New Diplomatic Posture May Bring P-5 Unity on Sanctions Against Iran: WP

Thursday's editorial in the Washington Post soundly rejects the Ahmadinejad letter, calling it "a manifesto that sounds more like those of Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi than of a government interested in detente," while at the same time expressing hope that the new diplomatic path of offering an incentive package along with the threat of sanctions to Tehran will finally bring Russia and China into the fold.

"The Bush administration's hope is that Russia and China will join in the coalition making the carrot-and-stick pitch -- and that they will agree to passage of a Security Council resolution ordering an end to uranium enrichment at the same time the package is delivered to Tehran. If that happened, the effort to restrain Iran would make an important advance, since until now neither Russia nor China has been prepared to support sanctions, much less join a coalition to threaten them."

Ari Shavit in Ha'aretz puts the situation in very clear terms: "Iran is not Libya or South Africa. It will not give up its nuclear program willingly. But Iran is also not India nor Pakistan. The West cannot accept Iran's nuclear project. Therefore, the confrontation is inevitable. In the best case scenario, it will end the way the Cuban missile crisis did; in the worst case scenario, it will turn ugly and irradiate the Middle East."

Shavit writes that at the diplomatic level, the crisis may peak as early as this summer. From a military standpoint, the crisis may reach its zenith in the winter, after the midterm elections. Either way, 2007 will be a critical year. It poses a challenge to the West of a kind that it has not faced since the Cold War.

That timetable may or may not play out. All that we are certain of is that a Chapter VII resolution is the immediate goal. Our concern remains that valuable time continues to be lost as Iran's scientists race towards technological self-sufficiency, but if the end result is a Chapter VII resolution (which would represent breaking through a major diplomatic barrier), then the ends will justify the means of this new track.