Peace Not Near on Middle East’s “Time Horizon”

posted on PRA Right Web rightweb.irc-online.org

Peace Not Near on Middle East’s “Time Horizon”
By Leon Hadar | July 30, 2008


Members of Washington’s band of foreign policy realists are high-fiving each other these days. First there was the news that the Bush administration decided to have Undersecretary of State William Burns sit in the same room in Geneva with Iranian nuclear envoy Saeed Jalili and high-ranking diplomats from five other countries and try to negotiate a deal to suspend Tehran’s plan to continue with uranium enrichment.

And then came reports that Bush agreed to set a general “time horizon” for the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraq as part of a long-term security accord that Washington is trying to negotiate with Baghdad.

If these moves seem odd, it’s probably because they came from the administration of President George W. Bush, the man who just recently compared those who would engage Iran to the “appeasers” who talked to Adolf Hitler in Munich. In the past, both Bush and the presumptive Republican presidential candidate, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), have taken swipes at presumptive Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL), for proposing that the United States and Iran hold direct negotiations—the same kind now being conducted in Geneva. And Bush and his supporters in Congress and the media have also long derided as dangerous any timetable for troop withdrawal, adamantly fighting efforts by congressional Democrats and other “defeatists” to impose what he described as “artificial” timelines for a U.S. force pullout that would supposedly play into the hands of al Qaeda and deprive America of its “victory” in Mesopotamia. (see the rest)

And here is a link to my TAC's Losing Afghanistan.

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