Should more time be wasted in talks with Iran?

NY Times:

A year after President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced a new strategy toward Iran, a behind-the-scenes debate has broken out within the administration over whether the approach has any hope of reining in Iran’s nuclear program, according to senior administration officials.

The debate has pitted Ms. Rice and her deputies, who appear to be winning so far, against the few remaining hawks inside the administration, especially those in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office who, according to some people familiar with the discussions, are pressing for greater consideration of military strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities.

In the year since Ms. Rice announced the new strategy for the United States to join forces with Europe, Russia and China to press Iran to suspend its uranium enrichment activities, Iran has installed more than a thousand centrifuges to enrich uranium. The International Atomic Energy Agency predicts that 8,000 or so could be spinning by the end of the year, if Iran surmounts its technical problems.

Those hard numbers are at the core of the debate within the administration over whether Mr. Bush should warn Iran’s leaders that he will not allow them to get beyond some yet-undefined milestones, leaving the implication that a military strike on the country’s facilities is still an option.

Even beyond its nuclear program, Iran is emerging as an increasing source of trouble for the Bush administration by inflaming the insurgencies in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and in Gaza, where it has provided military and financial support to the militant Islamic group Hamas, which now controls the Gaza Strip.

Even so, friends and associates of Ms. Rice who have talked with her recently say she has increasingly moved toward the European position that the diplomatic path she has laid out is the only real option for Mr. Bush, even though it has so far failed to deter Iran from enriching uranium, and that a military strike would be disastrous.

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The diplomatic path is making a gift of time to Iran which it is using to arm our enemies in Iraq and Afghanistan and arm enemies of Israel in Gaza and Lebanon while it continues to ramp up its nuke facilities. In other words the jaw-jaw approach has accomplished much for Iran and less than nothing for the US and its allies.

However, any military strike against Iran must hit more than her nukes. We must also destroy her weapon production facilities and her missiles as well as her naval assets. We have to destroy her ability to make war, or she will use whatever remaining assets she has to strike our forces and those of our allies in the region. Anything less will be an invitation to more terrorist attacks.

What we could probably do short of that is convince our allies that it is time for them to join us in a tougher sanctions regime. If they do not they will risk losing their investments in Iran during the military operations that would follow a failure to impose those sanctions.

The hard fact is that Iran has been at war with the US since 1979 and no amount of conversation is going to change that fact. All of Iran's hostile acts of late are consistent with that fact. Our forbearance has availed us nothing from Iran. It is also unlikely to appease the "anti war" left.