Matt Yglesias

15 Responses to “Talk to Iran”

1. otto Says:
   September 16th, 2008 at 8:43 am

   And some influential interest groups.

2. nukev Says:
   September 16th, 2008 at 8:59 am

   I’ve never understood why talking to your “enemies” was bad or appeasement or ??? Hell, tell them to cut the shit or you’ll nuke em’ How is that appeasement? What am I missing?

3. Braden Says:
   September 16th, 2008 at 9:16 am

   I’ve never understood why talking to your “enemies” was bad or appeasement or ??? Hell, tell them to cut the shit or you’ll nuke em’ How is that appeasement? What am I missing?

   Israel doesn’t agree, and that appears to be all that matters in this case. And, by the way, you don’t need to negotiate to communicate “I’m going to nuke you”. You simply position your fleet in the Gulf and run military training exercises designed to simulate an Iranian invasion. That usually does the trick.

4. nukev Says:
   September 16th, 2008 at 9:28 am

   Understand that I’m not advocating making bogus threats or really any other negotiating tactic. I just don’t see where meeting with your “enemy” is viewed as appeasement. I do seem to recall a time when the US and Israel did talk to its enemies.

5. Braden Says:
   September 16th, 2008 at 10:04 am

   Meeting with the enemy is not really a problem if you assume a deal can be reached. However, the Bush administration and the Israelis have already written off Iran as not worth the effort. They’ve been treating the on-going EU-Iran negotiations as just one more way of demonstrating to the world that Iran needs to be bombed. I mean, the most they are offering is “give up your nuclear program and we’ll talk”, which no negotiating partner would ever accept. They need a security guarantee from not only the U.S., but Israel as well. Israel won’t give them that guarantee unless forced to by the US, and the Republicans won’t risk looking like weak allies of Israel during an election season, so you can pretty much kiss any deal goodbye.

   Oddly enough, Obama may be in a better position to achieve a negotiated settlement with Iran if he wins the election by a healthy margin, but under-performs among America’s Jews. That might give the Democratic Party enough backbone to tell Israel to tow the US line.

6. Swan Says:
   September 16th, 2008 at 11:52 am

   It’s really unfortunate that up has become down, and the idea of not talking to foreign nations has become a sound-bite. That’s like saying “cut off your left hand to improve the performance of your right.”

   For what it’s worth, I’m sure the original advocates of this on the Republican side believe that they had a brilliant strategy, and that they are just misunderstood: to them, not talking to Iran was the centerpiece of brilliant psywar, and they can’t understand why everyone else can’t understand it. Not talking to foreign nations might (not definitely, but might) be appropriate at some points, but it looks like the Republicans guessed way wrong this time– out of desperation. They just wanted to use a very thin hand to try to win big diplomatic victories against the Iranians, and when you try to do too much with a thin hand, these are the kinds of hare-brained schemes you sometimes come up with. In that case, it’s the Republicans who are being silly for not understanding why relative liberals were still saying “talk to them” and not going along with the Republicans on it. As usual, Republican delusions of excellence in this field have disserved us.

   The “can do” attitude of the Republicans here wasn’t the kind of “can do” attitude we need, and that’s why they humiliatingly had to back down from their original plan.

7. levitra Says:
   March 2nd, 2009 at 4:42 am

   levitraVery interesting site. Hope it will always be alive!

8. tramadol Says:
   March 22nd, 2009 at 6:02 am

   tramadol
   I want to say - thank you for this!

9. buy viagra online Says:
   March 22nd, 2009 at 10:22 am

   buy viagra online
   It is the coolest site,keep so!

10. brand viagra Says:
    April 2nd, 2009 at 5:03 am

    If you have to do it, you might as well do it right
    buy cheap viagra

11. viagra brand Says:
    April 3rd, 2009 at 4:03 am

    I bookmarked this site. Thank you for good job!
    cheap brand pfizer viagra

12. Ex Girlfiend Says:
    April 8th, 2009 at 4:27 pm

    The style of writing is quite familiar . Did you write guest posts for other bloggers?

13. cheap viagra Says:
    April 9th, 2009 at 5:08 am

    thanks !! very helpful post! viagra

14. Vince Delmonte Says:
    April 15th, 2009 at 3:51 am

    Hey, nice tips. Perhaps I’ll buy a bottle of beer to the man from that chat who told me to go to your site

15. Aolani Says:
    April 16th, 2009 at 10:07 pm

    Badly need your help. Posterity is as likely to be wrong as anyone else.
    I am from Singapore and know bad English, tell me right I wrote the following sentence: “Departure accra airport, accra, kumasi airport, kumasi, tamale airport, tamale.”

    With love :), Aolani.