Quagmire Quandary You Choose

Our leaders will have no one to blame but themselves if what goes down this weekend in the Middle East ends up being a love feast for a power grab in the middle east. This meeting between the leaders of Iraq, Syria, and Iran is a good thing but I hope that it is a genuine effort on the part of the leaders of Iran and Syria to stem the tide of violence in Iraq and help them stabilize that country thereby leading to a more stable middle east.

You know things have a way of backfiring on you especially when the things that you do are not right to begin with. So now we are in Iraq where there were no connections to Al Qaeda in regards to 9-11 and there were no weapons of mass destruction but we have created a potentially explosive situation.

Here you have Ahmadinjad whom is believed to be building nuclear weapons and supports terrorists groups. Then there is Assad who also supports terrorists groups. Not only are we in a quagmire or as Kofi Anan said today “trapped in Iraq” we may find we are also in a quandary. What happens when these leaders meet with the Iraqi prime minister this weekend it turns out to bring an un-welcomed unity between these countries in the region? And not to mention the events in Lebanon where the Christian representative in their parliament because he challenged Syria’s involvement in Lebanon’s government was assassinated and where there is a move by Hezbollah, the terrorist group supported by both Iran and Syria, to topple the Lebanese government. What happens if all these events line up to be a power consolidation move? Oh joy. Then what we have essentially created in our haste to get into Iraq is the beginning of a new Muslim nation, Shiite dominated ruled by Ahmadinejad. Worse case scenario. Now look at what we have gone and done.

It’s all about engagement. You have to engage your enemies. Especially when the stakes are so high. Enemies have mutual respect for each other as long as you don’t cross their line. In this case invade their sovereignty. I respect your power and you respect mine. When you engage your enemy neither one will come to the table expecting to relinquish anything but when you get up from the table you have a new found respect for each other and we can come to some kind of understanding and some agreements. And this is the failure of our leaders, the failure of engagement.

If you sit down with these leaders you gain their respect because at least you were willing to treat them as equals as they should be treated because they are in leadership positions, and treat them fairly. When you engage diplomatically with these leaders, they can express what their positions are and our leaders can express our position, all the cards are on the table and we can negotiate our way to peaceful resolutions.

In the absence of this scenario we get the results that have been playing out in the Middle East. No diplomatic interventions, no willingness to work out differences, no peace. Thus we are on course for a potential power consolidation unlike anything we have seen in our lifetime. I suspect though that the true force behind this weekend’s summit is the Baker-Hamilton Commission, the hidden hand of diplomacy.

With so many things being said about Ahmadinejad it would be nice to hear that he is not what is being said about him in the media. Some reports I read say he is not building nuclear weapons for malicious reasons while other reports say that he is. I hope this meeting this weekend will prove that he genuinely wants to be a part of the world community and play his part along with Syria’s Assad to bring peace and stability in that region