OP-ED: “It’s Time to Engage with Iran,” by David Ignatius, Washington Post, 26 May 2006, p. A21.

This is damn near a perfect op-ed, so good I desperately wish I would have written it myself--that’s how much I covet it.

I will quote at length. It begins with:

“Only connect.” That was the trademark of E.M. Forster’s great novel, “Howard’s End.” And it’s a useful injunction in thinking about U.S. strategy toward Iran and the wider conflicts between the West and the Muslim world.

We are in the early stages of what the Centcom commander, Gen. John Abizaid, calls “the first war of globalization, between openness and closed societies.” One key to winning that war, Abizaid told a small group of reporters at the Pentagon yesterday, is to expand openness and connection. He calls al-Qaeda “the military arm of the closed order.” The same could be said of the extremist mullahs in Tehran who are pushing for nuclear weapons.

America’s best strategy is to play to its strengths--which are the open exchange of ideas, backed up by unmatched military power. The need for connection is especially clear in the case of Iran, which in isolation has remained frozen in revolutionary zealotry like an exotic fruit in aspic. Yet some in the Bush administration cling to the idea that isolation is a good thing and that connectivity will somehow weaken the West’s position. That ignores the obvious lesson of the past 40 years, which is that isolation has usually failed (as in the cases of Cuba and North Korea), while connectivity has usually succeeded (as in the cases of the Soviet Union and China).

A telling example was the decision to engage the Soviet Union in 1973 through the Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe. At the time, some conservatives argued that it was a dangerous concession that the Soviets might interpret as a symbol of weakness. But the CSCE provided a crucial forum for dissidents in Russia and Eastern Europe, and with astonishing speed the mighty edifice of Soviet power began to crumble. Similar warnings about showing weakness were voiced when President Richard Nixon went to China in February 1972.

I cite this Cold War history because the moment has come for America to attempt to engage revolutionary Iran…

Brilliant, as the Brits say.

Here’s a zinger I love:

Ahmadinejad’s letter clearly had the backing of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In the American context, that’s like having the support of Vice President Cheney for a peace feeler.

Ouch! Another bull’s eye! Ayatollah Cheney. I love it!

Best line (my italics):

My own Iranian sources say there is broad consensus in Tehran that it is time for talks with the United States. “Iran wants to start discussions the same way the Chinese wanted discussions” with Nixon, an Iranian businessman name Ale Ettefagh told me in an e-mail this week. “Great Satan doesn’t sell anymore. More than half the population was not born 27 years ago, and the broken record does not play well.”

The bundles of goodies we need to offer Iran “should stress connectivity--more air travel to Iran, more scholarships for students, more exchanges, Iranian membership in the World Trade Organization.”

An Iranian analysts with the International Crisis Group “noted in Senate testimony last week that opinion polls show 75 percent of Iranians favor relations with the United States.”

The killer ending: “Openness isn’t a concession by America, it’s a strategic weapon.”

Again, couldn’t have said it better myself--not that I won’t keep trying.

Ignatius rules the day on Iran, and Abizaid’s standing as head grand strategist on the GWOT within the military is demonstrated once again. I don’t think anybody gets this conflict better inside the military than Abizaid, and no one articulates it better among the pundits that Ignatius. They show the way at a time when the U.S. public is desperate for such strategic vision.