This is the only deal Iran will accept. But will Israel take it?
Stephen Walt gets to the heart of it:
...[A]ny deal that Tehran will accept is still going to leave it with the ability to produce a bomb if it ever decides it needs to; we are mostly going to be negotiating over the length of time it would take them to do so and thus how much warning we are likely to get.
It's not clear yet whether the U.S. is willing to live with such a deal. Obama's national security adviser Susan Rice said late last month that any Iran deal would not include domestic uranium enrichment (though Iran would be allowed to import enriched uranium for electrical generation). Still, it's conceivable that if a deal were in sight, the Obama administration and its European partners would relent and agree to Iranian enrichment under international inspections. (Lithuania's foreign minister has said as much.)
What's less clear is how Israel would respond to any deal that allows Iran to retain domestic uranium enrichment. Prime Minister Netanyahu's government has repeatedly insisted that Iran can have no such capability but would Netanyahu be willing to rupture a U.S. deal with a military strike? It's one thing to complain publicly about an American policy, quite another to literally blow it up.
(AP Photo)
