…[A] mood of defeatism appears to have settled over the White House. As one senior Obama adviser recently remarked: “It wouldn’t be easy to live with an Iran that’s a virtual nuclear power, but at the end of the day, it’s not a complete disaster.” A similar air of resignation has taken hold in Europe, which until recently had taken the lead role in negotiations over Iran’s uranium enrichment. Concerns over the state of the global economy, and the awareness that Iran is close to acquiring the technological capability for an atom bomb, has weakened the Europeans’ resolve to confront it. Only Britain and France have any appetite for further tough talking.
With political will diminishing in the West, the most likely outcome, or so it is now argued, is that leading Arab states, such as Saudi Arabia, Syria and Egypt, seek to acquire their own nuclear arsenals.
Con Coughlin: “Ignoring Iran’s nuclear plan would be the West’s greatest blunder” – Telegraph.
Comments 8
Well, that’s the most misleading sentence I’ve run across in days.
I started off thinking that, finally, the Jøker had clued in to the fact that the American people don’t want the IRS in charge of their health care.
Instead I’m treated to a farrago of nonsense about how the Jøker and his clown-car refugees are ‘resigned’ to a nuclear Iran.
[Expletive deleted].
The Democrat party, including the then junior senator from Illinois, did everything within its power to stymie the (admittedly less than all-out) Bush administration’s efforts to build a coalition with which to pressure Iran (not something likely to have succeeded in the immediate term, but it would have provided a base from which to build a firm opposition).
There is no evidence besides their public pronouncements (sound and fury signifying nothing) that this pack of crooks and liars has any problem with Iran nuclearising.
As with anything associated with the Jøker, ignore the speechifying and pay attention to the associations.
August 14th, 2009 at 8:34 pm
Hard to say, aelfheld: Ø himself may not have really known what he thought or expected, and might not be able to say when the willingness to accept a nuclear Iran turned into resignation and defeatism not just about Iran itself but about the political fallout.
It’s hard to see any domestic political advantage to the Obamanauts in a nuclear Iran, and in a complete rebuff of the “unclenched fist” policy. Before the Iranian election, I think that at least some in the WH thought there was a chance that Iran would give them a superficial political victory – see it in their interests – that could be portrayed, truthfully or not, as a step toward a Grand Bargain.
There are too many unknowns. Anyway, I thought that the interestingly contentious part of the piece wasn’t in its observations on the US and others re Iran, but in the notion that the betting now favors a “polynuclear” ME.
August 14th, 2009 at 10:47 pm
In case anyone is interested on what other people think.
http://archive.gulfnews.com/region/Iran/10333853.html
We also think that we have a couple of years before it happens.
http://www.televisionwashington.com/floater_article1.aspx?lang=en&t=3&id=12915
August 15th, 2009 at 12:07 am
fuster, the article you link tends more to reinforce Coughlin’s points, I think, than to rebut them.
August 15th, 2009 at 12:11 am
@CK MacLeod – On balance, it does. I don’t think I was attempting to say otherwise.
Overall, it’s hard to see how anything other than regime change can force the Iranians not to produce a bomb if they’re determined to go ahead.
Our job now is to find out if they can be deterred. If they don’t show up to sit down and aren’t open to bargaining away the program, we start looking at alternatives.
August 15th, 2009 at 12:21 am
Except that until the day they demonstrate a working weapons capacity, their capacity will always be a matter of dispute, and to some extent even then will continue to be. That’s a formula for always being too late to start looking at alternatives.
I say this as something of a dissenter on the evilmongering right, since I’ve long wondered whether there was a real world scenario, short of a major conflict started by someone else, under which the U.S. could and would act decisively. Meanwhile, JED’s analysis tended to reinforce my belief that what Israel seemed likely to achieve on its own in a unilateral action might not justify the political cost.
However, many of the terms in the discussion change over time. What seemed impossible for us to contemplate a year ago may not, depending on intervening events, seem so a year from now. Iran’s at a milestone point, but is still likely years away from having usable weapons.
There’s some doubt among experts about the real weapons capacities of countries at similar or more advanced stages of technological development like Pakistan, India, and North Korea. The duds and misfires that the Norks have had aren’t unusual from the history of nukes. It took the French several tries to get the missle tech right.
So we might boiling this frog in one way or another for a decade if not decades.
August 15th, 2009 at 12:57 am
I like the way you’re thinking here, CK.
I’m just going to keep on saying what I’ve been telling JED for months. The Iranian regime is doing a fine job of screwing itself up.
August 15th, 2009 at 1:23 am
In cases like this the passive voice is used to convey a certain vagueness concerning the identity of the people by whom the arguing is being done. This is no doubt intended by the author.
August 15th, 2009 at 11:18 am