The Obama administration today announced that it would drop a key precondition for negotiations with Iran — a precondition that the Bush administration had insisted on maintaining, says the NYT.
The theory is that by allowing Tehran to continue enriching uranium for an as-yet unspecified length of time during talks, the country will have an incentive to negotiate. “We are going to start with some interim steps,” said an unnamed European official, “to build a little trust.”
Source: http://www.abc.net.au/reslib/200804/r240208_972753.jpg
But Obama’s concession doesn’t fundamentally change the cost-benefit analysis for Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. Certainly, from his perspective, keeping the enrichment facilities up and running as long as possible is in Iran’s interest. But if the outcome is still going to be that Tehran gives up its nuclear programs, you can bet that Ahmedinejad will do everything he can to sabotage the process.
What we need is a solution that’s mutually agreeable. Iran’s goal is to keep its nuclear facilities. Westerners don’t want Tehran to build a bomb. These aren’t mutually exclusive objectives. Yes, it’s difficult to implement effective oversight, and it’s not that far a jump from civilian nuclear energy to something more dangerous. But the hardest part is coming to a satisfactory agreement in the first place. Everything after should be a piece of cake by comparison.
A middle-ground solution would be to do what the U.S. recently did with the United Arab Emirates: sign a cooperative nuclear treaty that would see American technology exported to the Middle East. Done this way, Ahmedinejad gets to keep his nuclear energy program, and the U.S. gets to keep track of every piece of equipment that goes over there. Periodic, perhaps random maintenance checks, would also give Obama an opportunity to oversee what’s happening.
The danger that Ahmedinejad might co-opt even this program into producing enriched uranium is not nonexistent. But risk management, while more difficult, is also more realistic than the inflexibility of risk avoidance.
Posted by Brian Fung 
