Condi Comes Back

Three cheers for Condi Rice. After a lot of dancing around, the U.S. and Iran are apparently finally going to talk. In a group, if not yet one-on-one.

Rice confirmed Tuesday that U.S. diplomats would take part in regional talks on Iraq with a number of countries including Iran as well as Syria, which the Bush administration has also lately been boycotting. This is a potentially important victory for pragmatists within the Bush administration against the hawks who prefer unrelenting pressure on Iran and Syria.

Special Iraq envoy David Satterfield will be present at the first round in March in Baghdad, and Rice will be there for the second round in April, probably in Istanbul. The talks with Iran and Syria will be indirect and focused on Iraq, but it's a hopeful beginning toward expanding the dialogue to other issues of critical importance to the Middle East's future. With Rice extending an olive branch, in line with a Baker-Hamilton recommendation that the White House has largely ignored until now, the onus is on Tehran and Damascus to show that they are not the spoilers.

In the run-up to the meeting that will involve Rice and her Iranian counterpart, Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki, all eyes will be watching whether Tehran shows conciliatory signs on issues like aiding militant groups in Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine as well as on the dispute over Iran's nuclear program. Similarly, the U.S. and its Western and Arab allies will be carefully monitoring whether Syria makes any provocations, especially pertaining to the tense standoff in Lebanon between pro-democracy forces and groups backed by Syria and Iran.

There is a large number of explosive, interrelated issues in the Middle East that require Iranian and Syrian cooperation to settle--Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict among them. Many people rightly feel that part of the problem has been Bush's refusal to engage either country through diplomacy. Last summer's war in Lebanon, essentially a geopolitical proxy war between the U.S./Israel and Iran/Syria, shows the uselessness of settling issues through the barrel of a gun. Now that there seems to be an opening for diplomacy, however tentative, it is an enormously important moment for Tehran and Damascus to show whether they want to be part of the problem or the solution.

--By Scott MacLeod/Cairo