Also on the MOU

I will also comment that, of course, I think it was stupid to negotiate a settlement that depending on Israel's compliance without consulting Israel.  However, when you get to be my age, you recognize it as not an extraordinary, unprecedented sort of stupidity, but as a perfectly ordinary, routine stupidity that we have fallen into all too often.

Back in Cold War times it was an absolute dogma that we must learn the lessons of Munich.  Diplomacy did not work in dealing with Hitler and therefore would not work in dealing with [fill in the blank].  Some actors were deemed morally unworthy of talking to lest it convey some sort of legitimacy on them.  This meant that diplomacy had not place in our toolkit in dealing with certain actor, but was deemed "appeasement," which didn't work at Munich as therefore must never be attempted again.

Of course, some bad actors were so big there was just no getting away from negotiating with them.  The Soviet Union was the prime example.  We included diplomacy in our toolkit in dealing with the Soviet Union at least since Stalin died in 1953.  For a long time Communist China was deemed morally unworthy to talk to, so we firmly insisted on turning our backs on the world's most populous country, waiting for it to go away.  It did not oblige, and after Nixon went to China in 1972, we opened ourselves to talking to China.  Certain remnants of this outlook remained when Obana undertook negotiations with Iran.  To many people, the details of the agreement were not the point; the point was the act of talking to the Iranian government at all.

This sometimes had absurd results in our foreign policy -- attempting to negotiate the end of a war but refusing to talk to an important belligerent because we deemed them morally unworthy of negotiations.  Unsurprisingly, it didn't work.  Realistic options would have included either talking to bad guys, or else admitting you were not trying to end the war, but only to form an alliance by all other factions to defeat the bad guys.  But we regularly claimed to be negotiating to end a war without talking to one of the sides and failing. 

A prime example to my mind also involved Israel and Lebanon when Ronald Reagan was President and George Schultz -- an eminently serious and highly respected figure -- was Secretary of State.  Lebanon has been wracked by civil war since 1975.  Syria (ruled by a hard left, pro-Soviet government) intervened and occupied large portions of Lebanon.  In 1982 Israel invaded to rout out the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO, forebear to today's Fatah).  The US (always acting through intermediaries because the PLO was one of the groups we could not talk to) negotiated the PLO's withdrawal.  The State Department, under command of George Schultz and acting through a first-rate, highly respected Arab American diplomat, negotiated Israel's withdrawal and a peace treaty between Israel and Lebanon.  Unfortunately, they made the peace settlement contingent on the Syrian forces also withdrawing and neglected to consult the Syrians on the matter, since they were another of the parties who were unworthy of our negotiating with.  It worked about as well as you would expect, with civil war continuing to rage until 1990, Israel remaining in the country until 2000 and Syria until 2005.  (Hezbollah arose out of resistance to the Israeli occupation).

An obvious objection presents itself.  Granting this to be true, clearly Israel has never been one of the countries we refuse to speak to, so the situation is not comparable. In this case, though, we should see the Iranian government as the one that refuses to see Israel as legitimate and therefore refuses to talk to it.

But another phenomenon was also common at the time.  When we were unwilling to talk to a small country or faction, we might instead talk to its sponsor (typically the Soviet Union) and put pressure on the sponsor to put pressure on their client to end the war.  In the Cold War, we might put pressure on the Soviet Union to put pressure on an Arab country, while possibly putting pressure ourselves on Israel.  Here, the equivalent would be us putting pressure on Israel and Iran putting pressure on Hezbollah.  Except I have no idea whether Iran is actually putting pressure on Hezbollah at all.

In short, trying to end Israel's invasion of Lebanon without talking to Israel about it was stupid.  But that, at least, was not stupid in an extraordinary, unprecedented way.  I was just normal stupidity.