Welcome, I'm Anastasia Glova bringing you the Cato Daily Podcast.

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Today we'll talk to foreign policy analyst Justin Logan about Iranian President Mahmoud

Ahmadinejad's lengthy letter to President Bush.

Justin, will ignoring this letter constitute a missed opportunity for the Bush administration?

I think that to ignore the the Ahmedinajad letter was sort of to be expected but ignoring the second letter from the representative to Ayatollah Ali to I totally al-Ighamini Hassan Rohani would be a much more ill-advised

course.

I think that ignoring or downplaying diplomacy is bad for one reason and that is essentially

because the prospect of military action is so much worse.

There was a war game that took place late in 2004 in which Lieutenant General Sam Gardner said that

he was left with two sentences for policy makers.

One is that there is no military solution to the problems in Iran.

And the second sentence was, you have to make diplomacy work.

So I think that this is an opportunity to enter into negotiations in a relationship that has been poisonous for the past 25, 26 years.

So I think it would be a huge missed opportunity in that the current negotiations that are ongoing with the EU3, France, Germany,

and the United Kingdom, I think are almost certain to fail.

So I think that by engaging with the Iranians, we have a much better chance of getting our

grievances and their grievances onto the table and to see if there's any possible

opportunity for a breakthrough and it's important to point out that this idea of direct discussions has been supported

by people such as Senator Lugar, Senator Hagel, and sort of a broad bipartisan swath of foreign policy analysts.

So I think that the administration very much needs to back away from it sort of,

...