Speaking at AIPAC yesterday, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) mocked the idea of direct talks with Iranian leadership, specifically rejecting “sitting down unconditionally with the Iranian president or supreme leader in the hope that we can talk sense into them.”

This morning, top McCain adviser Steve Schmidt also ridiculed the notion of talking to Iranian leaders, disingenuously claiming that Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) is “arrogant” and would be trying to “charm” Iran to change its ways:

Iran is supplying deadly munitions used to kill Americans in Iraq. … Is Senator Obama so arrogant that he believes that he will charm his way into getting the Iranians to change their policies, supporting terrorist organizations?

Watch it:

Today, however, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki announced that next week, he will be making his “second trip in a year’s time” to Iran. Maliki will meet with Ayatollah Khamenei and President Ahmadinejad to discuss “the security pact between Iraq and the U.S.”

Maliki will also address one of McCain’s major complaints — “growing concerns among Iraqis and Americans that Iranian agents are training and arming Shiite militants in Iraq.” Just last week, Adel Abdul Mahdi, Iraq’s Shi’ite vice president, also sat down with Ahmadinejad and discussed “bilateral relations and security issues.”

“[I]t’s hard to see what such a summit with President Ahmadinejad would actually gain,” McCain remarked yesterday. “Such a spectacle would harm Iranian moderates and dissidents,” he added. Will McCain publicly ridicule Maliki and senior Iraqi leaders as “arrogant” and claim they are trying to “charm” Iran?

In a speech before the Israeli Knesset last month, President Bush sparked controversy when he attacked those who would “negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along.” Bush said “we have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement.”

CNN reported at the time that “White House aides” said that Bush was referring to Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) and other Democrats who have “publicly said that it would be ok for the U.S. President to meet with leaders like the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad.” Watch it:

Apparently, Bush too once thought it was “ok” to engage in negotiations with Iran. In his new book, War Journal: My Five Years in Iraq, NBC News correspondent Richard Engel provides excerpts of an interview he conducted with President Bush last year, in which Bush said “we can talk to Iran“:

We can have meetings. Talking is not the problem. We can talk to Iran. But Iran wants nuclear weapons and I’m not going to let that happen. Not on my watch. We tried to have dialogue with Syria, right after the war, didn’t get much.

Like his Secretary of Defense, it’s clear that President Bush once understood that the mere act of talking is not “appeasement.” But now that it’s political season, Bush seems more interested in taking partisan potshots than approaching policy seriously.

There have been a few articles over the past weeks — Lawrence Wright in The New Yorker and Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank in The New Republic — examining the growing debate within Al Qaeda and the broader Salafist community in regard to the appropriate use of violence against civilians in the waging of jihad. As the authors note, this debate was ongoing well before 9/11, but has become more pronounced as Arab publics have expressed revulsion at Al Qaeda’s brutality in Iraq, Pakistan, and elsewhere.

While it’s important not to mischaracterize or overstate the ideological cleavage within Al Qaeda (its Salafist critics do not question the justice of resistance in Iraq, Palestine, or Afghanistan, only the tactics used) this is certainly a welcome phenomenon, one which the United States should cultivate as much as possible. But it’s simply false to claim, as some conservatives are now forwarding, that Muslim opinion turning against Al Qaeda represents a vindication of Bush’s war in Iraq.

Citing the Wright, Bergen and Cruickshank pieces, former assistant to President Bush and current Contentions blogger Peter Wehner grandly declares that “the tide within the Islamic world is turning strongly against al Qaeda and jihadism”:

The causes for this shift include an organic uprising within the Arab and Islamic world against the barbaric tactics of al Qaeda, as well as the success of the Petraeus-led strategy in Iraq, which has been indispensable in aiding the “Anbar Awakening” and which has also dealt devastating military blows to al Qaeda.

In fact, neither article mentions anything about “the Petraeus-led strategy” having anything to do with the “uprising within the Arab and Islamic world against the barbaric tactics of al Qaeda,” let alone with the ideological revolt taking place within Salafism. This is purely Wehner’s invention. It’s also important to note that Al Qaedism has always been a marginal ideology in the Islamic world. To the extent that Al Qaeda had any significant status among Muslims, this was a status granted by President Bush when he cast Al Qaeda as the new Evil Empire after 9/11.

Back in March, Wehner published an op-ed in Financial Times that attempted a similar sleight of hand. “We are also seeing large drops in support for Mr bin Laden,” Wehner wrote. “These have occurred since the Iraq war began.” What Wehner conveniently and understandably neglects to mention is that support among Arabs and Muslims for bin Laden and Al Qaeda skyrocketed because of the Iraq war. This has only begun to change because of the years of Al Qaeda’s unremitting brutality in Iraq which resulted from the U.S. invasion.

Wehner’s argument essentially amounts to a defense of the invasion of Iraq on the grounds that doing so gave Al Qaeda an opportunity to kill thousands of Iraqis and show how evil they are. I don’t find this argument convincing or morally defensible. I don’t think Iraqis would either. I don’t think any decent person would, frankly.

This Wall Street Journal editorial from Saturday is similarly dishonest. Citing the same Wright, and Bergen and Cruickshank articles, as well as CIA director Hayden’s assertion of “significant setbacks for al Qaeda globally,” the Journal wrote:

To certain sophisticates, this is all al Qaeda’s doing: By launching suicide attacks on Shiite and even Sunni targets, and ruling barbarically wherever they took control, the group has worn out its welcome in the Muslim world.[...]

But the U.S. offensives in Afghanistan and especially Iraq deserve most of the credit.

“Certain sophisticates” — you’ve got to love the conservative anti-intellectualism at work here. Among those “certain sophisticates” who grasp the central importance of Al Qaeda’s “ruling barbarically” as the root cause of its delegitimization among Arabs and Iraqis are…the vast majority of Iraq and counter-terrorism analysts, including General Petraeus himself. Petraeus deserves credit for perceiving the change in Iraqis attitudes, and for developing a strategy to take advantage of it, but to credit the surge for the Anbar revolt is to get things exactly backward. It also remains to be seen whether the Anbar strategy, which succeeded by creating bases of power separate from the Iraqi central government, will actually contribute to the long-term stability of Iraq, or continue to agitate against it.

Far from vindicating President Bush’s strategy in Iraq and the war on terror, Muslim revulsion at Al Qaeda’s tactics, and the debates currently taking place among Islamist extremists about the rightness of those tactics, represent a significant refutation of Bush’s strategy. More importantly, in as much as these critiques are being generated from within Islamism, they represent a pointed refutation of the conservative “clash of civilizations” ideology that underpins the war on terror.