Pretend for a moment that you are the president of the United States and you have gotten yourself into a bit of a hole with your Iran policy.
First you offered to negotiate with Iran over nuclear (and potentially other) issues without the Bush preconditions. But there were powerful political forces that felt this was an example of your inexperience and even appeasement tendencies. So you unwisely accepted a six-month deadline for the negotiations to show that you meant business. You tried to soften that by saying you would take another look at the issue at the end of the year, but everyone ignored that and let you know that Jan. 1 was the drop dead date to solve all the negotiating problems with Iran.
In the meantime, the most serious internal revolt in 30 years exploded in Iran. It was not clear how this would affect the behavior of the regime on international issues. Some said the regime was weakened and vulnerable and so would more readily yield to pressure; others thought Iran's rulers would become more belligerent internationally to compensate for their internal weakness.
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You had a couple of rounds of meetings with the Iranians and jointly came up with a fiendishly clever ploy. Iran would ship out quite a lot of its low enriched uranium (LEU), thereby reducing its stockpile that might be turned into a bomb, and Russia and France would provide the Iranians with more highly enriched fuel to be used in their research reactor that makes medical isotopes. Everybody wins. But when the Iranians took this home, they were savaged by their own political opposition for buying a pig in a poke. In disarray, they backtracked and started looking for a face-saving alternative, specifically to conduct the swap on Iranian soil or, later, in Turkey.
This situation was complicated by the discovery (or Iranian announcement, we're not quite sure) of a previously unannounced uranium enrichment site, which was immediately inspected by the IAEA. Some think that this was Iran's Plan B, to have a separate enrichment capability if the primary site at Natanz was bombed by Israel or the U.S.; others think the site was intended as a covert production line to produce a bomb. The punditocracy decides that it was a covert bomb production line.
Moreover, the punditocracy, which had already decided on the deadline of Jan. 1, now decides that the Iranians negotiated in bad faith and the negotiations were at a total dead end. Congress, which had reluctantly stayed quiet on the subject, now returned to its usual political game of looking tough by bashing Iran. Sanctions bills threatening interdiction of gasoline shipments to Iran were passed overwhelmingly in the House and were due to pass with equal margins when the Senate returned in January.
Your critics (who wanted merely token negotiations followed by crippling sanctions and, if possible, war) rubbed their hands in anticipation. A leading neoconservative gleefully remarked that everything was proceeding according to script. AIPAC issued a triumphant declaration as gasoline sanctions rolled through Congress.
So, Mr. President, here you are on Jan. 1. The "deadline" is upon you. Your allies and your opponents in Congress are ready to hit you with a dilemma -- either impose crippling sanctions or look like an appeaser. Yet you know that gasoline sanctions are perhaps the worst idea to come out of Congress since they opposed the purchase of Alaska. The sanctions would enrich and empower the Revolutionary Guards, undercut the Green opposition, identify the U.S. as the enemy of the ordinary citizen in Iran, and possibly start us down the slippery slope to another disastrous war in the Middle East. But it looks great on a bumper sticker, and Glenn Beck will savage anyone who dares oppose it.
So what to do?
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