Obama is negotiating with Iran, without preconditions, apparently, as he said he would during the campaign. Sometimes we wish he wouldn’t keep his promises.
But Israel isn’t fooled.
Long strident in its calls for tougher international action over Iran’s nuclear program, Israel has fallen silent as world powers try to convert last week’s talks with Tehran into a lasting deal.
Israeli officials have declined comment on Thursday’s meeting in Geneva, which yielded agreements to open a newly disclosed Iranian uranium enrichment site to inspection and follow-up negotiations.
Former defense minister Shaul Mofaz, however, told Israel Radio on Sunday that he did not see Iran’s recent cooperation as any other than a “strategy of buying time.”
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“The chance of the Iranians agreeing to a complete halt of the nuclear program looks relatively slim, in my view,” Mofaz said. “Theirs is a strategy of buying time.”“Therefore, in my view, moving to a next stage of harsher sanctions, in global partnership, and with an emphasis on Russia and China, is inevitable.” Mofaz told Israel Radio. “My assessment is that 2010 will be the year of sanctions on Iran.”
Under the previous government, Mofaz was Israel’s strategic liaison with the United States and set a core demand that any deal with Iran rule out uranium enrichment on its soil.
That stance could be challenged by Iran’s offer, at the Geneva talks, to send low-enriched uranium (LEU) to Russia and France for further processing and then re-import it to fuel a U.N.-monitored Tehran reactor to produce medical isotopes.
It seems likely that Obama knows that Israel was on a countdown to military action, and this was the only way he could forestall it, by making it politically harder for Israel to attack when Iran is “negotiating.” Of course, unlike Obama’s vocabulary, Israel’s includes the word hudna.
It’s really interesting how these multi-cultural types operate. They are always the first to tell us that other cultures are different, don’t have the same values as ours, that words don’t translate directly between different languages with different cultural assumptions, that we really can’t understand other cultures in the terms of our own…
And then when Iran offers to “negotiate” with the possibility of an “agreement” if terms can be met, the multi-cultural negotiators (that would be the Obama administration) act like they’re contemplating signing a manufacturing contract with Dupont or Boeing, complete with penalty clauses and mutual understanding.
The problem in this case, of course, is that in case of failure to comply, by all parties, to any agreement that is reached with Iran, it is Israel that will pay the penalty.
My recommendation to Israel, for what it’s worth: instead of getting stuck with the penalty clause later, it might be better to consider some penalty claws now.
