.

Nobody here but us chickens, eh?

Back in 1960 Richard Nixon decided not to contest the close election that was probably stolen in the Democratic machine bastions of Illinois (Dick Daley, prop.) and Texas (Lyndon Johnson, prop.). He thought it would be too divisive.

In 2000 Al Gore elected to contest the close election in Florida, and ginned up his supporters up with divisive partisan rhetoric. When his effort was put down by the U.S. Supreme Court he conceded only grudgingly, and his supporters understood that the attacks on the president could continue.

Ever since the Democrats have been paying for his bad faith. Because when you divide America into conservatives and liberals it turns out that that the conservatives win.

The Problem of Incapacitated Heads of State

What do we do if the President is incapacitated? Or a drunk, or a depressive?

That’s the topic of an interesting essay by David Owen in QJ Med. Lord Owen was British Foreign Secretary in the Labour Government from 1977 to 1979.

We all know that President Wilson was completely incapacitated by a stroke in 1919. But did you know that President Mitterand of France was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1981 and became almost incapacitated later on in his second term as president? No, you probably don’t because they kept it pretty secret.

And Prime Minister Anthony Eden of Great Britain was fueled with amphetamines throughout the Suez Crisis of 1956.

What should we do about presidential incapacitation, and how much secrecy is acceptable?

Winston Churchill, of course, was a depressive and endured many attacks of the “black dog.” He had a heart attack in the White House in 1941. And what about his drinking?

In May 1953, Churchill as Prime Minister was standing in for Eden as Foreign Secretary weeks before he had a very serious stroke. A diplomat from the Foreign Office records lunching with him and his Private Secretary, ‘The lunch lasted for three and a quarter hours. A varied and noble procession of wines with which I could not keep pace — champagne, port, brandy, cointreau; Winston drank a great deal of all and ended with two glasses of whisky and soda’. It is hard to imagine functioning on such an input, but he had been used to it for over fifty years.

What should be the rules regarding the health of the head of government, and when should we step in and replace them?

A View of the War on Terror

How well do we understand the war on terror? How well are we doing? What is it we are fighting against? You could read A View from the Eye of the Storm by Haim Harari in FrontPage Magazine to get a broad strategic sweep.

The root of the trouble is that this entire Moslem region is totally dysfunctional, by any standard of the word, and would have been so even if Israel had joined the Arab league and an independent Palestine had existed for 100 years.

And this great region with 300 million people has

a combined GDP smaller than that of Netherlands plus Belgium and equal to half of the GDP of California alone.

...

Within this meager GDP, the gaps between rich and poor are beyond belief and too many of the rich made their money not by succeeding in business, but by being corrupt rulers.

There are four main pillars of the conflict: the suicide murder, lies, money, and the “total breaking of all laws.”

And this conflict is power by three “concentric spheres supporting death and murder.”

The first sphere is the terrorists themselves. “They are surrounded by a second wider circle of direct supporters, planners, commanders, preachers.” Then there is the outer sphere,

the third circle of so-called religious, educational and welfare organizations, which actually do some good, feed the hungry and provide some schooling, but brainwash a new generation with hatred, lies and ignorance.

We’ll win, of course. But meanwhile how are we doing?

Now that Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya are out, two and a half terrorist states remain: Iran, Syria and Lebanon.. [Both] Iran and Syria are now totally surrounded by territories unfriendly to them... This is a significant strategic change and it applies strong pressure on the terrorist countries...
I do not know if the American plan was actually to encircle both Iran and Syria, but that is the resulting situation.

Read the whole thing.