[Mb-civic] The strangest bedfellows - Boston Globe Editorial

[William Swiggard]

  The strangest bedfellows

April 20, 2006  |  Boston Globe Editorial

EACH DAY'S NEWS from Iraq highlights a veiled reality: that American and 
Iranian interests overlap there significantly. Iran, which has influence 
on the main Shi'ite factions in Iraq, has declared it will take part in 
talks with the United States about ways to bring stability to Iraq. Yet 
neither Iran nor the Bush administration is eager to acknowledge 
publicly that they need each other to help prevent a full-scale civil 
war in Iraq.

Nonetheless, this need explains the pirouette the two governments had to 
perform when they agreed to discussions about Iraq. The US ambassador to 
Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, who is to conduct the talks with Iranian 
interlocutors, has had to declare that the agenda will be confined 
strictly to Iraq and that instead of engaging in a negotiator's 
give-and-take, he will simply demand that Iran cease arming Iraqi 
Shi'ite militias and transporting Al Qaeda operatives into Iraq.

Obviously, if this were the exclusive content of the talks, there would 
be no talks. The clerical regime in Iran does not need a direct 
encounter with Khalilzad to discover what it is about their meddling in 
Iraq that displeases Washington.

An American-Iranian dialogue about Iraq can only have meaning if it is 
premised on the need for reciprocal actions.

The starting point for such a cooperative rescue operation in Iraq must 
be an overt admission that the sectarian civil war now brewing there 
portends a nightmare for both Iran and the United States. In the past 
month, more than 100 Iraqis a day appear to have been victims of blind 
revenge killings -- Shi'ites being murdered simply for being Shi'ites 
and Sunni Arabs for being Sunni.

President Bush already seems a feckless sorcerer's apprentice to much of 
the world because of the radical disorder his blunders have helped 
induce in Iraq. But the current sectarian purging of neighborhoods and 
villages could yet turn much worse. In the extreme case, the government 
Khalilzad is trying to help knit together would not be able to prevent a 
complete dissolution of the Iraqi state.

And, as Khalilzad has warned, Iraq's neighbors would then be sorely 
tempted to intervene, if not with uniformed armed forces then with 
irregular proxies.

This prospect would not only signify a complete collapse of Bush's 
much-trumpeted vision of democratization in Iraq and the surrounding 
region, it would bring a regional war between Shi'ites and Sunnis to 
Iran's doorstep.

The Americans can go home when that war starts. Iran cannot. So no 
matter how spiteful Iran's leaders may be toward the United States, it 
is in their vital national interest to help the United States save Iraq 
from the disasters that now threaten.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2006/04/20/the_strangest_bedfellows/
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