Hand it to Secretary of State Rice. She knows how to make lemonade out of lemons. When asked on CNN this week her reaction to a communique signed by Iraqi leaders on Monday that recognized a “legitimate right to resistance,” she said, “I think what they were trying to do was to get a sense of political inclusion while recognizing that violence and terrorism should not be a part of resistance.”

That’s one way to look at it. Another way to look at this compromise is that Iraq’s leading politicians acceded to the view of their hosts, the Arab League, that blowing up Iraqi civilians is wrong, but blowing up American soldiers fighting terrorists is permissible. This parsing was the result of a three-day conference in Cairo billed as an attempt to bridge the divide between the elected government in Baghdad and Sunni Arab leaders who claim to represent the car bombers trying to destroy it.

The State Department, according to Iraqi officials I’ve spoken with, put tremendous pressure on elected leaders to attend this parley in Cairo. And the see-no-evil reaction to the results of these deliberations suggests something potentially more ominous. The Arab newspaper Al-Hayat, for example, reports that American diplomats on the sidelines quietly pushed for the statement calling for an eventual timetable for withdrawal of American troops. And there are now new reports that Foggy Bottom in particular would like to build on the progress of the Arab League’s renewed interest in Iraq and urge the armies of its member states to build a force to stabilize the country.

If this latest diplomatic foray is not checked by some common sense it could become the exit strategy so many of the Bush administration’s more feckless critics are demanding. Here’s a former aide to President Clinton’s U.N ambassador, Richard Holbrooke, Suzanne Nossel, writing for the Democracy’s Arsenal Web site this week: “Why not approach League President Amr Moussa and key Arab States to propose that that if the Arab League steps up, pulls together a group of Iraq’s neighbors willing to help prevent the slide to mayhem, and engages in a committed effort to broker a political compromise, that in return the US will plan its getaway and offer all manner of support for the Arab effort?” This is the same foreign policy of Senator Kerry when he ran for president in 2004. He promised in effect to replace American soldiers with those of Iraq’s Arab neighbors in order extricate our country from the grand project it started in 2003.

That approach was wrong then and it’s wrong now. There are a few reasons to be concerned about bringing in the Arab League as a broker for Iraqi reconciliation. To start, there is the fireman and arsonist problem. Saudi Arabia, Syria, and even Jordan have turned a blind eye towards the financing and equipping of the insurgency that has stilled reconstruction of the country and murdered thousands of Iraqis. Of course most of the actual insurgents in Iraq are Iraqis, but there is nonetheless a connection between some of the Arab league’s member states and the campaign of terror waged by the saboteurs.

It’s also important to remember that the Bush administration opted to empower former Arab League negotiator Lakhdar Brahimi in 2004 to cobble together an interim government under Iyad Allawi that, at least according to independent audits from the current government in Baghdad, looted hundreds of millions of dollars intended for the rebuilding of the military. The security services built under the Allawi regime ended up giving jobs to former senior Baathists who aided and abetted the wrong side in the war.

It is especially problematic, as Ahmad Chalabi said in an interview with me this week, that questions of reconciliation would be discussed outside of Iraq’s national assembly. If the elected parliament in Baghdad supports a withdrawal of coalition forces or agrees to the distinction between “resistance” and “terrorism,” that’s one thing. But for a collection of some elected leaders and others who have spurned elections to reach this consensus in Cairo sends the message that the national assembly in Baghdad is not legitimate. It’s also suspicious that the final wording of this communique was agreed on very late on Monday evening after many notables, like President Talabani, had left the conference.

Finally, it’s worth asking how exactly do the Iraqi people benefit from their supposed acceptance of the “legitimate right to resistance? “Yesterday, according to the Associated Press, “a suicide car bomber targeting U.S. troops handing out toys to children at a hospital in central Iraq killed 30 people, including four police guards, three women and two children.” Another suicide bomb attack “near a crowded soft drink stand in the Shiite city of Hillah” killed at least two people. It looks like some Iraqis have put a spin on the “right to resistance” that is different from Secretary Rice’s rosy interpretation.

None of this is to say that Sunni Arab leaders should be purposely excluded from participating in the future of their country or that offers from Arab states to reopen embassies in Iraq should be spurned. Compromises eventually must be made in the interest of holding the fragile government in Baghdad together. But those compromises cannot extend to a legitimization of attacks on the army fighting for successive elections, a constitution and a future free of tyranny.

Abandoning those aims now is not so much an exit strategy as it is a surrender.