Will the U.S. and the Taliban make a deal for peace?

After nearly a decade of study, more than 400 columns written, and half a bottle of rum this morning, I have uncovered what I believe may be the three immutable presidential laws of the War On Terror™.

Law No. 1: Lofty foreign objectives are important, except when they aren’t.

When the U.S. invaded Iraq, President Bush’s stated goals were to remove a nuclear, chemical, biological terrorist threat, to bring peace to Iraq and the Middle East, to teach would-be challengers not to mess with the U.S. of A., and to install a democracy that would spread throughout the Middle East faster than cold sores on a high school field trip. Troops would return home in six months or a year, and we’d have a parade. Maybe several parades.

Well, it turns out Iraq was never a WMD or terrorist threat to the U.S. Our botched invasion and occupation unleashed a horrific civil war that has left hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead and turned millions more into refugees. Our aggression encouraged Iran and North Korea to accelerate their nuclear programs, while our unwillingness to listen to our international allies simultaneously diminished the U.S.’s ability to coordinate an effective international response. And the Iraqi democracy we installed is a thug regime that doesn’t uphold democracy or justice in any sense Americans would tolerate in their own lives.

President Bush never really acknowledged that his war aims were bullshit. Instead, he simply modified his goals. After the 2006 congressional elections, Bush changed up his goal to conform to reality. Instead of turning Iraq into a Jolly Rancher-scented fairyland of freedom, his new goal became merely to create a self-governing Iraq that did not threaten the U.S. Hey, wasn’t pre-invasion Iraq a self-governing non-threat to the U.S.? Oh, never mind that.

Law No. 2: U.S. presidents strongly support democracy, except when they don’t.

In November 2003, President Bush gave a great speech (no, seriously) ‘fessing up to “60 years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East” – which, Bush admitted, “did nothing to make us safe, because in the long run stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty.”

He was right. He then announced what he called “a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East” which consisted of, well, those nine words inside quotation marks. The U.S. remained, and remains, firmly Velcro-ed to corrupt, human-rights-abusing dictatorships in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. We call them “moderate Arab states” because they’re our friends, not because there’s anything objectively moderate about them. And we also bankroll and make excuses for Israel’s vicious blockade and imprisonment of 1.5 million people in the Gaza Strip, more than half of whom are children, all in the name of fighting terrorism. President Obama continues these policies.

Law No. 3: U.S. presidents do not negotiate with terrorists, except when they do.

“We don’t negotiate with terrorists” is such a foreign policy cliché, it might as well be engraved on the presidential seal. But presidents negotiate with terrorists all the time.

The Reagan administration sold weapons to Iran in the 1980s to secure the release of American hostages held captive by Iran’s allies in Lebanon. The Bush administration paid Sunni insurgents in Iraq to quit fighting us and start fighting al-Qaida.

Now, Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai is inviting the Taliban to accept the Afghanistan Constitution and make peace with his U.S.-supported government. At a conference in London, Karzai spoke of reaching out to the Taliban, whom he called “disenchanted brothers.”

Karzai’s not doing improv. His message is a coordinated U.S. policy shift. At the same time Karzai was talking about “brothers,” the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, told London’s Financial Times, “As a soldier, my personal feeling is that there’s been enough fighting. What I think we do is try to shape conditions which allow people to come to a truly equitable solution to how the Afghan people are governed.”

Translation: Use the Obama-approved Afghan troop surge to pound the crap out of the Taliban as much as possible, all while telling them we’ll stop if they just sign some sort of peace deal.