Appeasement Run Amok

France - you know, the country that used to be...well, not quite an enemy, but certainly no friend under the corrupt ignomy of the departed and unlamented Black Jacques Chirac, but last fall turned back in our direction by electing the closest thing to a Gallic Reagan that country is ever likely to produce in Nicholas Sarkozy - has decided to take the offensive in the Global War Against Terror by beginning the process of normalizing relations with Hamas.

Pakistan has struck back in its war against al Qaeda and the Taliban by throwing in the towel, effectively ceding several provinces to the Islamist terror network.  The birth of a nuclear "al Qaedastan" now seems to be only a matter of time.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, whether out of sheer insanity or to try and save his own sorry political ass, has offered to more or less unilaterally cough up the strategic Golan Heights back to Syria.

As if this trio desultory developments were a pre-arranged signal, Lebanon has now followed suit on the creation of a de facto Hezbostan, giving Hezbollah veto power over the Lebanese cabinet:

According to the terms of the deal, Hezbollah will be given eleven seats in a thirty-member cabinet — enough to exercise an effective veto over government policies, as the group had demanded. Army leader General Michael Suleiman will be installed as president, a step the parties had agreed to months ago but which had been delayed by the dispute over cabinet seats and other issues…

“We’ve won. We have got what we wanted,” said Ali Badran, a 47-year-old Hezbollah supporter who had joined a tent city erected in protest more than a year ago near the Lebanese parliament as the political crisis deepened. Though the protest encampment had dwindled to a symbolic few, it stood as a sign of Hezbollah’s support in the country’s large Shiite community.

“We were victorious over the American and Zionist project.”

Indeed.  The entire fiasco was a classic case study of appeasement from beginning to end.  The bad guys force the "political crisis," back it up with violence and intimidation, the good guys flinch, flee, and ultimately capitulate, and the bad guys "get what they wanted."  And then it's on to the next "political crisis," and so on, until their ambitions are stoked so high, and the good guys are backed up against the proverbial wall to such an extremity, that the end result is, inevitably, war.  But not just any war, but a war at the time and place of the bad guys' choosing, with the good guys at their weakest and greatest disadvantage.

AP enumerates the near-term implications:

Without two-thirds approval, the cabinet can’t do anything — like, say, demand that Hezbollah finally disarm, just like that nice UN resolution asked them to. In fact, the summit that led to this capitulation was supposed to resolve the issue of Hezbollah’s weapons. The solution: The issue has been postponed indefinitely, although it doesn’t matter since any effort by the government to enforce a disarmament deal would simply be vetoed anyway. As Time puts it, “The new agreement broadly gives Hizballah what it wants: legitimacy as an armed state-within-a-state.” Even the new president the various factions agreed on, Michel Suleiman, is notorious for being soft on them.

A state, thanks to its Iranian masters, that is far better armed than that ceremonial force known as the "Lebanese Army," which has become an effective adjunct to it rather than a legit opponent of it.  With this defensive political power in the Hezbos' hands, and their offensive military power having given them effective domination over Lebanon long, long ago, their decks are cleared for another attack on Israel just as the Jewish state teeters on the ragged edge of self-dismemberment.

Just for the record, gentles, I'm not the only one tying all these adjoining threads together and christening it a trend.  A trend that, as you might have expected, bears the A-OK stamp of approval of our good friends at the U.S. Department of State:

The Bush Administration [!] seemed to try to put the best face on the deal even though it gave more power to Hezbollah, considered a terrorist group by Washington and Israel. Assistant Secretary of State David Welch called the agreement "a necessary and positive step."

 But a step in a much larger diplofantasy Foggy Bottom is calling "the Grand Bargain":

"Many analysts believe that the relationship between Iran and Syria is a purely tactical and transactional one. Implicit in this belief is the idea that if only the United States would make Syria an offer of sufficient size and sweetness, the axis from Tehran to Damascus could be shattered and the Middle East transformed. Syria, in this view, might even join our team.

In exchange for the return of the Golan Heights, and the restoration of its overlordship of Lebanon, Syria would renege on its relationship with Hezbollah, give Hamas the boot, and slam the door shut on Iran. The mullahs would be cut-off from their Lebanese and Palestinian terrorist proxies and isolated completely in the region. The flow of jihadis from Syria would dry up-perhaps in return for a restoration of Saddam’s old largess with Iraq’s oil-and the situation in Iraq would settle down, further isolating Iran from the Arab hinterland. Faced with a united Middle East, the ayatollahs would set their dreams of hegemony and Islamic revolution aside, and give up their nuclear program in exchange for international security guarantees."

