This story pretty much speaks for itself.

U.S., Iranian and Iraqi officials held the first meeting in Baghdad on Monday of a sub-committee intended to improve cooperation on Iraqi security among the three countries, officials said.

“It’s the sub-committee they’ve been talking about for some time now. They’re meeting today at the expert level. It’s hosted and organised by the Iraqis,” U.S. embassy spokesman Philip Reeker said.

The U.S. delegation was headed by Marcie Ries, minister-councilor for political-military affairs at the U.S. embassy, Reeker said.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini said Tehran’s delegation was being led by the deputy head of its mission, Amir Abdollahian.

Setting up the security sub-committee was one of the main achievements of a July 24 meeting in Baghdad between the U.S. and Iranian ambassadors in Iraq.

Washington accuses Tehran of fomenting instability in Iraq, supporting militias and providing weapons, such as armor-penetrating bombs, used to kill U.S. troops.

Tehran denies the charge and blames Iraq’s unrelenting sectarian violence on the 2003 U.S.-led invasion to topple Saddam Hussein.

The talks between the United States and Iran, which have not had diplomatic relations for almost 30 years, had their first round in May and are seen as groundbreaking.

Story

Here’s an argument for a return to the kind of bipartisan foreign policy we had during WW II and the early Cold War years. Among their many points about what led to the collapse of bipartisanship, and what can be done, Charles Kupchan and Peter Trubowitz at Real Clear Politics say:

Former Secretary of State Dean Acheson once claimed that 80 percent of the job of foreign policy was “management of your domestic ability to have a policy.” He may have exaggerated, but he expressed an enduring truth: good policy requires good politics. Bringing ends and means back into balance would help restore the confidence of the American public in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy. But implementing a strategic adjustment will require dampening polarization and building a stable consensus behind it. As Roosevelt demonstrated during World War II, sound leadership and tireless public diplomacy are prerequisites for fashioning bipartisan cooperation on foreign policy.

I’m not too sure about this. The extremities of WW II forced bipartisanship, as did the later bipolar world with its unprecedented “nuclear terror.” The Truman and Eisenhower era administrations worked hard, both openly and covertly, to convince Americans to be frightened of the Soviets and the “international communist conspiracy,” and this management of fear worked well enough to produce bipartisanship. The Bush administration is trying to push and manage fear of a “global network of terrorists,” but either its not working, or it’s too soon to tell.