Somebody had to say it.

If the Israelis attack Syria and/or Lebanon this summer, would AMS determine that a military response from either entity constitues a "terrorist" attack by Iran?

"So who is she kidding?"

I would join jhaber in defence of "Dean Slaughter" (although I shudder when someone is titled that way, it is hard to think that the role of deans is to be most creative and original denizens of academia).

I could structure a deal that Iran should find attractive: "Dear morons, nuclear weapons are actually good for nothings because politically they are impossible to use. Also, making decent nukes is not all that easy, you can spend a decade on futile effort. Instead, you can secure nuclear fuel supplies with a long-term contract with Russia, and you can see very well that Russia is not inclined to be bullied into suspending such deliveries for a flimsy reason. More importantly, you can get excellant retaliation capability by getting decent anti-ship rockets capable of sweeping from water anything that moves in the Persian gulf. Refrain from messing with nuclear fuel and we will drop all opposition to you acquiring such missile technology. Closing Persian Gulf for commercial and military traffic comes pretty closed to MAD, and it is politically feasible and reversible."

A person so close to actual politics and policies as Anne-Marie should not talk with such clarity. It is just not done, and with good reasons.

Why wouldn't Hezbollah's attack on Israel last summer qualify as "direct Iranian support of a terrorist attack against the United States, Europe, or Israel."

piotr, you want to give the Iranian's missiles they can use to close the Persian gulf? Not a good idea. What if they decided to use them? How many American's would have to die to rectify the situation?

Iran needs a secure source of nuclear energy and technological know-how, not weapons - it has repeatedly said so & there's no evidence to the contrary. So the assumption that a security guarantee would resolve the issue is based on a false premise that Iran is building nuclear weapons. In fact Iran has repeatedly stated that nuclear weapons would NOT help its security.

And actually, the US has already made a Negative Security Assurance to not only Iran, but all the signatories of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It was one of the many promises that the US made to convince everyone else to sign the NPT. The other promise was to work towards its own nuclear disarmament.

In both cases, the US has totally ignored and violated the promises.

Such promises to Iran would not be worth the paper their written on.

" . . . nuclear weapons are actually good for nothings because politically they are impossible to use. Also, making decent nukes is not all that easy, you can spend a decade on futile effort."

If this is so, why bust your chops trying to do a deal in the first place?

Actually, nukes or not good for anyone, so it would be better to limit their proliferation.

To me, a good strategic weapon can be

(a) dangled like sword of Damocles

(b) introduced with excruciating slowness

(c) withdrawn as soon as an acceptable deal is in sight.

Nukes are good for making fake threats that can be rightfully diagnosed as fake by the adversaries. Even so, fake threats can lead to some all-to-real massacres, so it is worth to avoid it.

Russian or Chinese military technology won't resolve Iran's energy shortfall, which is the whole reason that the (link) US encouraged Iran to go nuclear in the first place(link)sound economic basis for Iran developing nuclear power, and Iran wants to be able to use its own uranium to make some of the nuclear fuel it will need, without being totally reliant on outside sources like Russia.

Analysts agree that the oil will not last forever, indeed, we may already have reached the point of peak oil. The developing world will bear the brunt of the imminent energy crunch. European countries already rely on nuclear power for a third to a half of their electricity needs, and both France and the US have invested in new enrichment plants. South Korea, China, Britain and the US have all recently announced plans for dramatic expansion of their nuclear power industries. Even Rice has conceded that developing countries will have to turn to nuclear energy.

Iran is no exception Despite its large oil and gas reserves, it already had a clear case for diversifying its energy resources into nuclear power by the 1970s. Since then its population has tripled, while its oil production has almost halved, and it now consumes about 40% of its oil domestically.

The economic justification of nuclear power was confirmed by studies in both the US(pdf file):

[T]he oil export decline we project implies that Iran’s claim to need nuclear power to preserve exports is genuine. U.S. insistence that Iran’s nuclear technology program has no economic purpose has obscured the regime’s petroleum crisis, of which the nuclear power need is one symptom.

Studies in the UK also support Iran's economic case for nuclear power:

In the absence of a "smoking gun", Washington often says the fact Iran is the No. 2 producer in OPEC and sits on the second biggest natural gas reserves in the world is enough to make its atomic ambitions suspicious.

The Foreign Affairs Select Committee of Britain's parliament said last March that based on a study it commissioned: "It is clear ... that the arguments as to whether Iran has a genuine requirement for domestically produced nuclear electricity are not all, or even predominantly, on one side."

Some US arguments against Iran "were not supported by an analysis of the facts" the committee added, noting that much of the natural gas flared off by Iran - which US officials say could be harnessed instead of nuclear power - was not recoverable for energy use.

We should not permit the assumption that Iran is building nuclear weapons to go unquestioned. There's no evidence of that. In speculating about how to get Iran to drop a nuclear weapons program, we're confusing a perfectly legal and economically justifiable nuclear energy program with a weapons program, and we're hop-skipping over that minor inconvenient fact that no weapons program has been found by the IAEA, just as we hop-skipped over the fact that the IAEA had found no WMDs in Iraq.

Those who claim that Iran lives in a dangerous neighbourhood and therefore must be seeking nuclear weapons as a deterrent are engaging in a logical fallacy known as "subverted support": they are attempting to explain a phenomenon when there is no evidence that the phenomenon exists in the first place.