Our World: When talking can kill
Jul. 14, 2008 Caroline Glick , THE JERUSALEM POST
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At the end of the week, Saeed Jalili, Iran's nuclear negotiator, is
scheduled to arrive in Geneva for yet another round of talks with EU foreign
policy chief Javier Solana. It is unclear what the two have to discuss.

On July 4, the Iranians sent their written response to the West's latest
offer to appease them. In and of itself, the offer, made by the five
permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany and communicated to
Iran by Solana, constituted a major achievement for the Iranians. It
promised civilian nuclear power plants, economic assistance, new airplanes,
agricultural assistance, hi-tech transfers and a freeze on the expansion of
economic sanctions against the nuclear-weapons-seeking mullocracy. In
exchange for all of that, the Iranians weren't even required to end their
uranium enrichment activities. To get the ball of concessions rolling, all
the Iranians needed to do was promise not to expand their current enrichment
activities.

If Iran were ever even remotely interested in reaching a deal with the
international community, this was the deal it would have taken. For the
unspoken subtext of the agreement was that the international community is
willing to accept a nuclear armed Iran in exchange for the mere appearance
of Iranian willingness to bow to international pressure. As David Albright,
president of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International
Security, explained to Newsweek last week, at their current, known level of
uranium enrichment the Iranians are producing 1.2 kg. of enriched uranium a
day. And at this enrichment level, they will be able to produce a nuclear
bomb by next year. So the international community's willingness to accept
continued Iranian uranium enrichment at current levels is a clear signal of
the international community's willingness to accept a nuclear-armed Iran.

And yet, that offer still wasn't good enough for the Iranians. Their written
response didn't even discuss the issue of uranium enrichment. They just
asked for more concessions in exchange for nothing. And now they believe
that their "counterproposal" should form the basis of this week's round of
discussions.

As Iran submitted its response to the offer, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei
dispatched his foreign policy adviser Ali Akbar Velayati to the media to
discuss Iran's interest in accepting the West's offer. The Western media and
some EU officials were so thrilled by the gesture that the immediate
coverage of Iran's response lent the impression that Iran had in fact
accepted the offer.

IT WAS only two days later, after those same officials sat down and read
what the Iranians wrote that they realized that they had been tricked. And
just to be sure that there was no residual optimism, senior Iranian leaders
like President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Foreign Minister Manoushehr Mottaki
stated clearly that they would never accept any deal that places limitations
on their uranium enrichment.

After verbally snuffing out all hopes for an agreement, Iran proceeded to
show off its military prowess by testing ballistic missiles last week and
augmenting those tests with verbal threats to destroy Israel and attack all
US bases in the Middle East.

And still despite all of this, Solana looks forward to his meetings this
Saturday with Jalili with hope for an accommodation. After Iran rejected a
deal that effectively offered it acceptance as a nuclear-armed state, he
still believes that the best way to deal with Iran's clear intention to
acquire and use nuclear weapons is to offer it membership in the World Trade
Organization.

Solana's unshakeable faith that Iran can be appeased is to be expected.
After all, Solana was on the first flight to Teheran to begin negotiating
with the mullahs the minute that Iran's nuclear program was exposed five
years ago. And he's been running the talks ever since - first for France,
Germany and Britain, and then starting last May, for the US as well.

Solana cannot acknowledge that the talks have failed. He is too personally
invested in them to admit that Iran has been using him as the diplomatic fig
leaf behind which it has pushed forward with its nuclear bomb program.

SOLANA IS a perfect example of why the oft repeated policy mantra "there's
never any harm in talking" is incorrect. The basic idea behind that
assertion is that negotiations can never cause damage, they can only do
good - by resolving a conflict without resorting to force. But they can and
often do cause tremendous harm - and to the wrong side.

If Europe's initial justification for negotiating with Iran was that it
wished to convince Iran to give up its nuclear weapons program, over time
that justification gave way to a more basic justification - to deny that the
talks had failed. That is, after it became clear that the talks would not
succeed in engendering a change in Iran's behavior, the parties involved
changed their focus from Iran to themselves. The talks were about them. And
if the talks failed, it wasn't because Iran refused to listen to reason. It
was because the West hadn't given it a good enough offer. So just by
engaging Iran and its ilk, these Westerners were transformed from Western
representatives to the Iranian regime to advocates of the Iranian regime in
the West.

As a result it has become nearly impossible to have coherent discussion
about the Iranian nuclear program. For when the "experts" are called to tell
us how to proceed in preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, they
instead exhort us to engage at ever higher levels with the Iranians in order
to show them our good intentions toward them.

