Achieving détente with Iran

Talks with Iran have been going on for ten -- count 'em, 10! -- years.  Bush couldn't do it; Obama has worked with Plan B, and the situation has improved.  No, we're not going to nuke 'em.  We've achieved what could be called a satisfactory stand-off. No more lying; no invasion; no fireworks; no teens tossed into a bloody conflict their parents couldn't resolve. 

This morning, NPR interviewed Karim Sadjadpour, senior associate of the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, about a win for diplomacy.

NPR:  So where is the opportunity for some kind of deal in all of this?

Karim Sadjadpour:  For years now we've been saying that the status quo is unsustainable.  If a deal isn't reached, it's going to deteriorate into some type of military conflagration.  I don't think the Obama administration is at all interested in going to war against Iran.  The Israelis are very reluctant.  They would like the US to do something.  And I don't think that Iran is going to give the US a reason to go to war. 

NPR:  Do you think this is actually a kind of success?  Iran isn't going to give; the US isn't going to give.  And they both know it!  And success is just Iran not going to war?

KS:  Actually, I think that's right. Iran is one of many US foreign policy challenges that isn't going to be solved.  We're not going to find a resolution to our conflict with Iran until there is a different system of government there.  What dialogue -- what negotiation -- helps to do is to manage the conflict and to prevent what is now a cold conflict from deteriorating into a hot one.  So I think that in itself is indeed some type of success because we're preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.  We're preventing military conflict from breaking out.  But there's not going to be a scenario in which Ayatollah Khamenei comes to Washington to the Rose Garden and signs of Iran's nuclear ambitions.  I think the Obama administration understands that.  Their ambitions for the second term aren't to resolve this foreign policy conflict but to manage and contain it. ...NPR (excerpt)

This kind of thinking drives the hawks crazy.  But then, of course, they are crazy.  Still ready to throw increasing numbers of other people's children into unnecessary wars, they look for wars to fight.

Comments

[Richard W. Crews]

sometimes I think they should just secretly buy a bomb from NK, set it off in their desert, and go "There! It's done! We;re not aggressive and we got past that threshold - leave us alone!"

But then, again, sometimes I think we should announce to the world a place, by coordinates, in that Iranian desert, and tell everyone a time and date as to when to stand back. Then we drop an unarmed Minuteman missile, fired from North Dakota, within a 100 feet of that target, right in front of the whole world.

[Richard W. Crews]

The best policy would be a Palestinian/Israeli solution - two viable states. If a poll of Palestinians indicated satisfaction with the solution, and an optimistic attitude, then we, the "West", i guess that's what we are, we would have the right to ask Iran, Al-Queda, various unhappy Middle-Eastern folks, "what's your problem?" Because the problems they would come up with would be their own problems.