Resurrection

The danger of engaging with the enemy -Jeff Jacoby

James Baker's Iraq Study Group thinks direct talks with Tehran and Damascus would be a fine idea.

[N]egotiating with Iran and Syria over the future of Iraq is about as promising a strategy as negotiating with Adolf Hitler over the future of Czechoslovakia.

How many times does the lesson have to be relearned? There is no appeasing the unappeasable. When democracies engage with fanatical tyrants, the world becomes not less dangerous but more so.

[Engagement] buys time and legitimacy for the totalitarians, while deepening their conviction that the West has no stomach for a fight.

The war against radical Islam...cannot be won so long as regimes like those in Tehran and Damascus remain in power. They are as much our enemies today as the Nazi Reich was our enemy in an earlier era. Imploring Assad and Ahmadinejad for help in Iraq can only intensify the whiff of American retreat that is already in the air. The word for that isn't realism. It's surrender.
[Boston Globe]