OPINION:
The lot of a diplomat is not always a happy one. Life in striped pants can be challenging. So much Chablis and brie, so little time. It’s not all polite chatter. In the matter of the crucial talks over the future of Iran’s nuclear program, all the pushing and pulling of policy, all the huffing and puffing of inflamed egos, will probably be for naught. Sooner or later, unless the Israelis rescue the West from fear and indecision, Iran will have its Islamic bomb.
Negotiators from Iran and “the P-5 Plus 1” — the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China — have put aside their wine glasses and put talking into overdrive to attempt a deal to eliminate the Islamic republic’s relentless development of a nuclear weapon.
Secretary of State John F. Kerry, treading the familiar road to nowhere, a road worn by a generation of American diplomats, played hide and seek over the weekend with Iran’s chief negotiator, Mohammad Javad Zarif. Messrs. Zarif and Kerry first said they would quit Vienna, the site of the talks, to return to Tehran and Washington to get “further instructions.” Each man then changed his mind, canceled his travel reservations and stayed in Vienna as the negotiations settled into stalemate. The self-imposed Monday deadline for a deal came and went, and the parties announced the new deadline for reaching an agreement would be sometime in December, or unofficially, maybe in July, or later, and maybe never.
Once upon a time, President Obama was dead set against the mullahs acquiring nuclear capabilities. “We cannot allow Iran to get a nuclear weapon,” Mr. Obama, the presidential candidate, said in 2008. “It would be a game-changer in the region.” Now he sings a sadder tune. “Our goal is to shut off each pathway sufficient that we know we have a breakout time of a minimum of a year,” his emissary Mr. Kerry told The New York Times in October. There’s hope for change; one can always hope. But Mr. Obama’s hopes are always blighted, and change is forever elusive.
The United States still hopes that if the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, agrees to limit Iran’s capacity for refining fissile material for a bomb and later blows off the deal, the West would have at least a year to make room for another seat in the nuclear clubhouse. Some deal.
The Israelis get that queasy feeling when the bargainers in Washington and in Europe make the familiar noises about giving away the store. Little more than a thousand miles separate Tehran and Jerusalem, and the Iranians have a conventional medium-range ballistic missile that can reach Israel in minutes. If a nuclear warhead were to sit atop one of those rockets, the threat would become what the diplomats euphemistically call “existential.”
“Dr. Strangelove” the movie came with a subtitle often forgotten: “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” When it debuted in 1964, the movie elicited giggles worthy of a good black satire, but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu isn’t laughing, and he shows no sign of learning to love an Iranian bomb. He has vowed to take steps up to and including a pre-emptive attack to stop the search for an Islamic bomb. Other Middle Eastern nations are anxious about Iranian nuclear intentions, too. Saudi Arabia has the financial resources and the determination to acquire its own Islamic bomb.
Mr. Obama and the utopian enthusiasts of “global zero,” the elimination of all nuclear weapons worldwide, have failed again to persuade the descendants of canny Persian rug merchants to trade away their precious program. Deal or no deal, Iran isn’t likely to let anyone get in the way of its quest for a nuclear weapon.
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