Super fly smart guy Michael Oren (O yeah! He got game!) shares that talk isn’t always cheap (not to be confused with talking trash).

“The issue of American dialogue with Iran featured prominently in Friday’s presidential debate. Barack Obama pledged “to engage in tough, direct diplomacy with Iran.” John McCain denounced that notion as “naive” and “dangerous.”

This exchange capped a week in which five former secretaries of state, including Henry Kissinger and Colin Powell, called for talks between the United States and Iran, and when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad assured the United Nations General Assembly that “the American empire is reaching the end of the road.”

Amid all of these declarations, though, few questions were raised about the possible benefits of U.S.-Iranian talks as well as the potential pitfalls. What, for example, would be the talks’ objectives — to moderate Iranian behavior and renew Iranian-American relations or, more broadly, to recognize a new strategic order in the Middle East?

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The security situation in Peshawar, the capital of Pakistan’s turbulent Northwest Frontier Province, continues to deteriorate as the Taliban conduct several high-profile strikes in the city. The chief US diplomat in Peshawar evaded an assassination attempt today as the Taliban bombed a school and police station in the city.

The assassination attempt occurred on the streets of Peshawar as Lynne Tracy, the Peshawar Consulate’s Principal Officer, was driving from her home to the consulate. “Unknown gunmen” used a Land Cruiser to block the street Tracy’s vehicle was driving on, forcing it to stop. The gunmen opened fire on the car as the driver slammed it into reverse and escaped the scene of the attack. The vehicle was bulletproof; neither Tracy nor her driver was wounded.

The attack required some planning and scouting of Tracy’s movements throughout the city. The ambush was said to have been carried out close to her home, limiting the number of alternate routes that could have been taken to get to the embassy. The Taliban are known to favor Land Cruisers as their vehicles of choice.

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Unlike the previous Gulf War, the United States mustered a smaller coalition of nations willing to engage in the liberation of Iraq prior to the invasion in 2003. Much has been made of the weaknesses in the international alliance, in so far as it did not include powers such as Germany and France, two pivotal players on the European mainland. Germany and France, for reasons cultural, strategic, and financial, where unwilling to work with the Bush administration’s stated goals for dealing with Saddam Hussein’s government in 2003, and this has plagued relations between the U.S. and its traditional allies in Europe since.

Yet, other European nations bucked the leadership coming from the old continental forces. A number of these “new” European states were formerly members of the communist Eastern-bloc, and sided with the American mission to topple Iraq’s totalitarian government and establish a democracy in its remains. One of the key nations in this union was Poland, lead by Aleksander Kwasniewski’s government, which headed the nation between 1995 and 2005. (more…)

“Trust but verify.” Those were the watchwords of President Ronald Reagan when he embarked upon the historic series of negotiations with the Soviet Union that would culminate with the START I Treaty designed to reduce the numbers of nuclear weapons deployed by the United States and Soviet Union. Today a tempest in a teapot has ensued over President Bush’s remarks before the Israeli Knesset comparing negotiations with hostile foreign dictators as tantamount to Neville Chamberlain’s alleged “appeasement” of Adolph Hitler at Munich in 1938. (more…)