This lunacy isn't a house of cards, it's a skyscraper.  What if the relationship between Iran and Syria ISN'T just "tactical and transactional"?  This smells like the same kind of "analysis" that insisted Saddam Hussein (the socialist Muslim apostate) and Osama bin Laden (the rabid theocrat) could never work together (they did) and that Sunni al Qaeda and Shiite Iran were similarly irreconcilable (Iran is hosting and supporting al Qaeda's operations in Iraq and Afghanistan).

Take note of the fact noted in the Fox link that both Iran and Syria praised Hezbollah's Lebanese Anchluss.  Bashar Assad is the junior partner in this alliance and takes his orders from Tehran.  He's no free agent that can pick and choose his friends and switch "teams" at a whim.  Even if he were to be so entinced, what reason is there to believe the the mullahs would just let him jump ship?  Assad may be chinless, but I can't think he's completely clueless; all he has to do is look at the direction of American politics and the ascendant party's determination to abandon the fledgling democracy next door in Iraq to see how much any American alliance offer, no matter how ostensibly "sweet," in exchange for betraying Iran, Hezbollah, AND Hamas is truly worth.  Would said offer include defending Assad's regime against an Iranian-ordered terror reprisal offensive?  Would we be prepared to send troops into Syria not to liberate it, but preserve its Ba'athist dictatorship?  Has anybody at State actually devoted a single brain cell to thinking through this breathtaking nonsense?

Of course not, because they don't have two brain cells to rub together between them.  They assume every player in this hypothetical circle-jerk is as cynically materialistic, and brain-dead passive, as they are.  We buy off Assad, the mullahs do nothing.  Iraq buys off Assad, the mullahs do nothing.  The mullahs who have spent the past thirty years fomenting Islamic revolution across the region, dreaming of conquering the entire planet under the Shiite Islamic banner, waging war against Israel and the West, and are closing in on the nuclear weapons with which they will finally bring these stupendous ambitions to fruition, will sit passively back, let all their gains be reversed without a peep, and then meekly pack in everything they stand for, become just another UN-administered backwater, and take up the Islamic extremist equivalent of golf.

Astonishingly, it was a prominent Democrat - Representative Gary Ackerman, chairman of the U.S. House Middle East subcommittee - who called this sick policy dementia the bullbleep it really is:

"I’m not convinced. It sounds lovely, and it has a sort of logic to it. But it’s a fantasy. The relationship between Iran and Syria is longstanding, durable, and is based on a bedrock of shared interests. This relationship is meant to fulfill each party’s deepest strategic aspirations and regional ambitions. Neither state wishes to live as a second class citizen in a Middle East ordered, organized and run by Washington, Cairo, and Riyadh. They have bigger dreams."

Or, in plain non-diplospeak, Syria's relationship with Iran is not "purely tactical and transactional."  Yes, they really are our enemies; yes, they really have thought through what they think their interests are; and no, they can't be bribed out of them for the right price.

Besides which, they've already attained one of the two biggest enticements - Hezbollah's all-but-formal takeover of Lebanon - and the other one - return of the Golan - has been at least informally offered.  Aren't bargains supposed to be driven at least a little harder than that?

The reality is that little or nothing short of the U.S. Army invading Syria, smashing into Damascus, and giving the "chinless opthamologist" two choices would persuade him that crossing us would be less to his advantage than crossing the mullahgarchy.  Any "sweet deal" he'd just pocket, or more likely pass on to his Iranian "senior partners", and renege on the rest.  Which would trigger an overpowering impulse on our part to....resume negotiations to "sweeten the deal" even more.

I say that, my friends, because that is precisely what Foggy Bottom has been pursuing with Iran itself for (at least) the past two years:

To recount: We were dealing with an apocalyptic regime certain that radical Islam’s global triumph was as imminent as the long lost Mahdi’s arrival any day now. President Bush had said time and again that it was pointless to negotiate with terrorists because they are — surprise! — incorrigible. Yet, Secretary Rice convinced the President that the ball would really be advanced by [drum-roll] . . . direct U.S. negotiations with Iran....

What was the price? What stringent preconditions did Condi Rice persuade the President that we should demand?  A commitment to foreswear, or at least suspend, the development of nuclear weapons?  A commitment to refrain from abetting Iraqi insurgents in the murder of American troops?  A commitment to stop funding Hezbollah, the world’s most adept terrorist organization — and the one that, prior to 9/11, had trained al-Qaeda operatives and killed more Americans than any other?  A commitment to restrain its Revolutionary Guards and Qods force from targeting Americans?  A commitment to retract its threats to wipe Israel from the face of Earth?

