Wendy Sherman, John Kerry, And Those Frantic Negotiations

Now John Kerry has taken personal charge of the negotiationswith Iran over its nuclear project, negotations .which had been in the famously competent hands of Wendy Sherman, His intense and hectic involvement, which he thinks should impress the Iranians, and the world, with the seriousness and splendor of his deep commitment to The Process And Its Outcome,  has only made the Iranians keenly aware of how eager the Obama Administration is for a deal.

And all along the American government might simply have made clear that:

1) Iran has a “perfect right” to try to obtain nuclear weapons, which “right”  is something the Iranians keep insisting on, and ought to be conceded, in a perfectly straightforward manner

and

2) The United States has a “perfect right” to try to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons or the capability to produce them

and after those two statements have been made, the American government ought to have

3) Imposed severe economic sanctions on Iran years ago, and announced that they would remain in effect unless, and until, Iran agrees to undo much of its nuclear weapons program.

and

4) Not entered into negotiations at all. There is no need for negotiations.It would have been better to have rejected negotiations. They only give the Iranians the notioi that they can haggle, in bazaari style,with the naive Americans.  The position of the American government, the Americans might have said, has been made clear in 1), 2), and 3).

5) Then wait for the Iranians to suffer — with their oil income cut in two, their inflation rate of 25-30%, the collapse of their agriculture because of the drop in annual rainfall, the decrease in the birth rate, especially among the educated women (which means a drop in the national I.Q.), the vast population of drug addicts, the Iranian girls who work as prostitutes in the Gulf, servicing the despised Arabs — and then to ask, repeatedly, for negotiations. And then, only reluctantly, grant them, not frantically but with a certain studied indifference, those negotiations, en grand seigneur, and certainly not allow them to be conducted either by the likes of Wendy Sherman or by John Kerry.

That would have been a better way.