Gerard Baker, in the Times of London, hashes over the question of whether the United States should respond to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's oddball letter by negotiating unilaterally with the Iranian regime.
That's the course advocated by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger. This much can be said for their argument: The likely downsides of military action against Iran are serious, not least the possibility of alienating the Iranian people, the large majority of whom currently seem opposed to the mullahs' regime; and a diplomatic agreement, if it could be reached, would be desirable. Against this view, it has to be said that the British, French, and Germans have been negotiating with Iran for several years, with no positive results at all. Albright and Berger don't give us much reason to believe that U.S.-Iran negotiations would be more productive; they just hope so.
Baker contributes to this debate by pointing out that there is another downside to negotiating:
So why not [negotiate]?
The answer is that before embarking on any diplomatic (or for that matter military) initiative, you should be assured of a reasonable chance of success, otherwise, the process itself becomes larger than the objective you are trying to achieve and can bog you down in a futile exercise. In the meantime the other side gains simply from the passage of time.
If the Iranians seriously demonstrate a willingness to abandon their military ambitions, then by all means talk to them. If all they want is to exchange views about the iniquities of the war in Iraq, the historical unreality of the Holocaust and the merits of the continued existence of Israel, the U.S. would be well advised to politely decline.
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