All Iran, all the time

James Fallows has an article in the latest Atlantic Monthly in which he describes just how bad the situation is vis-a-vis Iran's nuclear programme. As he puts it near the end of the article, "The inconvenient truth of American foreign policy is that the past five years have left us with a series of choices-and all of them are bad."

For the record, I also think it would be a bad idea for Iran to get the Bomb. I thought it was a bad thing when India, Pakistan and North Korea especially nuked up as well. That said, I would clearly prefer a nuclear Iran to airstrikes, if only because a variety of people who know more about this than I do think that airstrikes won't work. I think Matt Yglesias puts it well here, the only way to conceivably get the Iranians to back off involves giving them something. As I understand it, a conventional bombing of suspected nuclear sites might very well not eliminate the programme, which means the only way to be sure of taking out the sites is the nuclear option that's had me so excited lately.

Are they willing to talk? Well, Seymour Hersh says they want to, and while that's far from conclusive I'd say that it's at least some evidence that it really isn't time to saber-rattle in public. It certainly couldn't hurt for the U.S. government to make better use of its back channels-as Fallows says, it would make more sense to do any threatening that needed to be done there, rather than in bombastic speeches by Dick Cheney and Condi Rice.