It's the Diplomacy Stupid

I have been biding my time before commenting on the Surge. There has been more than enough commentary on it and I didn't have anything useful to add to the debate as it was framed. While I was very interested to see the Senate take up the debate and heartened to see Republicans coming out with their own positions.

The problem is that most of the focus has been on opposing the surge (with the question for most Senators being how much to oppose it). There have been plenty of strong arguments that the surge won't work, but little in the way of explaining why the surge would actually make the US worse off. Now we are beginning to see that the surge really isn't more than a gradual increase of one brigade a month (see "Iraq 'surge' little more than a trickle so far" ).

The critics are quite right in saying that an increase in troops won't make a difference, but they are misdirected in their opposition to the so-called "surge". Rather than putting their opposition to military deployments at the fore, Senators need to start jumping up and down about the lack of diplomacy. Perhaps those who are not running for president will move in this direction.

There is increased reason to think that diplomacy is not a dead end road. Syria is calling on the US to engage in negotiations (see "Syria can help quell Iraq violence, Assad tells ABC News") and Saudi Arabia is holding talks with Iran (see "Rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran now talking"). The doors of international diplomacy are rarely opened wider than this.