Kerry, headed to Damascus, calls Bush refusal of dialogue with Iran, Syria "a mistake" (2006)

[dirtdigger]

http://www1.whdh.com/news/articles/world/BO37069/

Sen. John Kerry, on a Mideast tour taking him to Damascus for talks with President Bashar Assad, said Friday that the Bush administration's rejection of dialogue with Syria and Iran to try to calm Iraq is a mistake.

Kerry's trip is the latest in a growing tussle between the White House and Congress over the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan panel that called for talks with Iran and Syria to win their help in stabilizing war-torn Iraq.

The Massachusetts Democrat said his visit to Syria was "a fact-finding mission" to explore "what might or might not affect behavior with respect to Hezbollah, Lebanon, Israel and Iraq, where in each of those cases Syria is playing a role."

"Dialogue is an important thing. It's very hard to move the ball if you don't know firsthand what people's needs are, what their own perceptions are," Kerry said in an interview with The Associated Press and several other journalists in Cairo.

[J_White]

good find !

[The Northbreather]

all the world is a stage

[Occam's Banana]

The Second Coming
by William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

[mosquitobite]

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice soundly rejected any talks with Syria and Iran in an interview with The Washington Post, saying any "compensation" they demand would be too high and that they should act on their own if they want stability in Iraq.
Kerry called the refusal to talk to Syria and Iran "a mistake. I think it's the kind of policy that's got us into trouble in the reason and it needs to change."
The former Democratic presidential candidate underlined that he was not engaging in negotiations with Damascus. "Talking to somebody is not rewarding their behavior. I have no illusions about our differences with these countries ... and nothing in the discussion is based on trust," said. "But you cannot get to (action and verifiability) without setting up the modalities. So you have to engage in some dialogue."

So does this mean democrats have to stop believing that talks can fix things?

[dirtdigger]

So does this mean democrats have to stop believing that talks can fix things?

It just means that the Republicrats have one agenda which moves forward no matter which wing is in power. They play good cop/bad cop with the foreign country that is about to be attacked and the party out of power plays the good cop by opposing the war. Had Romney won the 2012 election, this attack would have happened with the Republican supporters arguing for it and the Democrats arguing against it.

[enhanced_deficit]

They dont call him flip flop kerry for nothing.

[Cap]

Forwarded to Drudge.