Goldblog responds:
Hillary Mann Leverett, in her weak-tea response to my original post about her new politics, denies that she jumped from Team Sanctions to Team Appeasement because she lost her bearings, but because she came to realize that negotiations with Iran could work. ...Hillary Mann Leverett and her husband are among the more cynical foreign policy realists (by definition, of course, not an idealistic bunch) I've ever read, so I won't critique the morality of their desire to buttress an Iranian regime that rapes and murders its own citizens in order to maintain its hold on power. But I can say that, in realist terms, her response to my post is deeply unrealistic.
First, the senior diplomats for whom she worked (including Ryan Crocker, the most esteemed American diplomat of his generation) don't seem to have the same rosy memories of these negotiations that she does, but in any case, the conditions that pertained at the time no longer exist. The people who conducted Iran's negotiating in the pre-Ahmadinejad period aren't the same ones who would do the negotiating today (Some of these officials have been purged from the system and face imprisonment.) Imagine a foreign leader stating that he believed he could successfully negotiate with George W. Bush because he once successfully negotiated with Jimmy Carter; this is what Hillary Mann Leverett, in essence, is saying.