Why talk with Iran?

Here is my Creators Syndicate column on how to deal with Iran. And here is the latest offering on Iran from the invaluable Michael Ledeen, on National Review Online, with a link to Der Spiegel's interview of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

It is astonishing to me that so many people are treating Ahmadinejad's letter to George W. Bush as an invitation to dialogue, when it is no more an invitation to dialogue than Mein Kampf. A high-ranking Bush administration official has told me that the most important lesson to be drawn from our experience with Iran since the mullahs' revolution of 1979 is that there is nothing to be gained from negotiating with so-called moderates in the regime. But the people urging negotiations with Ahmadinejad do not even claim he is a moderate. They seem to assume that we lose nothing by negotiating publicly. But we do. Here is a good analysis of the reasons by David Frum.

UPDATE: One of the perils of blogging is that you can quickly be overtaken by events. Just as this post was written, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in a speech announced that the United States would enter talks with the Iranian regime if it stopped all uranium enrichment. Predictably, the Iranian regime replied that it would enter talks only with "no preconditions." The Wall Street Journal editorial page takes a dim view of this; "Ahmadinejad gets the direct talks he wants" is its subhead. I'm more sanguine. It seems to me that Rice has laid down a line in the sand—no talks if you continue enriching uranium—that will tend to prevent direct talks rather than authorize them. Nor do I think that the Iranian people will take this as a U.S. legitimatization of the mullahs' regime. But then I tend to have an optimistic temperament.