Blogs For Victory

This doesn’t bode well for Obama’s policy of engagement:

US President Barack Obama’s offer to talk to Iran shows that America’s policy of “domination” has failed, the government spokesman said on Saturday.

“This request means Western ideology has become passive, that capitalist thought and the system of domination have failed,” Gholam Hossein Elham was quoted as saying by the Mehr news agency.

“Negotiation is secondary, the main issue is that there is no way but for (the United States) to change,” he added.

After nearly three decades of severed ties, Obama said shortly after taking office this month that he is willing to extend a diplomatic hand to Tehran if the Islamic republic is ready to “unclench its fist”.

In response, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad launched a fresh tirade against the United States, demanding an apology for its “crimes” against Iran and saying he expected “deep and fundamental” change from Obama.

The truth of the matter is that all tyrannical regimes view a willingness to talk as a confession of weakness – at least in the sense of an unwillingness to fight for something, in this case to fight to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons and/or continue State-sponsorship of terrorism. This is because the sort of people who run tyrannical regimes are the sort of men who view all relations as power relations – with one side to dominate, one side to subordinate. This doesn’t mean you never engage tyrants, but it does mean that any engagement must be done with a clear eye to the sort of people you’re negotiating with.

The election of Obama does mean a change in US foreign and military policy – while Obama will maintain most of what President Bush has established because Bush had the correct general policy line, there will be changes, most notably in Obama’s willingness to send special envoys and in general open talks with regimes who bear the United States exceptional ill will. This has all been tried before and has uniformly failed – tyrants don’t keep agreements and are always working for their own advantage, not for a reasonable community of nations respecting each others needs. But we are going to try it, again, and if we are I hope that Obama at least pays heed to some core principles:

1. If we give, we must get – and we must get before we give. In other words, if Iran wants to open diplomatic ties with the United States, we must first insist upon some solid, verifiable act prior to the opening of relations…such as, for instance, a cessation of Iranian attempts to arm Hezbollah and Hamas with rockets.

2. Realize that any thing they do is designed for their personal advantage, not over concern for justice, truth, human rights, what have you. This can be worked to our advantage because tyrants are also rather greedy and we can purchase agreement – in other words, de-facto bribe them into following a certain, desired line.

3. Stay armed and vigilant – don’t worry about “breaking” an agreement with tyrants. The agreement was never going to be honored in the long haul with them and thus any indication that they are not keeping the agreement should be taken as rock-solid proof that the agreement is now null and void. It can be re-worked through a new round of negotiations, but we must not consider that a treaty with, say, Iran is a treaty such as we might make with Canada – a treaty, that is, where we can expect both sides to make a good faith effort to abide by the terms. Everything is temporary and for expediency with tyrants – and Churchill said, they ride to and fro on the backs of tigers and, at times, even if they’d like to keep a particular agreement with us, they may not be able to for reasons we’ll perhaps never understand.

We have the advantage right now – with Iraq becoming a solid democracy and the prestige and power of our military at a high pitch, we can negotiate from a position of strength and be rather insistent. If we must negotiate – and Obama, our Commander in Chief, says we must – then we must be entirely realistic about it and not carry any notions of the brotherhood of Man with people like the Iranian tyrants.