Talking is the first step in avoiding armed conflict

The advice that you should hold your friends close and your enemies closer is variously attributed to the Godfather and to President Lyndon Johnson. But it is safe to say that neither Don Corleone or LBJ had an enemy as odious as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran.
Nonetheless, the Godfather/LBJ advice is fundamentally sound, and so it is encouraging that the Bush administration has reversed a long-standing policy against sitting at a conference table with Iran.
U.S. diplomats will be at a March 10 conference being organized by Iraq and attended by representatives of a number of countries in the region, the U.N. Security Council and the G-8 group of industrialized democracies and, yes, Iran and Syria.
The White House is unwilling to characterize this a change in U.S. policy. Just a couple of months ago, the administration rejected out of hand the recommendation from the bipartisan Iraq Study Group that it reach out to Syria and Iran as part of the effort to stabilize Iraq.
Saving face
The face-saving explanation is that the meetings will take place as part of the Iraqi conference. That's OK.
It remains a necessary reversal of the previous policy that the United States would not meet with either Iran or Syria until Tehran abandoned its uranium-enrichment program and Damascus ended its support for extremists in Lebanon and Iraq. The administration says those strictures still apply to any bilateral, face-to-face talks on issues other than Iraq.
But, of course, issues related to Iraq are the most thorny issues between the United States and Iran.
On the one hand, the administration has been making increasingly bellicose statements regarding Iran's support of insurgents and terrorists in Iraq. On the other hand, Ahmadinejad was in Khartoum Thursday sidling up to the president of the genocidal Sudanese regime and blaming the United States and Israel for the world's problems.
It will be interesting to see how Ahmadinejad behaves this weekend during a visit to Saudi Arabia. The Saudis, who are Sunni Muslims, have every reason to be as wary of Ahmadinejad, who has been supporting the Shiites in Iraq, as does the United States.
Indeed, if the United States were to pull out of Iraq precipitously, Saudi Arabia and Iran could likely be the major players in an all-out civil war between the Sunnis and the Shiites.
The United States hasn't had diplomatic relations with Iran since the Islamic revolution in 1979 and the 444-day American Embassy hostage standoff. Sitting across a table in Iraq for a few days is not going to reverse nearly three decades of enmity between the two nations.
The aim isn't to become friends. It is to avoid armed hostilities between enemies and to reach a recognition that a stable, prosperous Iraq is in the best economic and diplomatic interests of all involved.