Posted by
Always To The Right on Saturday, September 12, 2009 11:01:52 AM
Last night, the media reported that the US had accepted an offer of direct talks with Iran
for the first time without preconditions. The timing could not have
been worse, since people across America had spent the day commemorating
the deaths of 3,000 of their countrymen at the hands of the kind of
radical Islamists that run Iran. Was the administration hoping to bury
this in a Friday-afternoon document dump?
Aside from the remarkably tone-deaf timing, though, it’s not a surprise
at all. Obama has three basic choices for policy change when it comes
to Iran: go to war, increase the sanctions to attempt to change their
behavior, or open direct negotiations. None of these are completely
mutually exclusive, for that matter. Obama simply will not take the
first option — no one can seriously think that Obama would declare war
on anyone absent a military attack on the US — and Russia
pulled the rug out from underneath the second option. China wouldn’t
have supported more sanctions either. That meant either the status quo
or an offer for direct talks.
That’s much more give than the Iranians have ever publicly offered.
Do they really want to put their nuclear program on the table? Of
course not. The Iranians understand that this concession by Obama and
other UNSC nations will not be popular in the West, especially in the
US. They want to give Obama and other leaders a piece of paper they
can wave in the air while promising “peace in our time,” in order to
give them enough political cover to continue.
At this point, though, there doesn’t seem to be much opportunity for
success through policy change. Obama won’t go to war, and in any event
a war against Iran would be a very ill-advised affair; Iran is not Iraq
or Afghanistan, except in the worst possible ways for terrain and
fanaticism. The rest of the world won’t tighten sanctions enough to
change Iran’s course. Talks will be fruitless and will likely lull the
West while Iran completes its bomb and tightens its oppression, plus it
has the effect of endorsing the regime that just rigged an election and
triggered a promising uprising among the Iranian people. In this case,
the status quo was the better option.