Where I Am On Iran

Something that needs reiterating about the Iranian negotiations: these are not negotiations over territory, resources, an ongoing conflict, or economic relations. Assuming that the Iranian regime wants a nuclear weapon at all - a point I'm still dubious of - then they are negotiations to stop a determined nation from acquiring 1940s technology.

These are not ideal chips to be bargaining over. If a country with the resources of Iran seriously wants the bomb, it will eventually develop it, one way or the other. To stop them you would need an air strike of unprecedented accuracy and comprehensiveness, devastating their entire programme in one blow, in precisely the attack that the Iranian authorities have presumably been preparing for for a decade or more. This seems to me, even in my capacity as armchair general, obviously absurd. Even assuming you could do that damage, such a strike would either lead to all-out war or simply the reversal of the programme by a few years, at which point it would become even more of a source of national pride and would be even more fetishised by the regime, publicly and privately. The only sure way to stop them getting a bomb is full-on invasion and regime change, which is so blackly hilariously stupid as an idea that I will not give any space here to pointing out just how moronic an idea it is.

So, assuming they really want the bomb, everything between now and a nuclear Iran is just the small talk as cucumber sandwiches are handed round the diplomatic soiree. The alternative is that they quite want the bomb, but would give it up for something better. Given that the best they can hope to achieve from these talks if they intended on using the nuclear threat as bargaining counter all along is a relaxation of sanctions that started, um, because they looked like they were trying to get the bomb, this doesn't seem likely.

The other alternative is that they don't want the bomb at all, and the regime is telling the truth when it says it dislikes nuclear weapons, and Khamenei is not working out how to deal with the incredibly awkward situation when he has to tacitly admit to having nuclear weapons having issued a fatwa against them. The conflicting intelligence reports on the matter, their refusal to allow complete IAEA inspections, the sudden suspicious appearance of new unreported facilities - this suggests to me that the truth is somewhere in between, and a lot of very dangerous bets are being hedged in Tehran. In that case it is possible that Iran doesn't know what it wants from these negotiations, and is stalling for time until Israel makes the kind of characteristically belligerent, bone-headed mistake that gives them more room to make a definitive decision one way or the other. In any of these cases, I get the feeling that tantalising though the negotiations might be to cover in the press, they are to a great degree a means of passing time. Still, jaw-jaw better than war-war and all that.

All fairly standard stuff, I know, but it's good to keep an eye on the basics with a story like this.