Clifford May has a great piece up at National Review on last weekend’s Munich Conference on Security Policy. The conference’s slogan, “peace through dialogue,” sounds an awful lot like appeasement to May, but this is clearly the approach favored by Democrats in Congress. Here’s freshman Democratic Rep. Joe Sestak in an question and answer with readers of the Philadelphia Inquirer today:
That [Afghanistan] is the real danger to U.S. security . . . not the civil war in Iraq which can have relative peace if we lead with confidence in a diplomatic effort with Syria and Iran and other regional nations to bring stability to a country once we are out — but remaining strong in the region on our bases in Qatar, Bahrain, UAE, Oman, and Kuwait, carrier battle groups, and amphibious ready groups in the Persian Gulf. We change the incentive for Syria and Iran once we are not present in Iraq from being destructively involved in Iraq, to wanting stability in Iraq so that millions more refugees do not overflow their borders, nor do they become involved in a proxy battle by supporting the Sunnis and Sh’ia in Iraq that represent the majority of their own respective populations of these two “allied” countries.
We just retreat, redeploy, and then negotiate the details with Syria and Iran–peace through dialogue, peace in our time!