Well . . . not exactly.

In the midst of the war on terror, at a time when the express policy of the United States was to regard and treat as terrorists the regimes that sponsor terrorism, in circumstances where Iran was actively coddling al-Qaeda and killing American soldiers, the Bush Administration insisted on . . . no preconditions for negotiating with Iran.

Oh, but we did offer them a "sweet deal," alright.  Did the mullahs swoon in appreciation and gratitude for our good-hearted, generous largesse?  Did they fleece us in public comity and private contempt?

Nope and nope:

[A]s would have been effortlessly predicted by anyone who has followed Iran for the last thirty years, when the mullahs looked at the Bush Administration’s front-loaded, precondition-free offer, they laughed their heads off. They told us to take a $3- (now $4-) dollar-a-gallon hike.

So what did the Bush State Department do?

It gave Iran the civil-aviation assistance anyway. And it continued to sit down with the regime’s diplomats while the regime continued to build nukes, kill Americans, and dispatch Hezbollah to kill Israelis.

That is to say, we not only demanded no preconditions for negotiations; we persisted in patently futile negotiations even as they thumbed our eyes. [emphasis added]

Such was the oceanic depths of Iran's contempt that they didn't deem us worthy of even taking advantage of our abject, incurable idiocy.

Some readers of this space probably think that I'm a rigidly recalcitrant warmonger who has utterly no use for diplomacy whatsoever.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Well, okay, some things are probably further from the truth, but that would still be a vast overstatement.  My view of diplomacy aligns with that of the first German chancellor, Otto Von Bismarck.  It was he who became the most famous practitioner of "realpolitik," in which diplomacy was employed not for ludicrously high-minded foolishness, seditious pacifistic twaddle, or simply the mindless pursuit of process (sharks eat, swim, and make baby sharks; diplomats pump the air full of useless words), but in the aggressive pursuit of national interest.  Bismarck had in mind a realistic objective - the unification of Germany and establishing her as the leading power in Europe.  He also sought to protect that accomplishment via the isolation of her natural enemies, France and Russia, from the rest of Europe as well as each other.

Bismarck achieved all of these goals (almost) entirely at the negotiating table.

You can quibble with those goals, and you can argue that Bismarck was an extraordinary international horse-trader whose diplomatic ledgerdemain was virtually unemulatable.  What no one can deny is that he employed the art of negotiation in the perceived interests of his country, and the end result was good not just for Germany but for Europe as a whole.  It was only after Kaiser Wilhelm II fired Bismarck that all his painstaking diplomatic accomplishments unraveled, and the march to World War I began.

Would that at least the spirit of Otto Van Bismarck, if not (God help us) the skill, could animate any echelon of the State Department, rather than the spirit of Neville Chamberlain.  The latter has permeated Foggy Bottom for decades.  It exhausted and outlasted even the Bush Doctrine.  And it has us backpedaling toward the full-scale escalation of World War IV into the apocalyptic disaster that the continuation of the pre-emptive "medicine" of five years ago could so easily have prevented.

That's before Barack Hussein Obama journeys to Tehran to bow down to the mullahs as President Rodham's personal representative.  And, what's more, if John Sith McCain represents "the third Bush term" (on foreign policy, at least, which is supposed to be his selling point to the Right), how would his presidency differ from Rodbama's other than the symbolic cherry atop the "presidential diplomacy" sundae?

Do you yet see why neither I nor any other conservative can cast a meaningful vote in the 2008 presidential election?  By the time Darth Queeg or Rodbama are finished socializing domestically and retreating abroad, we'll be comprehensively screwed beyond the ability of even another Ronald Reagan to fix.

You know what the biggest irony of all is?  Iranian dissidents are practically begging us to forget "jaw jaw" and let the bombs start falling:

As Barack Obama and John McCain thrash it out over how they would deal with Iran, voices from inside Iran are weighing in with an unusual message: If the United States strikes hard and fast, we will support you.

Emissaries from inside Iran have been meeting with Iranian exiles in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere in recent weeks to deliver this provocative message, which they claim comes from pro-U.S. dissidents at the upper-most levels of the regime.

“U.S. airstrikes must be powerful and sustained enough to break the myth of the regime’s absolute power and reveal the weakness of the leadership,” a former official who traveled outside of Iran recently said.

