Just Another Brick in the Wall

I've been scratching my head for many hours now trying to figure out exactly what Obama was saying on Fox yesterday. When asked about his promise to speak on a presidential level with Iran he said that the last eight years of the Bush Policies hadn't stopped Iran from building their nuclear program. He also said that the point of direct talks with Iran is to show the world that the U.S. is open to negotiations and if there is no progress it is not the fault of the U.S. (i.e. After all, we tried to negotiate with the Psycho, he just won't listen to reason - my words, his implication).

I walked away from this interview with the strangest feeling that something really didn't add up. Then it hit me. Obama confessed that direct talks with Iran would produce no tangible results - and he knew that! See what I'm getting at? He says that the Bush policies allowed Iran to continue building nukes, but also confesses that his plan to talk to Iminthemoodforjihaad would have absolutely no more success than what's been tried to date. The only reason to have these talks would be to give the impression that the U.S. is not the obstacle to progress.

Indirectly, Obama has confessed that his plan would do nothing more than what the McCain team has been saying all along - these talks would only lend legitimacy to our enemies.

I wish that the McCain camp could say it better than I did in that last paragraph, but the people in this country don't seem to have the attention span to hear more than once sentence. I'll explain it anyhow and maybe someone from McCains campaign will pick up on the argument.


To date, the only claim Iminthemoodforjihad can make to the Iranian people is that they have the right to develop their own nuclear weapons - regardless of the fact that they signed on to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty [when Iran signed the NPT is unclear, but the treaty has been in effect since 1968]. One also has to understand that the Iranian media is a state controlled entity. The people of the country get virtually all their news from the government. If a sitting President of the U.S. (or any other country trying to block their entry to the nuclear family) would make an appearance with Iminthemoodforjihad, the headlines in Iran would read that their push to build nuclear weapons has succeeded into forcing the U.S. and it's allies into negotiating. That they scared the U.S. so badly that we had no choice but to negotiate. What's said at the meetings would be irrelevant - they would claim victory on nothing more than the idea that we called a meeting.

For those that have never negotiated a large business transaction (I've participated in several mylti-million dollar deals), there is one simple rule to negotiating - you can't win if you don't have the upper hand. You have to have something that the other wants. For example, you have to be better than your competition, faster than the competition, or be able to meet some other specific condition that the client demands (like being green-friendly or being able to meet a specific budget number). Political negotiation isn't all that different. You can't get what you want from your enemy if you don't have something they want. You can't go into the negotiation with nothing more than the hope that they will be reasonable. Kennedy tried that with Khrushchev and the result was the Soviet Union saw Kennedy as weak. This soon led to the construction of the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Those that don't study history are doomed to repeat it.