NO TALKING WITH TERRORISTS
By Mike Evans
The abrupt reversal in United States policy on negotiating with Iran and Syria, announced Tuesday by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, is a slap in the face to our allies in the war against terrorism and signals the perpetrators of barbarism that terrorism pays.
Rice’s move came in response to the Iraqi government’s invitation to a pair of regional conferences. The first meeting, at the ambassadorial level, is to be held this month, followed by her sitting down with the foreign ministers of Iran and Syria at a second meeting in April.
How different from Rice’s statement in January on the improbability of a dialogue with Iran and Syria: "The only reason to talk to us would be to extract a price, and that's not diplomacy, that's extortion," she told the German magazine Der Spiegel, when asked about a similar international conference promoted by the Iraq Study Group.
Also in January, Rice told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that "the problem here is not a lack of engagement with Syrians but a lack of action by Syria. . . . If the government in Teheran wants to help stabilize the region -- as it now claims -- then it should end its support for violent extremists."
What happened to Rice’s own division of the region between "mainstream" states, such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and "extremists" such as Iran and Syria? She had not considered approaching Iran and Syria through diplomacy, but said the US would seek to isolate them unless they changed their ways.
Isn’t this the same Iran whose main export to Iraq is terrorist infiltrators and the arms they use to kill innocent Iraqi civilians and American soldiers? Isn't this the same Syria whose porous border and loyalty to its Iranian ally ensure a continuing flow of suicide bombers and whose capital, Damascus, is the seat of the “united nations” of the worldwide jihad? Whatever happened to the Bush Doctrine on terrorism?
For one thing, this doctrine has been proudly championed, and at great sacrifice, by our troops on the ground in Iraq. Retired Vice Adm. John M. McConnell, the director of national intelligence, told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday that Iran's contributing weapons to Iraqi militias "raises the cost to the United States" of its fighting in Iraq. In other words, the Iranians that Secretary Rice wants to engage in dialogue are murdering American soldiers.
Where did this about-face come from? The December recommendations of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, led by former secretary of state James Baker and former congressman Lee Hamilton, were largely ignored by the administration, particularly its call for such a regional meeting on Iraq.
Suddenly President George W. Bush has jumped into bed with a resurrected Baker. This is the same James Baker who persuaded the first president Bush to pressure Israel to absorb 39 Iraqi Scud missile attacks during the Gulf War and then betrayed Israel by freezing a $10 billion in loan guarantees, paralyzing the government of then prime minister Yitzhak Shamir. It was Baker who dragged Israel by the neck to the disastrous 1991 Madrid “peace” conference – and now he's doing it again.
Baker – through Rice – has just sent a signal to all Islamic fascist regimes that terrorism and bigotry pays. It goes without saying that the only country not going to be invited to the conference is America’s ally and the only democracy in the Middle East, Israel – which is also the only country being threatened with extinction by Iran. Make no mistake: the State Department’s about-face is going to feed Iranian anti-Semitism, just as State Department policy during World War II encouraged Adolf Hitler by refusing to act against his plan to destroy the Jews.
Now an Islamofascist dictator is threatening the Jewish state with another Holocaust as it races to arm itself with nuclear weapons, and Secretary Rice is flushing the Bush Doctrine on terrorism into the cesspool of history. Bush is buying a morally bankrupt Baker plan, just as his daddy did, with the world’s two worst terrorist states waiting to be rewarded by the US for their crimes.
At a meeting in Iraq in January with Minister of State Karim Sinjari, I was told that tens of thousands of Iranian agents have infiltrated throughout Iraq, and that their number is augmented by hundreds of thousands of Iranians. He told me that Iran is working with Syria, a Sunni state, to kill Iraqis, and with the Shi’ites to pit one group against another. Most government officials told me they would be killed by Iranian agents if they talked to me on the record. Osama bin Laden must be celebrating at this gift from the US State Department.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates has declared that the US is preparing to stop Iran from fostering violence in Iraq. For that matter, the US also has been “preparing” to stop Iran’s nuclear proliferation, with no notable success. Inviting Condoleezza Rice to chat with the two main, unrepentant sponsors of terrorism in Iraq and the rest of the world is just an invitation to view another act in the theater of the absurd.
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