U.S. Set to Join Iran and Syria in Talks on Iraq

I'm sorry to sound so cynical, but what the Hell are they playing at?

American officials said Tuesday that they had agreed to hold the highest-level contact with the Iranian authorities in more than two years as part of an international meeting on Iraq.

The discussions, scheduled for the next two months, are expected to include Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her Iranian and Syrian counterparts.

The announcement, first made in Baghdad and confirmed by Ms. Rice, that the United States would take part in two sets of meetings among Iraq and its neighbors, including Syria and Iran, is a shift in President Bush’s avoidance of high-level contacts with the governments in Damascus and, especially, Tehran.

This is something that many people, including the Baker Report, have been calling on this administration to do for months. Their response has been to ratchet up tensions and accuse Iran of killing US soldiers, whilst moving carriers within striking distance of Tehran.

And now, going completely against the grain, we get the offer of high level meetings?

Am I the only one to find this a staggering U-turn? Now, there are only two possible things that can be going on here. Either Bush has been ratcheting up the pressure on Iran in order to make Ahmadinejad view this meeting as a sort of last chance saloon. Or, and this is the one the cynic in me finds myself leaning towards, Bush has realised that Iran is not going to as easy a sell as Iraq was and he is going to go through some faux diplomacy before launching his strikes against a Tehran regime that "can't be reasoned with." A bit like the way the Bushites like to tell us that "he tried to go through the UN" before the Iraqi invasion.

The administration are certainly going to some lengths to convince us that they have been engaging in the former, deploying anonymous sources (any more flashbacks to Iraq anyone?) to reassure us that the conflicting signals have been "part of a larger diplomatic strategy for dealing with Iran that verges on a high-level game of chicken."

“We became convinced that the Iranians were not taking us seriously,” said Philip D. Zelikow, who until December was the top aide to Ms. Rice. “So we’ve done some things to get them to take us seriously, so now we can try diplomacy.”

If that was your strategy, why would you now be using anonymous sources to alert the Iranians to your game? Or are they actually warning the Iranians - and by inference the rest of the planet - that this is, indeed, the last chance saloon?

Either way, the Bush regime are about to attempt diplomacy whilst holding a giant gun to Ahmadinejad's head. It's a highly unusual way to conduct diplomatic talks, but with time we'll find out more about what's actually behind this bizarre turn of events.

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Tags: Bush, Rice, Ahmadinejad, US, Iran, Iraq, talks, diplomacy, meetings