DTOP
You missed the point.
I never said the words 'friendly'. The Krushchev talks were not friendly at all. But (Going back to old Nikita), the Cuban Missile Crisis was resolved through negiociation with abit of gunboat diplomacy to prove that we were serious. Could you have imagined what would have happened if Kennedy had decided to listen to the warhawks in the Pentagon? The Eastern US would have had a wave of unseasonible warm weather of about 2000 degrees Fehrenheit, and Cuba would be at the bottom of the Ocean.
My point is that unfriendly talks are better than no talks at all. Talking is not the same thing as agreeing, we don't have to agree to anything. But there is no harm in talking, you never know what can be worked out. 30 years ago nobody could have imagined that Israel and Egypt could make peace as they were mortal enemies. But in 1979 at Camp David they did...
I am not on one of by daily anti-W Bush rants (this time, no promises about the future
), but its impossible to discuss solutions to the current problem (Iraq) without mentioning mistakes we made in the past, and the need to correct these mistakes. Right now the Bush Administration has refused to even talk to the Iranians or the Syrians, which is a pretty stupid thing to do when you consider the proximity and large amount of influance Tehran and Damascus can exert over the Shiites in Iraq.
I have no love for Ahmadinejab, but Ahmadinejab is not crazy or stupid. Despite all the rhethoric and bluster he doesn't really want a war with the US, he knows that even in our weakened state we could hurt him 1000x more than he could hurt us. But even moreso, he really doesn't want another Shiite dictator like Saddam or a religous fruitcake like al-Qaeda to come to power in next door Iraq. As odd and unfathomable as it sounds, from their standpoint, negiociating with the USA is the lesser of two evils for Iran. And I betcha the Iranians know this to be true, they just don't want to admit it.
Syria is an even easier solution. We were once allies. In 1990 the US was able to add Syria as an ally for the first Gulf War. Do you know who managed that? It was none other than James Baker.
BTW the ISG wasnt so biasly pro democrat as you think. It was made up of 5 Republicans (from the Bush Sr and Reagan Administration) and 5 Democrats (3 from the Clinton Adminirations, 2 from earlier, Carter era I believe).
On top of it Assad Sr is now dead. Assad Junior is Western-minded. He lived many years in London. He is not your typical Arab
OILagarch, since his father's death he has been trying to warm relations with the West. He even allows the CIA to torture our terrorists there
.
Assad Sr was more of a authoritarian, but we were able to deal with him. The reason things got so bad was that Bush (Junior) decided to acquiese to the demands of the far right Israeli lobbies in Washington (people like Perle and Wolfowitz, of which Bush Sr. and Baker absolutely hated) to stop talking to the Syrians as well. That was another terrible piece of Foreign diplomacy this administration committed.
Its time to go back to the 1990s where we talked to people we didn't like, it worked so much better, than simply giving the bird to everybody who doesn't like us.