Jaw-Jaw during War-War?

(My apologies to the late Sir Winston for mangling his quote for my own mundane purposes)

I misplaced the link, but I read somewhere today a question about whether we should be negotiating with al-Qaeda.

The keystone to getting along in the world is finding a meeting of interests, if not minds. If as these people claim, Bin Laden and co. “merely” wants the US out of the mid-east, it’ll probably be a while before they get together at the table. The loss of the Saudi government (the inevitable result of said disengagement) would be no skin off our noses, since they’re at least as repressive as anything Bin Laden would like to put in their place. Indeed, as long as we have an agreement with whoever controls the stuff we want, we have, well, the status quo. If only it were that simple…

For the sake of argument, I’d happily shop the Saudis to some other Wahabbist group, albeit on the model of the US disengagement from South Vietnam by simply moving my troops elsewhere, like say Iran, on the condition that the “jihad” bullshit was ceased and desisted from. That would likely keep the Sunnis off our backs, so then just to deal with the Israel issue and the government in Iran.

Well, abandoning Israel is out of the question, but the status quo there isn’t tenable either. Carrot to the Sunni extremists would have to be balanced with one massive dose of Stick to the Shiite factions. Instead of taking the troop dividend from pulling out of Saudi and dumping it straight into Iran, send it into Lebanon (with Israeli Int support at least) and settle Hezbollah’s hash for good and all. I’m sure that some sort of proof of Iran’s involvement (better than that against Iraq, for sure) could be found picking through the wreckage of Hezbollah bunkers and on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard bodies that would be the result.

This would necessitate sorting Syria out, but I think they are amenable to some arm-twisting short of regime change. The last thing I want to see in the current political state of the ME is a decapitation of Syria’s power structure (aka "Son of Iraq"). Hopefully the result would be political justification to launch a decapitating strike on the Iranian government, which is something I’d very much like to see as would, I believe, most of the Iranian population.

I won’t worry about the details of all this since it won’t happen, and in any event I’ll have nothing to do with it. The upshot is that as long as you can reach an accommodation with the bad guys, as long as that won’t make the situation worse than it is or is likely to be otherwise, it’s not out of the question to try.

However, the universal rule of negotiations is to do so from a position of strength, so keep kicking ass while you’re talking so they don’t think you’re doing it through fear or lassitude. US foreign policy is the source of a lot of discontent, but most of that discontent is manufactured for other political purposes and would disappear if the ringleaders could be co-opted. Killing them will just lead to more of the same, but until we have a better option we’d better keep smacking them.