Remember how the Iraq Survey Group report suggested we ought to strengthen Iraq’s moderates and negotiate with the insurgency’s national sponsors–Iran and Syria–to bring it under control? The ISG report just wasn’t wrong enough for some “experts”, who want to skip the middlemen and negotiate directly with the terrorists. Problem is, the terrorists don’t want to negotiate, their demands are laughable, and they can’t carry out their promises to disarm.

Despite a cringe-inducing headline (”Talks with radicals called key to ending violence ; U.S. must negotiate with insurgents and militias, experts say”), this San Francisco Chronicle report actually has a lot to recommend it.

The focus is too much on these experts with the International Crisis Group, which is a Brussels-based think tank with George Soros, Wesley Clark, and LGF’s favorite EU bureaucrat, Chris Patten, on its board. They advocate U.N.-mediated talks with every insurgent group except Al-Qaeda.

That’s not all that surprising, is it? What is revealing is the Chronicle’s attempt to actually find out what the insurgents would be willing (and able) to bring to the table. They asked some insurgents. The answer? Nada:

* The Sunni/Nationalist insurgent bloc, fronted by former Saddam strongman Izzat Ibrahim (Al-Douri), won’t even talk to us because of what “we” did to Saddam. Two insurgency-linked Baathists (not Izzat) told the Chronicle no dice:

However, the chaotic Dec. 30 execution of Hussein stoked the insurgents’ anger against the United States and soured them on direct talks with Americans.

“After the execution of President Saddam, now the Baath Party and all resistance groups reject any negotiations with the United States,” said the former army brigadier general.

* The Sunni demands–as relayed by the same general–are also ridiculous. For example, no Shiites:

the insurgents’ demands seem to leave little ground for compromise. The former Republican Guard general said the current government must be dissolved and replaced with “a military or political command council.” He did not explain how this council should be chosen, except that it would be made up of “patriotic Iraqis” who are “not loyal to Iran” — a demand that presumably excludes members of the leading Shiite organizations.

* The Shiites are willing to negotiate but their demands are no more realistic, including a de facto hall pass for their death squads:

“The American government must give the Iraqi government complete sovereignty, which means that the Iraqi army will have the authority to strike the takfiri Baathists with an iron hand, without any interference from the Americans,” said Hadi al-Amiri, leader of the Badr Brigade, a Shiite militia that has been largely incorporated into the Interior Ministry and, along with al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, is widely blamed for death-squad attacks on Sunnis.

* Neither of these parties can even control the extreme de la extreme within their ranks:

None of the Iraqis interviewed for this article had a plan for disarming his side’s most sectarian killers.

* And unlike the experts in the International Crisis Group, the “politically sophisticated radicals” are themselves losing hope that a negotiation could work:

“I don’t know anymore if it’s possible to stop this slide toward sectarian civil war,” said Wamidh Nadhmi, a political science professor at Baghdad University who is a leader of the National Foundation Conference of Resistance to the Occupation, a coalition of mostly Sunni and secular nationalist political groups.

When weighed against the downside of legitimating the insurgent groups by negotiating with them, the advantages of the Crisis Group’s proposal appear vanishingly small.

Kudos to the Chronicle for a critical look at what the “experts” said, even if their headline miscast the significance of the article.

PS: Why do I think any negotiations would in reality just turn into a more violent version of this?

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