We welcome Bush’s willingness to try diplomacy (on Iran) for a change, but he might do even better if he didn’t trumpet his ambivalence quite so loudly, said International Herald Tribune in an editorial on Friday. Excerpts:
We welcome the news that President George W. Bush has decided to send one of his top diplomats to talks on Iran’s nuclear program. That is quite a change from just a few months ago when Bush denounced as appeasement any effort to talk to “terrorists.”
It is very late in the game, but we hope this means that Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice are learning the lessons of seven years of failed foreign policies built almost completely on isolating (or attacking) America’s adversaries. There is little chance of solving major international problems so long as the United States refuses even to have a seat at the table.
We also hope it means that Vice President Dick Cheney and his crew have given up their dangerous fantasy of bombing away Iran’s nuclear ambitions — or at least have been overruled by the president.
It has been two years since the United Nations ordered Iran to stop enriching uranium.
Tehran continues to defy that order, and its scientists are getting ever closer to mastering a process that is the hardest part of building a nuclear weapon.
The United States and other major powers (Britain, France, Germany, China and Russia) have tried to use a mixture of incentives and sanctions to get Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions. But neither the rewards nor the punishments have been especially persuasive.
China and Russia, which have strong economic ties to Iran, have blocked tough sanctions, while the Bush administration has not made a credible offer of improved relations and security guarantees and had refused to sit down at the negotiating table.
