May I ask the main reason it cant be trusted? Is it because Israel doesn't have enough influence over the state department perhaps?

Sanctions dont work. It's only going to hurt the green movement.

Much better leave things exactly as they are; the sanctions are for mollifying Israel, not for harming Iran.

... acknowledge is that there are but two options here:

1) Allow Iran's fundamentalist shiite leadership to develop nuclear weaponry and then sit back and wait for the day when a unclear warhead furnished to Hamas, Hezbollah, or more likely some shadow group we've never heard of before is used against an American, European or Israel city, to say nothing of the nuclear arms race that it will ignite in the Middle East

or

2) Invade Iran to totally destroy its nuclear program and overthrow its patently evil and corrupt regime.

Anyone who seriously thinks that "diplomatic pressure" and/or sanctions of any kind are going to deter Iran's mullahs from building their bomb is either delusional or an out & out idiot. The unpleasant fact is that Iran is a boil that's going to have to be lanced sooner or later. I'd prefer that we do it now before they have nuclear weapons.

One can only pray that our Commander-In-Chief will somehow summon up the courage to do what must be done.Unfortunately, the indications that we been given up to now don't give much cause for hope. Barack Obama and his team seem to be preparing both themselves and the public for "the inevitability of a nuclear Iran."

As much as he screwed up US domestic policy, it's times like these when I really miss George W. Bush. He'd know what needs to be done and wouldn''t flinch from doing it.

There seems to be an undercurrent within the above analysis, and some of the comments, that the Dept of State acts on its own, or pursues its own goals and interests. Unless I missed something in my middle school civics classes, or any of my college or graduate level classes, DOS is part of the executive branch, and as such acts in accordance with the wishes of the president.

Maybe some of the ire needs to be directed as current and past POTUS's, and not at this or that SECSTATE or civil servants.

from NDU on nuke politics in Iran:
http://www.ndu.edu/press/lib/pdf/Nuclear-Politics-in-Iran.pdf

nuclear fuel cycle and nuclear weapons are not the same, ok?

remind me the last time sanctions worked?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/18/opinion/18iht-edcohen.html

NYTIMES:

Op-Ed Columnist
The Inertia Option
By ROGER COHEN

I hope Iran policy makers in Washington and Europe are reading histories of that world-changing year, 1989. I hope so because the time has come to do nothing in Iran.

As Timothy Garton Ash has written of the year Europe was freed, “For the decisive nine months, from the beginning of Poland’s roundtable talks in February to the fall of the Wall in November, the United States’ contribution lay mainly in what it did not do.”

That inaction reflected the first President Bush’s caution and calculations. Its effect was to deprive hardliners in Moscow of an American scapegoat for Eastern European agitation and allow revolutionary events to run their course.

The main difference between Moscow 1989 and Tehran 2009 is that the Islamic Republic is still ready to open fire. The main similarities are obvious: tired ideologies; regimes and societies marching in opposite directions; and spreading dissent both within the power apparatus and among the opposition.

Yes, the Islamic Republic has not arrived at a Gorbachevian renunciation of force. It is not yet open to compromise, despite calls for moderation from prominent clerics and now, it seems, from some senior army officers. It is still, in the words of the opposition leader Mir Hussein Moussavi, sending its Revolutionary Guards and Basiji militia to chase “shadows in the street.”

I don’t know how long this situation can endure. Anyone who claims to be able to tell the Iranian future is lying. But it seems clear that the “political clock” has now outpaced the “nuclear clock.”

Iran has been messing around with a nuclear program for some four decades. Pakistan went from zero to a bomb in about a quarter that time. Setting aside the still debatable objective of this Iranian endeavor (nuclear ambiguity or an actual device?), it’s not in the midst of the current political turmoil that Tehran is going to break out of its back-and-forth tinkering. Inertia is always strong in Iran’s many-headed system. Right now it’s stronger than ever — hence the risible, blustery confusion over a possible deal to export Iran’s low-enriched uranium.

All this says — nay, screams — to me: Do nothing. It is President Barack Obama’s outreach that has unsettled a regime that found American axis-of-evil rhetoric easy to exploit. After struggling, Obama has also found his sweet spot in combining that détente with quiet support for universal rights. Note the feminine possessive pronoun in this line from his Nobel speech: “Somewhere today, in this world, a young protester awaits the brutality of her government but has the courage to march on.” I saw those bloodied women marching in Tehran in June and will never forget them.

Their cause would be best upheld by stopping the march toward “crippling” sanctions on Iran. The recent House passage of the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act, which would sanction foreign companies that sell refined petroleum to Iran, is ominous. Rep. Howard Berman, who introduced the bill, is dead wrong when he says that it would empower the Obama administration’s Iran policy. It would in fact undermine that policy.

So would sanctions action from the so called “P5+1” — the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany. When I’m asked where the “stick” is in Iran, my response is the stick is Iranian society — the bubbling reformist pressure now rising up from Iran’s highly educated youth and brave women.

