In Baker's world, Iran can be helpful in ending the violence in Iraq, because we all have a stake in a stable Iraq.
In Baker's world, we should talk to our enemies and let's just enter them with no preconditions.
In Baker's world, we have to earn Iran's trust. So any Iranian preconditions to talk are understandable.
In Baker's world, we don't have any proof that oil-rich Iran wants nuclear technology for nuclear weapons. And even it they do, we can deter them as we did the Soviet Union. Surely, we can understand why the want nukes in a dangerous part of the world? I mean, if they are really pursuing them--we wouldn't want to be hasty. Who knows?
In the real world, the reason Iran could be helpful in Iraq is because they are responsible for a lot of the violence. The Iranians are training thugs, sending in their own thugs, and sending money and arms to foment violence:
"The biggest help Iran can make is to stop what they're doing in Iraq right now," a senior U.S. military official, who did not want to be named, told Reuters.
In the real world, Iran is pushing forward with nuclear technology and it won't stop until they have nukes. And Iran knows the West has little stomach to stop them:
Resistance of the Iranian nation in the past year forced them to retreat tens of steps over the Iran's nuclear issue," the semi-official Fars agency quoted Ahmadinejad as saying. Fars is considered to be close to Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards.
Iran has been locked in a standoff with the West over its nuclear program. The U.S. alleges that Tehran is secretly trying to develop atomic weapons, but Iran contends its program is for peaceful purposes including generating electricity.
In the real world there are stone cold killers who just want to murder us in our sleep in mega-deaths. In the real world, Iran is our enemy and has been since they invaded sovereign United States territory by seizing our embassy in November 1979.
The real world is ugly, dangerous, and requires hard choices and difficult solutions taken over long periods of time.
Really, it is nicer to be in Baker's world. In Baker's world we can all just talk about our problems in international support groups and emerge smiling with nicely bound, signed documents, affixed with bright ribbons and wax seals. Proper gentlemen can do that sort of thing, you know. I sure wish I could live in Baker's world.
But even if we can't actually live in Baker's world, we can pretend we live there.
For a while anyway.
UPDATE: The Washington Post doesn't think much of Baker's world either:
[The ISG's] diplomatic strategy is sweeping -- and untethered to reality. The Bush administration could and should adopt some version of the military plan, though it would be right to ignore the unrealistic timetable attached to it. But to embrace the group's proposed "New Diplomatic Offensive" would be to suppose a Middle East very different from what's on the ground.
Why is Baker called a "realist" anyway? Oh yeah, the same reason those who support a Baathist victory in Iraq are called "anti-war."
