By Tony Karon
"As I wrote on TIME.com last week, Bush is in no position to bring the Iraq war to a satisfactory conclusion; the U.S. is treading water in Iraq lacking both any reason to believe the current balance of forces there will allow the attainment of U.S. goals, and any leverage capable of altering that balance of power.....
The latter point, really is the key to understanding the current quagmire. The idea of reaching out to Iran has become conventional wisdom in Washington diplomatic circles since the Iraq Study Group report, but it has only been grasped in a facile bound-to-fail sense. So Ambassador Crocker testified that he had talked to Iran on a number of occasions about ending their subversive activities, but to no avail. And this is largely accepted by the liberal hawk camp, while the neocons say told you so......
After all, when Iran retaliates for whatever Bush throws at them, the Iranians are likely to target U.S. forces in Iraq, cutting off their supply lines in Baghdad and targeting them via guerrilla forces in Iraq and medium range rocket attacks. Iran, for purposes of its asymmetrical response to any attack by the U.S. needs plenty of Americans within reach of its capabilities.
And its own survival is a far greater concern for the Iranian regime than the future of Iraq.
There lies the rub: The U.S. cannot stabilize Iraq without cooperation from Iran; the price of such cooperation is normalizing relations with the Tehran regime; the Bush Administration has no intention of doing that, clinging instead to fantasies of regime-change; Iraq remains a nightmare........"
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