White House agrees to diplomatic talks with Iran and Syria

What are we to make of the White House's abrupt reversal on entering into talks with Iran and Syria? As Steve Benen notes, the Democrats have been proposing this for years. The ISG recommended it when they submitted their report. And the left in general has suffered much derision from White House supporters for suggesting diplomacy of this sort might work out better in the long run than dropping a bunch of bombs in defusing Iran. However, Bush and his various mouthpieces have been adamantly opposed to sitting down at the table with "evil doers." So why the sudden complete reversal?

It could be that someone in the administration read the report that indicated our military readiness is already stretched to the breaking point and we simply can't engage in more military adventurism without seriously compromising our ability to answer real challenges should they come up, much less adquately defend our own soil. It could be that Bush lapsed into some kind of sanity and decided to put the greater good ahead of his own political skin. Maybe there's a new common sense virus making the rounds inside the Beltway?

Nah. I think the Gun Toting Liberal put his finger on it. He points to one telling quote in the NYT.

Iraqi officials had been pushing for such a conference for several months now, but Bush officials refused to sign on until the Iraqi government reached agreement on guidelines for nationwide distribution of oil revenues and foreign investment in the country’s immense oil industry, administration officials said.

And I think Matthew reads the tea leaves on this one correctly.

Now that the Iraqi government has reached an agreement to share the wealth of it’s very profitable oil fields it is more than okay for the evil doers in the region to sit at a table and talk with our nation. Is it just me or is this the administration you have to always follow the flow of oil and money in order to find out what they will do next? If that is true then hypothetically, if the oil fields in Iraq started to run dry, President Bush would have our troops home in a matter of days! Why would we need our troops there if it was just a damn desert with no economical value to the Republicans United States of America?

If you think about that last sentence, it might explain why the White House has also ignored Afghanistan until this new resurgence of the Taliban and AQ has become impossible to deny as a meaningful threat to our national security. Meanwhile, Joe Gandelman has more cogent thoughts of his own and as always rounds up the best reactions around Blogtopia.

For myself. I don't really care why it's happening. I'm just glad that it appears Bush took his finger off the nuclear trigger -- at least for the moment. One can only hope this fit of sanity lasts for a good long while.