Meanwhile, in less important news
Iran has urged the US to offer it further incentives to resolve the dispute over its nuclear programme.
The US should unblock frozen Iranian assets, lift sanctions and stop “hostile measures”, a senior Iranian negotiator told BBC News.
President George W Bush announced a major change in US policy on Friday.
He said the US would back European talks to resolve the stand-off and, unlike before, was prepared to extend economic incentives to Tehran.
These included the lifting of a decade-long block on Iran’s membership of the World Trade Organization (WTO), and objections to Tehran obtaining parts for commercial planes.
But Iran rejected the offer as “insignificant” and vowed to exercise its “legitimate right” to use nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.
This Iranian request for further incentives follows the negotiating trajectory I suggested as a possibility in my post yesterday.
But let’s be honest about what’s going on here: Iran is buying time, and there is no reason to believe negotiations will yield anything other than more deceit on the part of the mullahs. Which is perhaps why contingency plans seem to be the order of the day…
Nobody wants war with Iran. But the simple fact remains that the civilized world cannot allow a nuclear-armed Islamic theocracy to take root in the middle east. And I sure do hope that no option is off the table in the international effort to prevent such a thing.
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update: Ace has more.
Forget about this Iran shit–I’m sure France can sort it out.
Meanwhile, AMERICAN TRUTH IS UNDER SIEGE!
The only trajectory of interest is that from a missile silo.
How’s this for an incentive? They start behaving themselves and we refrain from turning Tehran into parking lot like we should have done in 1979, and like they keep offering us excellent excuses to do.
We don’t need to go to war with Iran. All we need to do is exercise our “legitimate right” to turn their nuclear facilities into rubble. If we don’t, Israel will. We can afford to play along for a while. The target will just get bigger.
Turing word= when. Appropriate.
People..people..people.. let’s show a little self restraint here… After all Iran is just playing the game by the same rules that N. Korea learned from Clinton .. We dont want to give the impression that we are in any way eager to turn their beautiful country into a big desert wasteland… er.. more of a big desert wasteland than it already is, I mean. We need to exhaust all of our peaceful options before even thinking about giving them 40 whacks with the thickened broomstick.. I say we offer them maybe one more concession before we go to Defcon 4.. like a free Sam’s Club membership or something.. and if they still wont take the offer then we glaze them over and sell the whole tract to Disneyland for a new Arabesque Disney Theme Park..
-AB
Dang, AB, what do you have against the third dot in your ellipses? I mean, sure you use it some of the time, but more often than not you bench the little guy.
And again, I’d like to point out that AMERICAN TRUTH IS UNDER SIEGE! WHERE IS DEMOCRATIC REP. LOUISE SLAUGHTER WHEN WE NEED A CONGRESSIONAL PROBE INTO FDR MISQUOTES?!!
“the civilized world cannot allow a nuclear-armed Islamic theocracy”
But a nuclear-armed Islamic dictatorship on the Indian sub-continent is somehow better?
The same nuclear-armed Islamic dictatorship that is willing to give you the latest plans for building nuclear weapons, probably in a pdf format, if you’re willing to kick in the cash to install that new hot tub that Abdul Qadeer Khan has been eyeing?
We got bigger fish to fry than Iran (heck, just shut off their gas from Venezuela)
Jim —
Uh, no, a nuclear-armed Islamic dictatorship on the Indian sub-continent is NOT somehow better—although to my knowledge at least THEY haven’t vowed to strike Israel with a nuke and rain fire on the US.
Also, it’s too late to stop them. Which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be worried about stopping Iran, does it?
BUT, THE HYPOCRISY!
I guess I was a little flippant in my earlier remark.
I spent a career watching the “hot spots” in the world and trying to guess with the best of them when and where the next war was going to come from. We weren’t that good and only scored in the low 20 percentile and that was only if we included Panama, Grenada and Somalia in our “successful predictions category”
Iran has all the makings of a nightmare and the only way we (the “Westâ€Â) can remain in the driver’s seat is if we are confident that we are still in a position to prevent their development of nukes; my experience in the prediction game doesn’t exactly inspire a high degree of confidence in that scenario.
My fear is that Iran WANTS Israel to try another “Opera” raid and already has nukes. A military strike on Iran by Israel would be a clear provocation of war even to the most ardent Israeli supporter.
Would the Mullahs be crazy enough to retaliate against Israel with nukes? That’s another crap shoot I wouldn’t want to predict based on method of delievery …..but hey, look on the bright side, I thought the Pakis and Indians were going to slug it out in 1996 so my numbers are still pretty crappy!