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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ManyMoose who wrote (66743)	5/19/2008 4:15:56 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 543588

I might not be quite as much against talking to Iran as McCain is. In fact we have already talked to Iran. What I would be against is strongly seeking high profile, no precondition talks with Iran. Partially for the reasons Lopez lays out and partially because making such an effort makes it look like we are going to Iran begging for talks, and weakens our negotiating position in any such talks. More generally negotiations are often overrated. They can be useful when the positions of two parties are not all that far from each other, or even if they are far, where there is trust, and a strong feeling on both sides that some all around win-win positive result from the negotiations is needed to avoid something really bad. But absent conditions like those they typically fail to achieve anything. Look at the negotiations with the US and North Vietnam. They dragged on for a long time, without deciding anything important, and when finally a treaty was signed it wasn't worth the paper it was written on.