Critic Watch

From the stark-raving mad department...John Bolton targets his Israel's missiles on Iran again. In Boltonland, Iran already has dozens of nuclear weapons pointed at Israel and the United States Chicago, anything short of pre-emptive warfare is "weakness," and the fact that Iran's presidential elections are tomorrow -- and may actually unseat neocons' favorite whipping boy -- is a reason not for nuance, but for publishing a warmongering op-ed sooner rather than later.

In fact, Bolton crookedly argues that a pre-emptive attack on Iran should actually have occurred under the Bush Administration, which at least did not engage in the kind of "apologetic" outreach that just might undo some of the ill will that a good bombing campaign could generate in the Muslim world. (His answer to the problems that a regional attack on Iran would cause? Unsurprisingly, more bombs!) What is truly unfathomable, though, is that Bolton somehow thinks that we can just attach a nice note of diplomacy alongside the missiles that should rain on Tehran.

Many argue that Israeli military action will cause Iranians to rally in support of the mullahs' regime and plunge the region into political chaos. To the contrary, a strike accompanied by effective public diplomacy could well turn Iran's diverse population against an oppressive regime.

Bomb first, negotiate later.

The other strikingly dense aspect of these two sentences is how utterly -- but unsurprisingly -- Bolton has failed to learn the lessons of Iraq. There is absolutely nothing to back up his blithe assertion that Iranians would most likely "turn against" the regime in the face of an Israeli bombing campaign. The same sort of forecast, equally unsupported by fact, was precipitously used to simply explain away any complicating reactions from Iraqis beyond their relief at the ousting of a tyrant (and one with much, much more blood on his hands than Ahmadinejad). This strategy, of course, proved disastrous in its oversimplification. Millions of Iranians have been rallying during their country's election campaign, but an unprovoked military assault would only sow disorder and antagonism.

It's probably no surprise that AEI's Danielle Pletka would dismiss Obama's speech in Cairo yesterday as mere "jawboning." Her implication, though, is much broader: that basically all efforts at negotiations with nefarious or intransigent actors -- the usual suspects of Iran, North Korea, and Palestine -- are not only wasteful and ineffective "jawboning," but provide a near-treasonous benefit to America's adversaries.

The underlying fallacy of Pletka's argument comes exactly here, in the assumption that negotiation -- the entire act of diplomacy -- is a zero-sum game. No one is arguing that negotiations don't come with trade-offs, or setbacks, or, yes, disingenuousness on the part of one's unsavory interlocutors. But continuing to engage in talks despite these problems is not, as Pletka would have it, to allow these problems to win the day. It is simply giving up.

In fact, Pletka seems more exercised by the medium of diplomacy than of the rotten fruit that she sees it begetting. The question she does not answer, though, is what method besides the "negotiation" and "engagement" that she derides -- and beyond simply giving up talking to other counties -- she would have us employ. Recklessly wielding sticks (or bombs) just limits our options -- and will only make the negative outcomes that she disdains all the more likely.

Obama's Cairo speech, moreover, seems a rather awkward hook on which to hang a denunciation of diplomacy. Obama was not involved in negotiations yesterday; he was making a broad outreach to Muslim populations. This use of "smart power" is a very different exercise than that of negotiating with, say, Hamas. When commentators like Pletka shudder at that latter thought, they are merely misunderstanding both the futility of isolation and the point of "smart power." While Hamas may still rail against Obama's outreach, millions of moderate Muslims heard what the U.S. president had to say. And most of them probably liked it a lot more than what extremists on either side had to say.