Iran Sets Preconditions for U.S. Meeting

Sen. Barack Obama wants to sit down with the leaders of America's enemies "without preconditions" and "without prejudging" the agenda items to be discussed. He has said so on numerous occasions during the campaign. Under pressure from rivals Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary, and Sen. John McCain in the general election, Obama modified his call for meetings at any price to say that he wants there to be "preparations" before any face-to-face meeting would take place. Someone must have forgotten to give Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the memo. Iran today laid out preconditions of its own that it wants met before any meeting with the United States.

As in any negotiation, Iran's opening offer was set high. The Islamic Republic has a very definite idea of what it wants from the United States for the honor of sitting down in high-level talks with its president. Mehdi Kalhor, Vice President for Media Affairs, said that the United States must first withdraw all of its military forces from the Middle East, effectively ceding control of the world's oil supply to Iran, and drop all support for Israel before any meeting can take place. Until the U.S. agrees to those conditions, Kalhor said, the prospect for negotiations is "off the table."

Iran's demands expose the folly of Sen. Obama's favored policy of talking to enemies on equal footing. Iran has no intention of engaging in serious substantive negotiations with any American president, be it McCain or Obama. Iran wants to advance its interests, which are the acquisition of nuclear weapons, the destruction of Israel, and hegemony over the Persian Gulf region. Obama's strategy of engagement assumes that America's enemies are rational actors that only want what the U.S. wants. This is a dangerously naive supposition. Iran clearly values a meeting with its president more than Obama values a meeting with the President of the United States. That much is clearly seen in the high geopolitical price that Iran wants to extract from the U.S. for the favor.