I read George Parker’s article on Sunday and agreed with some of it but totally did not agree with his Iraqi strategy. And then I saw this and thought it sounded very similar to Parker’s proposal. I couldn’t believe that they are really going to propose that we bring Iran and Syria into negotiations, the same Iran who said this and the same Syria that is trying to topple the government in Lebanon. Unbelievable, sometimes I feel like Alice in Wonderland.
So, from Parker’s article, this part made sense:

…James A. Baker III and Robert Gates, can lead the way out. These are the same men who, fifteen years ago, abandoned Afghanistan to civil war and Al Qaeda, allowed Saddam to massacre his own people, and concluded that genocide in the Balkans was none of America’s business. They are not the guardians of all wisdom. At some point, events will remind Americans that currently discredited concepts such as humanitarian intervention and nation-building have a lot to do with national security-that they originated as necessary evils to prevent greater evils. But, for now, Kissingerism is king.

Yes, I agree that we can’t return to the way we used to run foreign policy and I also agree that the Democrats have no idea what they are doing:

And the Democrats? Since winning the midterms, they have been talking about the endgame in Iraq with a strangely serene sang-froid. Last week in the Times, John M. Deutch, who was the director of Central Intelligence under President Clinton, praised the nomination of Gates to replace Donald Rumsfeld, and added, “The consequences of withdrawal need not be catastrophic to American interests in the region.” Also last week, on National Public Radio, Representative John Murtha, the Pennsylvania Democrat who was an early supporter of withdrawal, casually offered that, if Iraq were to fall apart in the wake of an American departure, “I don’t think it’ll be any worse” than the partition of the Indian subcontinent. A million people are estimated to have died in 1947 during the movement of Muslims and Hindus across the newly drawn India-Pakistan border. Sixty years and several wars later, the two countries confront each other in a nuclear standoff, trade charges of subversion, and periodically exchange fire in the Kashmiri Himalayas.

And he makes a very good point here about reducing troop levels:

It is true that the presence of American troops is a source of great tension and violence in Iraq, and that overwhelming numbers of Iraqis want them to leave. But it is also true that wherever American troop levels have been reduced-in Falluja and Mosul in 2004, in Tal Afar in 2005, in Baghdad in 2006-security has deteriorated. In the absence of adequate and impartial Iraqi forces, Sunni insurgents or Shiite militias have filled the power vacuum with a reign of terror. An American withdrawal could produce the same result on a vast scale. That is why so many Iraqis, after expressing their ardent desire to see the last foreign troops leave their country, quickly add, “But not until they clean up the mess they made.” And it is why a public-service announcement scrolling across the bottom of the screen during a recent broadcast on an Iraqi network said, “The Ministry of Defense requests that civilians not comply with the orders of the Army or police on nightly patrols unless they are accompanied by coalition forces working in that area.”

But when he made this point he lost me:

Though it may well be too late, politically a new Iraq policy is finally possible. It should use every ounce of America’s vanishing leverage to get the Iraqi factions, including insurgent and militia leaders and their foreign backers, to sit together in a room, with all the vexing issues of political power and economic resources before them.

Negotiate with Al Qaeda? Is that what he’s suggesting? How do you negotiate with a group that wants the world to be under the rule of Islam? And we see how well negotiations are going in Thailand and in Palestine.
And this doesn’t sound like someone who is willing to negotiate unless we want to hand over the White House:

Al-Qaeda’s Iraq chief threatened on Friday in an audio message posted on the Internet that the terror network will “blow up the White House.”

“We announce today the end of a phase of the jihad [holy war] and the start of a new one … to usher in the project of an Islamic caliphate and restore Islam’s glory,” Abu Hamza al-Muhajer said in the message.

“We swear we will not rest from our jihad … before blowing up the filthiest house, dubbed the White House,” in the course of establishing the caliphate which began with the proclamation of an Islamic state in Iraq, he said.

The authenticity of the message could not be independently confirmed.

“The location chosen by your mujahidin brethren to set up their state … is but a stepping stone for the leap,” Muhajer said, referring to the “Islamic state of Iraq” proclaimed last month.

An alliance of Sunni insurgents headed by the Iraq branch of al-Qaeda announced the creation of an independent Islamic emirate in Iraq in a video posted on the Internet on Oct.15, after parliament in Baghdad approved a federal Constitution for the war-ravaged country.

The idea of negotiation sounds as helpful as this one. (This wouldn’t work with a lame duck president anyway. Maybe he would be interested in someone who has a parent in line for the White House, someone like Chelsea Clinton.)
But thank the Lord, Bush hasn’t lost his mind:

U.S. President George W. Bush on Tuesday ruled out any talks with Iran until it suspends its uranium enrichment program, and said Iran and Syria should not destabilize the fledgling democracy in neighboring Iraq.
“Iran knows how to get to the table with us,” Bush told reporters during a visit to Estonia. “And that is to do that which they said they would do, which is verifiably suspend their enrichment programs.”
[…]
Speaking at a news conference before heading to a NATO summit in neighboring Latvia later in the day, Bush also accused Iran and Syria of undermining the government in Lebanon.
“That government is being undermined, in my opinion, by extremist forces encouraged out of Syria and Iran,” Bush said. He added that a democratic Lebanon “will be a major defeat for those who articulate extremist point of views.”
[…]
“I hope their talks yield results. One result that Iraq would like to see is for the Iranians to leave them alone,” Bush said. “If Iran is going to be involved in their country they ought to be involved in a constructive way – encouraging peace.”

And here is further proof that Iran would be the wrong nation to bring into a negotiation to stabilize the region:

Iran has allegedly played a key role in uniting Hezbollah with the Mahdi Army. Syria has also cooperated, but it is not clear whether senior government officials knew of the arrangement. Although Iran wants a stable Iraq, it apparently made a decision it could benefit from short-term instability in its neighboring country to discredit the United States.