They're not talking about former Ambassador to the UN John Bolton's limited strikes on Quds Force bases feeding Shiite insurgents into Iraq, or even Iran's hardened and dispersed nuclear facilities, either; they want us to take the head off the snake:

The United States should target the office of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as well as the headquarters of the Revolutionary Guards Corp, the offices of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and that of his predecessor and rival, Mullah Hashemi-Rafsanjani, Iranian sources say.

The goal should be to carry out sustained airstrikes over a 48-72 hour period that would “decapitate” the regime.

Such a strike would send a clear message to the Iranian people and to disgruntled officials throughout Iran’s faction-ridden government that the United States is serious about confronting the regime over its bad behavior in Iraq and is willing to strike the leaders responsible for that behavior, the Iranian sources argue....

“The conventional wisdom is that limited strikes will allow the regime to rally the people around the flag,” says Mohebat Ahdiyyih, an Iran media analyst at the office of the director of National Intelligence.

“However, if the U.S. launches a major strike that goes after the leadership in Iran, that’s different,” he told Newsmax. “Most Iranians hate the regime. People would be very happy to see a major strike that took out the leadership.”...  

And the ultimate endgame of this decapitation strategy?

U.S. airstrikes that target the top leadership of Iran and refrain from extensive damage to civilians or religious targets, could win strong support from the Iranian people for a pro-U.S. coup by the security services, many Iranians in positions of responsibility believe....

Dissidents within the Iranian military and the Revolutionary Guards believe that U.S. air strikes that take out the leadership will open the doors to a coup led by the military that would put an end to the Islamic Republic.

Readers of this space also know that I believe it is years too late for merely "encouraging uprisings" against the Islamic regime, to the degree that that was ever a tenable option.  Also that history shows no examples whereby a country was defeated in war by airpower alone.  Only by putting boots on the ground can power be not just projected, but imposed, which is the prerequisite to true and full "regime change".  Given that we're on the clock of how soon the mullahs can get possession of functioning nuclear warheads, and how close to fruition that process is (as little as three months from now, if they haven't already), and the likelihood of their promptly using those warheads against their enemies - Israel, our European allies, and ourselves - time is vanishingly short for exercising the only option that can avert this apocalyptic scenario: the military option.

Given all the uproar that invading Iraq has incurred, one can understand why the airstrike option would appeal to whatever hawks still exist in the Bush Administration, if any.  Personally, I'm skeptical about the efficacy of a "decapitation" strike - how many times did we try to off Saddam Hussein during the "major combat" phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom? - but if we really don't have the capability of invading and occupying Iran (and God help us if we don't), I think it is worth the gamble.

But despite lingering reports here and there - the latest from Israeli Army Radio - that President Bush intends to keep his promise to de-nuke Iran via air power before he leaves office, the White House again pissed all over that possibility depressingly definitively:

In a statement issued on Tuesday afternoon, the White House said that Bush believed that “no president of the United States should ever take options off the table, but our preference and our actions for dealing with this matter remain through peaceful diplomatic means. Nothing has changed in that regard.”

Some Washington, D.C. analysts take the White House at its word. “The Bush Administration has decided that the nuclear issue [in Iran] should be decided by the next administration,” Patrick Clawson, deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy told the conference at AEI.

Translation: We'll leave the heavy-duty appeasement to our successors.

Exit questions: Is GDub even aware of the policies that are being pursued in his name?  If he's not as abjectly stupid as that would make him, how did he get through that anti-appeasement speech to the Knesset without his nose growing right out the door?

And either way, do you still harbor any lingering doubts of just how screwed we really are?

UPDATE: Et tu, Iraq?:

Iraq’s most influential Shiite cleric has been quietly issuing religious edicts declaring that armed resistance against U.S.-led foreign troops is permissible — a potentially significant shift by a key supporter of the Washington-backed government in Baghdad…

So far, al-Sistani’s fatwas have been limited to a handful of people. They also were issued verbally and in private — rather than a blanket proclamation to the general Shiite population — according to three prominent Shiite officials in regular contact with al-Sistani as well as two followers who received the edicts in Najaf…

A longtime official at al-Sistani’s office in Najaf would not deny or confirm the edicts issued in private, but hinted that a publicized call for jihad may come later.

“(Al-Sistani) rejects the American presence,” he told the AP, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment to media. “He believes they (the Americans) will at the end pay a heavy price for the damage they inflicted on Iraq.”

Ingratitude at best, treachery at worst.  If, of course, the story is on the level.

Makes a convenient new "RETREEEEEAAAAAT!!!!!" talking point for Rodbama, though, doesn't it?