3 Civil Wars at the same time? Contd.

A reader writes:

Your points are valid. A large part of the Iraq study group's report seems to focus on this option of holding an international diplomacy conference, in which all of the main powers in the Middle East will attend. Of course, it is probably asking too much to get Iran and Syria to work out a peaceful agreement with nations like Israel and the US. Nonetheless, I still believe that it is nice to hear members of our government talking about diplomatic, rather that just military, options. Let's face it, Mr. Bush probably won’t want to resort to diplomatic options, but it is nice to hear someone is telling him he should not forget that diplomacy is US tradition. Even during the Cold War, the US still talked with Soviet leaders. Diplomacy may be difficult, tedious, and stressful, but it is a better option than trying to solve every dispute militarily.

Point taken and thank you for the post. What we do not wish to do, is rule out a reinvigorated, large scale military campaign in Iraq. That debate is still being hotly contested (more later). But with regard to Iran, despite the myriad of reasons for sidestepping the Iranian landmine, Henry Kissinger, the pioneer of detente, a policy which, as the reader points out, may have saved the world from nuclear destruction during the Cold War, expresses a slightly different point of view in his interview with Bernard Gwertzman for the Council on Foreign Relations: (Full Interview Here)

BG: What do you think of the policy that’s being followed to try to stop Iran’s uranium processing through negotiations?
HK: I agree that we should try to stop the processing and probably, tactically, it’s very useful to let the Europeans do the negotiating and we back it up. But the fact is, at some point in the relatively near future, we will have to decide whether those negotiations are working or whether they are not simply a way of legitimizing a continued program. That will be hotly disputed. Then we have to decide, we together with our allies, what measures are appropriate, and then we will face the question of how far we are willing to go to prevent nuclear-weapons technology in Iran. Iran will get us probably beyond the point where non-proliferation can be a meaningful policy, and then we live in a world of multiple nuclear centers. And then we’d have to ask ourselves what the world would look like if the bombs in London had been nuclear and 100,000 people had been killed.
BG: Am I right to think you’re not adverse to some kind of military action down the road?I’m not averse to thinking about it, but I think it has to be very carefully looked at.That would be quite a quagmire.
HK: I’m not recommending it but, on the other hand, it is a grave step to tolerate a world of multiple nuclear-weapons centers without restraint. I’m not recommending military action, but I’m recommending not excluding it.

So although you won't see any of the writers here endorsing military action in Iran anytime soon, it is interesting to read this position from the man who successfully negotiated the United States through the most tense time in American Foreign Relations in the last one hundred years...