Munaeem's Blog

An AP reporter who witnessed the opening of the session said Crocker and Kazemi shook hands.The American envoy called the meeting “businesslike” and said at “the level of policy and principle, the Iranian position as articulated by the Iranian ambassador was very close to our own.”

Dr. William Samii, a longtime Iran specialist currently with the Center for Naval Analyses, says,  "There are powerful forces pushing the two parties into these talks."

One obstacle to any rapprochement between Washington and Tehran is the determination of Iran's most implacable enemies in the U.S. to pursue a more confrontational policy.

Based on  prolonged and vociferous reluctance to engage with Iran, one could certainly question the Bush administration's motives for the Baghdad talks, and suspect that Washington is just going through the motions; that these negotiations are little more than a diplomatic maneuver in advance of military action. If the talks fail, as their narrow agenda all but guarantees, the President could assert that military strikes are justified.

Any military strikes, regardless of their scope or precision, would represent a major expansion of the conflict in Iraq and would prove to be a catastrophic mistake. One hopes, therefore, that the President can be persuaded to step back from the brink.

So what might constitute an alternative course of action?

President Bush needs to formulate a measured and constructive response to Iranian ascendancy -- a painful reality that is more the result of the chaos in Iraq than it is the cause. An alternative to military strikes is bold and imaginative diplomacy -- a more genuine and nuanced approach than the "do-what-we-say-or-we'll- bomb-the-hell-out-of-you" variety the Bush administration prefers.