Iran Warns of ‘Reduced’ Ties With U.N. Inspectors – NYTimes.com.
It doesn’t seem like this will be helpful in any conceivable way. Andrew Sullivan passes along this bit on if this will at least dissuade other “rouge” states:
Aside from Obama loyalists and administration members, no one thinks that this round of sanctions does anything of the kind. Engagement advocates find the pursuit of a new round of sanctions misguided, but recognize weak sanctions when they see them. As the Leveretts correctly observe, this round of sanctions is very weak and had to be very weak to gain Russian and Chinese support. On the other side of the debate, Jackson Diehl points out all the reasons why these sanctions are not very significant. Many governments will not adopt the stricter financial sanctions and ship inspections that the resolution allows but does not require.
So, to recap, it won’t stop Iran, it’s ineffective and unlikely to stop other nations from doing the same thing. It also causes Iran to reduce cooperation with international inspectors. This effectively makes it a lose-lose-lose proposition.
The only thing it actually does is create an appearance of action, which in the world of Washington “optics”, is far more important than effective action. Which brings me back to this question: why is Iran having a nuke more dangerous than Pakistan? If we simply make it clear that if Iran is crazy enough to actually use one, Tehran will be reduced to a pile of radioactive rubble. Despite the obvious horror of “mutually assured destruction” it did create a certain stability during the cold war. This is a bit different, in that it’s more of a “unilaterally assured destruction”.
Also, we remain the only country to ever actually use nuke. So who’s the crazy rogue state again?
