We Don’t Have A Solution, But We Need To Acknowledge That There Is A Problem

Yesterday the Christian Science Monitor posted an article about the summit of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) held in Tehran, Iran, which ended Friday. The summit was attended by 120 countries.

The Obama Administration has consistently claimed that the sanctions the United States has placed on Iran have isolated the country and will slow down the Iranian quest for a nuclear weapon. I don’t think a country that has been successfully isolated could host a conference of 120 nations. It is also disturbing to me that that conference included both Afghanistan and Egypt.

The article reported the positives and the negatives of the summit:

The US pressured NAM members not to go to Tehran, but many countries nevertheless “sent their highest delegates – their head of state, kings, prime ministers,” noted Mr. Zibakalam (Sadegh Zibakalam of Tehran University). “So I think…Iran can justifiably say, ‘I have scored some points against the United States and Israel.”

That view was countered by Mehdi Khalaji of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

“What Iran does not want to admit [is] that many of these countries that participated in this summit, they are not non-aligned anymore, they have close relationships with the United States, countries like Saudi [Arabia]…like Bahrain, they do not have good relations with Iran,” Mr. Khalaji told AJE.

“The fact that many countries participated in this summit doesn’t mean that Iran can make up [for] its political isolation,” said Khalaji. “Iran has to look for [a] real solution for its problem, instead of focusing on propaganda and public diplomacy.”

Both were on display in Tehran during the two-day summit meeting.

“They put the cars of the murdered scientists in front of the venue, then they had a special press briefing from the families of the murdered scientists,” says the European diplomat. “They were feeding the media all these stories, ‘We are the victims here, and we are getting killed,’ which done with a slightly lighter touch may have worked. But they’ve just overdone it.”

“Instead, coming out of Iran were stories that this was not a successful conference for the Iranians, because the two issues they didn’t want to talk about were talked about from the very beginning, right at the top: the nuclear dossier and Syria.

The longer the Iranian nuclear program goes unchecked, the more dangerous the world becomes. I have no idea what the solution is to the Iranian nuclear threat, but I suspect that killing their scientists and introducing computer viruses into their software is more effective than the current sanctions. I don’t want to see a war in the Middle East, but unless Iran is stopped, we are going to have one.

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