And of course, it isn't only Iran that is benefitting from the West's false
belief in the harmlessness of negotiations. Iran's proxies in Syria and
Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority are also prospering thanks to the
West's belief that negotiations can only do good.

THE LATEST display of this Western preference for the pomp of accommodation
over the responsibility of confrontation was French President Nicolas
Sarkozy's Mediterranean summit in Paris this week. The purpose of the
parley, which Sarkozy has been trying to organize since entering office last
May, was to project himself as a global leader in international affairs and
to project France as an important country in Europe and throughout the
world.

Although the summit - like the Barcelona and Madrid summits before it - was
officially focused on building economic cooperation among the countries
bordering the Mediterranean Sea and Europe, its actual purpose was to propel
France to the position of peacemaker between Israel and its neighbors, and
specifically between Israel and Syria. And to do this, the success or
failure of the entire conference was contingent upon Syrian President Bashar
Assad's willingness to participate and sit in the same room as Prime
Minister Ehud Olmert.

To bring Syria on board, Sarkozy was compelled to accept the Assad regime as
legitimate. And to do this, he needed to ignore the nature of the new
Lebanese government, Syria's role in establishing it, Syria's support for
terrorism, its feudal relationship with Iran and its role in the
assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri and a host of
anti-Syrian Lebanese parliamentarians and journalists over the past three
years.

Last Friday, just ahead of the Paris summit, Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad
Saniora announced that he had formed his new, Hizbullah-controlled
government. Saniora was compelled to abdicate control over Lebanon to Iran's
foreign legion as a result of Hizbullah's violent takeover of the country in
May. And Hizbullah justified its coup by noting that Saniora's pro-democracy
March 14 movement in the Lebanese parliament had failed to elect a new
president to replace Emil Lahoud, who completed his term last November. Of
course, Saniora only failed to elect a new president because Syria and
Hizbullah had murdered so many March 14 movement members of parliament that
he no longer had enough votes to elect a candidate without Hizbullah's
approval.

After Saniora announced his new Iranian-controlled government, Assad was
quick to announce that he would be opening a Syrian embassy in Beirut for
the first time ever. Assad's announcement was greeted with glee in the
Elysee Palace and throughout the West. It was perceived as Syria's first
acknowledgement of Lebanese sovereignty. But this is a false perception.

Syria's announcement was not a sign of moderation by Damascus but a sign of
radicalization. Syria has not accepted Lebanon's sovereignty. It has
accepted Iranian dominion over Lebanon. And in accepting Iran's control of
Lebanon, Assad effectively acknowledged that today Syria is nothing more
than Iran's Arab vassal state.

Rather than stand up for Lebanon in its hour of need, Sarkozy joined forces
with the Bush administration and the Olmert-Livni-Barak government and
pretended that Saniora and his pro-democracy forces are still in charge of
the country. He pressured Israel to give Mt. Dov to Iranian-controlled
Lebanon in spite of the fact that the territory is both vital to Israel's
security and is part of the Golan Heights. And rather than boycott Syria for
its role in destroying Lebanon, Sarkozy chose to embrace Assad as a
peacemaker.

By doing all of this, Sarkozy argued he would place himself in a position of
acting as an honest broker in talks between Israel and Syria. But of course
like Solana in his constant struggle to find the right mix of concessions to
convince Iran to only enrich small quantities of uranium, so Sarkozy's
concessions to Syria served only to embolden Assad still further.

Assad agreed to come to Paris. But he refused to have anything to do with
Olmert. And then, once he arrived in Paris, he gave an interview to
Al-Jazeera explaining that he wouldn't sign a peace treaty with Israel even
if it gives him the entire Golan Heights. As far as he is concerned, Israel
has no right to expect him to normalize relations. And of course Hamas,
Islamic Jihad, Fatah al-Islam and all the rest of the terror groups living
in Damascus are simply "resistance" groups and perfectly legitimate. And by
the way, Iran, he assured us, is not developing nuclear bombs to the best of
his knowledge.

So in exchange for recognizing the new Iranian-controlled regime in Lebanon
and embracing Syria to the bosom of civilized nations, Sarkozy provided
Assad with an international bullhorn to oppose everything that Sarkozy
claims to be interested in achieving. But now that he's embraced engagement
as his chosen strategy for dealing with Syria and Lebanon, he can do nothing
but proceed with what he started. And so he committed himself to paying a
state visit to Damascus by September.

Neither Sarkozy nor Solana are at all unique. Their associates in Europe,
Olmert and his ministers, the State Department and most US political leaders
support negotiating with rogue regimes that refuse to agree to anything
except the West's need to make more concessions to them. And all of these
leaders, at a certain point, have claimed that those negotiations mustn't be
endangered by more confrontational policies that might actually have a
chance of advancing their national interests.