Appeasement in Iran?

Michael Ledeen asks why the Bush administration seems to trying to appease the Iranians.

The same holds in our as-yet undefined policy towards Iran, which is arguably the most important single component of the war against terrorism (this follows logically from the uncontested fact that Iran is the world's biggest supporter of international terrorism). While the president has made many statements about the evils of the mullahcracy in Tehran, he has not only failed to carry out any action against the Islamic republic, he has repeatedly authorized unannounced meetings with Iranian representatives, in a futile effort to work out some kind of deal by which Iran would promise to limit its support for terrorism, especially inside Iraq, and we would promise, or hint, or imply, that we wouldn't attempt to support democratic revolution in Iran. These talks have been going on throughout the five years of Bush the Younger, many of them under the auspices of Ambassador Khalilzad, whose conversations with the mullahs have now been publicly acknowledged and formally approved.

It's hard to imagine what President Bush expects to gain from this little announcement, or indeed from talks with the Iranians. The last time Ambassador Khalilzad went in for extended talks with the mullahs, he produced a triumph of unnecessary appeasement: the proclamation that Afghanistan would be called an "Islamic republic." It seemed to me at the time that this was not at all what the president had had in mind, but it seems to me now that I was clearly wrong. For if W. really intended to take a stand against the Iranian regime, he would not have approved Khalilzad's (shameful, in my view) preemptive surrender to Iran's most important diplomatic goal, nor would he have rewarded Khalilzad by sending him to Baghdad, nor would he approve of the public announcement of a new round of talks with the mullahs.

But the Islamic republic will never do anything to help us, or our soldiers, or our allies. The Iranians themselves have no doubt of their role in the contemporary world: They see themselves as our gravediggers. "Following the downfall of Communism, today, only Islam stands against America's imperialism," says Yahya Safavi, the head of the Iranian national-security Council. And he means it.