Former diplomat Dennis Ross says negotiations towards de-nuclearizing Iran are failing and the Bush administration needs to modify its strategy.
[A]t this point the dynamic of the negotiations seems more likely to change European, not Iranian, behavior. If anything, the Iranians seem to believe they can continue to move incrementally toward developing fissile material openly and clandestinely and without incurring any real costs--and recent history would suggest they're right.[T]he Bush administration can also change its approach so that the Iranians actually believe they will pay a price if they go nuclear. To do this, the administration must now be prepared to join the Europeans in the talks. This means crossing the threshold of dealing directly, if multilaterally, with the Iranians but only on the basis of an agreement with the Europeans. At present, the Europeans agree that sanctions would be adopted if the negotiations fail. But there is no understanding on what the sanctions would be or even how to decide if the negotiations have failed. In return for the administration's directly joining the talks, the Europeans must come to an agreement on the meaning of each of these points.
If the Iranians see that there is such an understanding, they would know that they would not escape a real cost, and they would no longer be able to play the Europeans off against us. Even that may not prove to be enough, but at least such an approach could change the current dynamics--dynamics that have the Iranians inexorably moving toward having a nuclear capability while the world takes comfort in talks that cannot succeed.
That may be worth a try. But we can't forget Iran's actual conduct on both nuclear development and a long history of supporting terrorism. For example, here's today's reminder of reality, including details of named terrorists.
U.S. intelligence and foreign allies have growing evidence that wanted terrorists have been residing in Iran despite repeated American warnings to Tehran not to harbor them.Posted by Alan at June 3, 2005 05:45 PMThe evidence, which stretches over several years, includes communications by a fugitive mastermind of the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing and the capture of a Saudi militant who appeared in a video in which Osama bin Laden confirmed he ordered the Sept. 11 attacks, according to U.S. and foreign officials.