Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has long criticized those who are willing to meet with adversaries of the U.S., slamming Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) for willing to engage Raul Castro of Cuba and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela:

– “These steps would send the worst possible signal to Cuba’s dictators: There is no need to undertake fundamental reforms; they can simply wait for a unilateral change in U.S. policy.”

– “I know that his naivete and lack of experience is on display when he talks about sitting down opposite Hugo Chavez or Raul Castro or Ahmadinejad.”

But today, McCain supporter Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) broke with McCain and told reporters that he is planning personal meetings with Chavez and Raul Castro. Specter said he has met with Fidel Castro three times and boasted of pictures with Chavez:

I met [Fidel] Castro on three occasions, as I detail in my book, and I’d like to see Raul Castro. There’s a real opportunity to get Cuban cooperation on drug interdiction, which I talked to Fidel Castro about. I’d like to follow up on that. I also would like to see trade and tourism develop. [… ]

Then I also hope to see Chavez — that fellow right there, there are three of us in that picture. … I’m a firm believer in dialogue and I think that there’s potential to salvage the relationship with Chavez which would be very helpful in Latin America.

In fact, Specter said he had recently written a letter to Raul Castro. “I think he’ll see me,” he said. Specter recounted that his August 2005 meeting with Chavez had tangible, positive results for the U.S.:

I had a chance to meet with him. There’s a serious drug problem, and I was able to arrange a meeting between the US ambassador and the Venezuelan Minister of the Interior. They worked out a protocol for some cooperation on drugs. … I believe that the conversation that I had with Chavez was a serious conversation.

Does McCain find Specter, the 16th-most senior member of the Senate, to be “dangerously naive?” Is Specter advocating policies that are “dangerous to American national security?” We await the condemnation.

Our guest bloggers are Brian Katulis, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, and Peter Juul, a Research Associate at the Center.

The first problem highlighted in the previous post is that “conditional engagement” fails to outline the precise conditions when U.S. troops would depart –- it’s an exit strategy without an exit. Conditional engagement is a policy proposal that is unsure of what it wants to achieve, besides vague terms like “accommodation” and “sustainable security” – hardly much of an improvement on the amorphous goals defined by conservatives as “victory” or “success.”

The second main shortcoming is that it misreads Iraq’s interests and calculations, which have evolved and changed rapidly in the past few months alone:

2. Conditional engagement assumes that the carrots of continued military, economic, and political support are more appetizing then they are.

Conditional engagement falls into the same trap that the Bush administration has on Iraq for the past five years: overestimating how much leverage the United States has in Iraq and underestimating broader Iraqi opposition to a continued U.S. military presence.

Certainly, there is a lot of posturing going on among Iraq’s leaders these days, and a number of Iraqis who publicly state that they oppose the U.S. presence actually understand that they would not be in power if not for the security umbrella U.S. forces have provided.

But the core of the conditional engagement argument is based upon a presupposition of Iraqi dependency on the United States– a dependency that has visibly weakened in just the last eighteen months, and on several fronts:

- Growing financial independence – Stuart Bowen, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, noted in a recent report that Iraqi government revenues for the 2008 fiscal year will likely reach $70 billion, which is double what was originally projected at the start of the year. Barham Salih, Iraq’s deputy prime minister in charge of reconstruction, reportedly said earlier this month that Iraq didn’t need any additional foreign funding for reconstruction.

- Increasing size and capacity of the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF). Military operations in Basra, Baghdad, Amara, and Diyala this year have all gone much better than previous operations. The overall size of the ISF has reportedly increased by 50 percent from 323,000 at the start of 2007 to a current size of approximately 500,000, according to U.S. government figures. Of course, everyone knows that the Iraqi military lacks key capacities – logistical support, airlift, and basic management structures – and this of course abstracts from a more complex reality posed by multiple independent militias, which are as much of a political problem and a reflection of internal power dynamics as it is a capacity challenge.

This increasing Iraqi capacity demonstrates that perhaps “conditional engagement” is more of a descriptive analysis of the current Bush administration policy, rather than a prescriptive analysis that offers a viable policy for a new administration. The problem with the current policy, as with conditional engagement, is that it never actually describes how to bridge Iraq’s internal divisions. Read more