Unless We Take An Emphatic Stand, You're Looking At The Future
“Six Powers”
Powers? Pushovers, maybe.
“No” requires more than merely articulating phonemes.
Won't, is more accurate. Answer: They're afraid of what the rest of the middle-east will do.
What’s so surprising? We even say “No” to our kids today and then negotiate. People don’t want an answer....they are afraid of their own shadow.
We need a well planned airstrike to hit the nuke facilities and more importantly decapitate the mullahs/govt. Hit training camps also but leave all other infastructure in tact. With the govt. crippled but basic services in tact maybe some Iraninans will say enough is enough.
Maybe we should be keeping Bush.
The issue goes well beyond that of domestic politics in each of the participatory nations including Iran. It is precisely the sort of thing that collective security organizations such as the UN were built to address - ongoing national programs that are deemed to be a threat to regional security and not simply a matter between two contending nations. And we see a total paralysis of that system for the simple reason that, as Taheri points out, there is no consensus as to either the magnitude or the urgency of this particular problem.
That is the reason it devolves into the domestic politics of the participatory nations. The real paralysis is not within the electoral politics of the U.S., Great Britain, Russia, or Germany, or even within the electoral politics (such as they are) of Iran. Those are an excuse. The failure is within the overall international organization, and there is no cure within sight.
Time is on Iran's side, although it may take a little more time than even the mullahs are happy to contemplate. But that at least appears to be a matter that reaches beyond whether Ahmadinejad will be at the helm or not. The mullahs will have their bomb (and so, shortly, will Saudi Arabia and Turkey). It isn't so much that it is acceptable to Russia and China, it's simply that it's more trouble for them to help do something about it than it is to let it go. And as long as there is an element in this that serves to confound U.S. foreign policy that is likely to continue.
There are two possible jokers in the deck. One is active help by either Russia or China (North Korea has already dipped its fingers into the affair and possibly Pakistan as well) to accelerate the Iranian effort for unstated reasons that appeal to those respective foreign policies; or an increasing level of Iranian meddling in Lebanon that threatens to spill over into Israel such that a more immediate confrontation with Iran appears advantageous (or unavoidable) to the Israelis. The real danger point appears to be the latter at the moment - Hizbollah's antics are bloody and destabilizing enough as it is; those antics expanded under the protection of an Iranian nuclear umbrella may be too much for Israeli strategists to contemplate. They are, and will be, directly aimed at the overthrow of the Israeli state, war by proxy army that is the very thesis of the War On Terror.
Negotiation out of this impending crisis that depends on its current clear winner to back off is doomed. Should the situation in Lebanon turn for the worse from the Iranian perspective then things might change. At the moment that does not appear likely.
So he waits and in 9 months gets Mad McCain.
A word to the wise, don’t piss off someone like McCain, especially if he is in control of US forces.
Just a random thought...
Dec 2012, McCain has just lost his re-election bid and is itching for some payback.... this could be a very dangerous time.