Impossible Conditions to Talk

By Fester:

Doing nothing is hard work if you must obscure why you are doing nothing. The new Isreali government wants to do nothing with the Palestians, but they are facing significant international and domestic pressure to come to some type of settlement. So how do they justify doing nothing --- easy. They indicate that they are willing to do something given some onerous and unreasonable conditions. I tried this technique quite a bit as a teenager, and it usually was good for a couple of days of inaction.

From the Washington Post:

The new Israeli government will not move ahead on the core issues of peace talks with the Palestinians until it sees progress in U.S. efforts to stop Iran's suspected pursuit of a nuclear weapon and limit Tehran's rising influence in the region, according to top government officials familiar with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's developing policy on the issue.

Do the Isrealis have a time machine that we could use so that the Palm Beach County butterfly ballots were properly designed so the Jews for Buchanan could have voted for Gore?

If they do, great, then this is a reasonable condition to limit Iranian influence? If not, it is polite filibustering. Iran's influence in the Middle East is and has been increasing do to the US decision to first invade Afghanistan with a light footprint while destabilizing Pakistan which means the ISAF logistics tail is shaky as hell and could be improved with Iranian cooperation, and then the US decision to invade Iraq, and ally with Iranian sponsored and protected groups as the new government of Iraq? Throw in a weak dollar policy which pushes up oil prices, a refusal to look at conservation or efficiencies as energy policy (see the tire gauge stunt) and believing that Chalabi was a credible source, Iranian influence in the Middle East was sure to increase.

Now on the nuclear front, I'm going to outsource most of the work to Steve's excellent work:

Despite all the hype about the latest IAEA report on Iran (PDF") the key phrase, repeated a lot in the IAEA reports is "The nuclear material has been under containment and surveillance at all times." But that little detail normally comes out around paragraph five in news reports, if at all....

But they'd have to use this LEU - which is "under containment and surveillance at all times" - in their clandestine facility or wait another 3 or four years to enrich enough uranium from hundreds of tonnes of raw material clandestinely kept separately from the stocks monitored by the IAEA, which they'd have to clandestinely ship into the country and then clandestinely convert into UF6 gas at yet another secret plant. David Albright can "dance about it", but the world would have instant warning of an Iranian breakout and at least a year to decide what to do about such an event...

And from Cheryl Rofer referring to the same IAEA report at the Whirled View

The issue here is concentration...Concentration is not that hard to understand, but in our science-challenged society (yes, we all hated chemistry, where it was discussed in the first week), it seems not to be a consideration.

...Iran is not in a position to make a bomb, unless there is a bunch of hidden stuff that nobody has found, involving big buildings that can be seen by satellite surveillance...There are a number of other things in that IAEA report that the media aren't bothering to report, like that the pace of enrichment has slowed. That doesn't support the idea that Iran is racing toward a bomb, so it's not relevant, I guess.

So these conditions are impossible to be met or at least be 'verified' to Isreali satisfaction and everyone who is paying attention knows it. The conditions are an excuse to engage in pre-determined policy with minimal inteference.

Comments

[Peter G.]

That's a fair summation. It ought to be good for some considerable delay in doing anything at all. I'm not sure how to move Israel off this position. I am sure, however, that looking for relief from the hardliners on the Iranian side is pointless. I expected them to try to torpedo any sort of US diplomatic overtures and that's pretty much the case.