So I sent my case for talking to Iran over to my buddy Brian (recent escapee from the only country that is an oxymoron, "Great" Britain--the only police state in the world that can't seem to manage to police the right people...But I digress....), and he sent back the following comment:
Why bother talking?Let them have the place (and the "fun" that comes with it) and watch
their tough talk come crashing down as they have the "insurgency" spread
inside their own borders. Meanwhile, let the Israelis have their way
with Hizbollah, and come back after five years when Tehran is begging
for detente. :)We get the hell out (we shouldn't have been in there in the first
place), the Iranians get their extended state without having to wait for
Saddam to die, the Israelis get their prime opponent diverted and
weakened, and we get to regroup and figure out how to wean ourselves off
the damn oil stuff in the first place like we should have done back in
the 1970s.
I gotta say, while Bri and I don't always agree (him being a dyed-in-the-cashmere liberal and me being a dyed-in-the-wool conservative), I have to concede, he's got a point.
But I still think talking to the mental deficients in Teheran would be a good face-saving move. At least then they can't write the narrative of our departure. At least then we'll have some editorial privilege when it comes to writing that script. I just never think it's wise to let your enemy do the 'splainin for you. Sure, whatever we say happened in those "talks" will be contradicted or rewritten, but at least if we did talk, there will always be doubt as to whether what they're saying is true. And those who don't doubt it, well, those people don't count anyway, so who gives a shit?
I don't care if all we do is go to Teheran, drink the tea and talk about the fucking weather (during a nuclear winter), or make small talk about the rising cost of healthcare (for those with radiation poisoning). Whatever! Who cares? But to not go, to snub them--despite the fact that they aren't fit to shine our cowboy boots--that leaves them free to talk and talk and talk all the want about why we're staying away, and later, about why we left Iraq.
We can't continue to let a guy who looks like a week-old hairball coughed up by a very sick cat do all the talking, now can we?
Posted by insomnomaniac at December 2, 2006 9:26 PM | TrackBack