In diplomacy, always leave
your adversary an honorable avenue of retreat.
Fifty years ago this
October, to resolve a Cuban missile crisis that had brought us to the brink of
nuclear war, JFK did that.
He conveyed to Nikita
Khrushchev, secretly, that if the Soviet Union pulled its nuclear missiles out
of Cuba, the United States would soon after pull its Jupiter missiles out of
Italy and Turkey.
Is the United States
willing to allow Iran an honorable avenue of retreat, if it halts enrichment of
uranium to 20 percent and permits intrusive inspections of all its nuclear
facilities? Or are U.S. sanctions designed to bring about not a negotiated
settlement of the nuclear issue, but regime change, the fall of the Islamic
Republic and its replacement by a more pliable regime?
If the latter is the case,
we are likely headed for war with Iran, even as our refusal to negotiate with
Tokyo, whose oil we cut off in the summer of 1941, led to Pearl
Harbor.
What would cause anyone to
believe Iran is willing to negotiate?
There are the fatwas by the
ayatollahs against nuclear weapons and the consensus by 16 U.S. intelligence
agencies in 2007, reaffirmed in 2011, that Iran has no nuclear weapons program.
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