Noah Pollack being dense as usual is a good opportunity to repeat something:

Why is McCain allowing himself to be dragged into a debate about presidential-level diplomacy, when the more important question — and the question whose answer is more politically favorable to McCain — is whether diplomatic engagement will actually get anything accomplished? McCain should be asking Obama what concessions he realistically thinks he’s going to get from the Iranians upon going hat in hand to Tehran. UN Security Council sanctions have done virtually nothing to impede Iran, nor have EU diplomacy or IAEA reports. Russia and China continue to stand as the major impediments to the kind of UN sanctions that might so cripple Iran that it would give up its nuclear development.

The problem here is that, once again, we see hawks not understanding what diplomacy is. But think of diplomacy as a kind of bargaining. Like you might do at a yard sale or something. Diplomacy doesn’t exist at one end of a spectrum of coercive measures — we try war, we try sanctions, we try diplomacy — any more than bargaining operates on a smooth continuum with robbery. The point of bargaining with a vendor is to see whether or not it’s possible to find mutually acceptable terms that improve both parties’ positions. In terms of diplomacy with Iran, the idea isn’t that Obama’s steely gaze would force concessions out of the Iranians, the idea is that we might be able to give Iran something Iran deems more valuable than weapons-grade nuclear material, and in exchange we would get verifiable disarmament.

The “something” here would presumably be some form of security assurances plus an accommodation to Iranian interests in Iraq, along with Teheran and Washington laying out a pathway to gradual normalization of relations in exchange for an end to Iranian support for terrorism and Palestinian rejectionist groups. Would it be possible to strike such a deal? Maybe, maybe not. But the purpose of a negotiating session would be to find out by attempting to do the bargaining rather than having five more years of back-and-forth blog posts speculating about the possibility. The general theory of diplomacy is that rational actors should, through negotiations, be able to achieve positive-sum settlements rather than negative-sum conflicts. It’s always possible that your would-be negotiating partner will prove irrational (as George W. Bush did when he rejected Iranian peace overtures several years back) and the process will fail, but it’s worth attempting in good faith.

I keep forgetting to link to my Atlantic article on Barack Obama’s foreign policy vision and how one upside of the endless campaign is that it’s helped him develop his voice on these issues.

Washington Post correctly says that John McCain is “distorting history” as he criticized Barack Obama’s pro-negotiations position. The United States really only has two experiences with a sustained effort at the Bush/McCain approach to diplomacy. One would be our effort to deny recognition to Communist China during the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations. This, it’s generally acknowledged, was a strategic fiasco that denied us the opportunity to gain leverage vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. Indeed, it was a fiasco of such enormous proportions that Richard Nixon’s role in undoing it actually manages to stack up in a non-trivial way against his otherwise terrible record in office.

The other is our fifty year effort to starve the people of Cuba into rebelling against Fidel Castro. McCain actually defends continuing this policy, but everyone with a functioning brain understands that it’s been a ludicrous failure. So that’s the path Bush has been taking with Syria and Iran and used to take with North Korea. McCain wants to keep on taking it, put North Korea back under the interdict, and perhaps add Russia to the disfavored list. Like McCain’s apparent belief that it would be better if we’d spent another decade or two fighting in Vietnam, it really calls into question whether he has any understanding of what he’s talking about.

It’s heartening to hear that Syria and Israel are in peace talks. From Israel’s point of view, a stable peace agreement with Syria that reduced the flow of weapons to Hezbollah would be much more valuable than the Golan Heights. And for Syria, accomplishing something concrete like regaining the Golan Heights would be much more valuable than maintaining complicity in the killing of some Jews. A deal of this sort would also, it seems to me, help Syria regain more freedom of action from Iran which I assume is part of the appeal to Damascus.

It’s interesting that Turkey is serving as the intermediary, a minor coup of Turkish statesmanship and perhaps more to the point a reflection of the United States bizarre abandonment of the idea of trying to play a constructive role in the region.

Looks like Lebanon’s political factions have reaches a deal that’s okay with Hezbollah and may pave the way to relieve the atmosphere of crisis that’s been gripping the country. I meant to link yesterday to an excellent point Fareed Zakaria made about Hezbollah:

Hizbullah is not like Al Qaeda, a rootless organization that engages solely in existential terrorism. It’s a homegrown group with deep roots in Lebanon’s Shia community. The organization was formed to oppose Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon and still derives some of its appeal from that history of resistance. It’s since become the voice of the Shia community, which is institutionally discriminated against in the country’s power structures. (Shiites make up between 30 and 40 percent of the Lebanese population, yet are accorded only 18 percent of parliamentary seats.) Finally, Hizbullah runs an impressive network of social services, which provide health care, small loans and family support.

Right. Americans, because of our own situation, tend to look at Hezbollah primarily through the lens of its attitude toward Israel, to its attacks on U.S. troops in the early 1980s, and to its relationship with Iran. But to Lebanese Shiites, the primarily interesting thing about Hezbollah is its attitude toward Lebanon — a country where political institutions structurally disenfranchise Shiite voters. And because political institutions disenfranchise Shiite voters, government social services are undersupplied to Shiites communities. Hezbollah both fills the void in terms of direct provision of social services, and through its lawless behavior and unwillingness to operate like a “normal” member of the Lebanese political process stands up for the interests of a community that’s structurally disadvantaged by the process.

Talk of democracy in Lebanon needs to be put in this context. The pro-western, March 4 Coalition is not, for example, “pro-democracy” in the sense of favoring moves toward a fair voting system. But under the circumstances, it’s hardly surprising if Lebanese Shiites decide that they don’t really need democracy.

Jon Chait has an interesting article arguing that we shouldn’t take the candidates rhetoric about forward-looking Iraq policy all that seriously — both have incentives to try to outline crystal clear positions but, in reality, both would need to respond to some extent to events on the ground.

That’s all very true, but at the same time I think we’re in danger of seeing a tendency toward the smart set actually underestimating the extent of disagreement between Obama and McCain. Part of this is much is being made of the fact that some public statements by some Obama advisors seem to indicate that they are less enthusiastic about speedy withdrawal from Iraq than the candidate’s stated vision seems to imply. A big deal gets made out of this because it’s a newsworthy admission against interest type of thing. A less big deal gets made out of the fact that there are actually a lot of other people associated with the Obama camp who completely agree with Obama’s rhetoric on Iraq. Something like “Obama Advisor Agrees With Obama Position” makes for a terrible article so you get less coverage of the fact that Obama really might just listen to Brian Katulis and Larry Korb and leave Iraq.

More broadly, though, Jon’s article has been given the unfortunate subhead “Ignore what candidates say about foreign policy” even though that’s not what the argument of the column says. But of course “foreign policy” is not equivalent to “ideas about appropriate force levels in Iraq in October of 2009.” Foreign policy includes our relationships with Russia, China, India, Japan and the European allies. It includes our approach to Syria and North Korea. It certainly includes our approach to, say, Iran and it’s clear enough that McCain and Obama have different ideas about Iran. But the course of U.S.-Iranian relations will have a big impact on America’s Iraq policy. The causal line here isn’t totally predictable — Obama’s Iraq policy will depend, in part, on the outcome of his efforts at diplomacy with Iran, but we can’t know what that outcome will be. On the one hand, that supports Jon’s point that there’s a lot of uncertainty here. But at the same time, there are meaningful differences — Obama might work out a good accommodation with Iran but McCain almost certainly won’t, whereas McCain might blunder into a larger war with Iran while Obama almost certainly won’t.

U.S. Air Force photo by Tech. Sgt. Jeffrey Allen