It would be a tragedy were Obama to weaken them. Sanctions now would do just that. Nobody would welcome them more than a regime able once more to refer to the “arrogant power” trying to bring proud Iran to its knees. The Revolutionary Guards, who control the sophisticated channels for circumventing existing sanctions, would benefit. China and Russia would pay little more than lip service.

As Elizabeth Shakman Hurd of Northwestern University has written, “the United States is empowering the dissenters with its silence.”

Sanctions represent tired binary thinking on Iran, the old West-versus-barbarism paradigm prevalent since political Islam triumphed in the revolution of 1979 as a religious backlash against Western-imposed modernity. The Iranian reality, as I’ve argued since the start of this year, is more complex. A leading cry today of the protesters in Iran is “God is great” — hardly a secular call to arms. These reformists are looking in their great majority for some elusive middle way combining faith and democracy.

The West must not respond with the sledgehammer of sanctions whose message is “our way or the highway.” Rather it must understand at last the subtle politics of Iran by borrowing an Iranian lesson: inertia.

When the Berlin Wall came down two decades ago, Francis Fukuyama famously predicted “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” In Iran now, many of the forces of 1989 are present, but the reformists’ quest is not for something “Western.” It is more for an idea of 1979, an indigenous non-secular and non-theocratic pluralist polity.

Obama, himself of hybrid identity, must show his understanding of this historic urge by doing nothing. That will allow the Iranian political clock to tick faster still.

Iran is holding a good hand to play.

The Chemical Weapons Convention/Treaty required all the signatory countries to destroy their chemical weapons stockpile by a set date. The US hasn't destroyed all of it's stockpile and asked the Convention for an extension of the date from the Treaty for more time to destroy it's stockpile. 2007 it was supposed to be destroyed by and the US got a 5 year extension. Now the US is saying that it still won't be able to meet the extended deadline.

The US also just said at the Convention: ""Bacteria are now being engineered to perform industrial chemical production processes"" and wants to keep letting Pfizer and other companies work with very deadly bacteria...which was banned....saying it's for 'industrial production'.

Iran can get Sanctions on the United States. Failure to destroy it's chemical weapons stockpile, continued manufacture of deadly viruses that can kill every living thing on Earth.

www.nytimes.com/2010/04/03/business/03pfizer.html

Mr. Schanzer got his start in the policy world as a research fellow at the Middle East Forum, a Philadelphia-based think tank headed by "scholar" Daniel Pipes.

These people are beneath neoconservatives. Neocons use their intellect and political justifications to prop up their bigotry towards Islam and Muslims.

Daniel Pipes and his ilk and plain and simple fear mongers. This is nothing but Islamic McCarthyism.

Why the hell does FP gives these loons a platform? Equal time? Great. Let's hear from the neo nazis.

The lie started as soon as the author mentioned "illicit nuclear program". The IAEA has found Iran to be in complete compliance with all IAEA protocols. It is Zoinist control that keeps lies about Iran in the news.

The quote about Iran wanting to "wipe Israel off the map" was also a lie. What the Iranian president said was, "The Zionist regime should be erased from the pages of time."

Did the erasing of the Nazi regime mean the destruction of Germany and its people?

Right now I don't think there is a more fascist regime anywhere on earth. The Likud has become Nazi-like in its ethnic cleansing, concentration-camped extermnation of Palestinians and its reliance on its belief in the racial superiority of Jews to carry out crimes against humanity.

Israel lied when they attacked the U.S.S. Liberty and killed a hundred Americans to hide its crimes the U.S. was observing.

It lies America into war, carries out espionage against the U.S. and then sells American military technology to China.

We need to end American support for the Israeli war machine.

Talk about rounding up the usual suspects. First get a Zionist neocon to pen an op-ed piece saying that the AIPAC backed sanctions against Iran need real teeth. And then we can get a bunch of comments, the vast majority of whom think that imposing additional sanctions against Iran are a bad idea.

And all of this is done the day that Lula reaches an accord with Iran about processing their raw LEU into fuel rods instead of warheads. Everybody's happy. The AIPAC neocons get to strut their stuff, showing the world that they're still big swinging dicks. We liberals get to show our outrage, and the administration in Washington gets what it's wanted all along.

I can just hear President Obama talking to Rep. Berman and the folks at AIPAC:

"Well, we really tried hard to get sanctions against the Iranians on this issue, but it just didn't work out. I'm sorry we're in such a mess right now."

Ipso facto, everyone gets to spout off, and the President gets what he wanted all along.

When a government is entrenched in its place with one of its top 1 maxims being, "The US is the Great Satan" (No jokes about using a Christian name by the Islamic Republic here...), how can anyone assume that Iran will deal on the level? They simply can't. Too much is invested in the "Great Satan" motif.

On the other hand, if played through third parties, say, like, Turkey and Brazil, they can deal. While the deal they hammered out with Turkey and Brazil is most likely more token than anything else considering how much enriched stuff they probably have, its still better than anything the "Great Satan" has come up with in the last decade.

The US can't, for now, deal face-to-face with Iran. Dealing through third-parties gives both sides the opportunity to work together, kind of. The US can say they helped make the world a safer place, and Iran can say that they worked with Turkey and Brazil, not the "Great Satan".