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Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/06/AR2009030602071.html
Talk with Iran? Then Move Fast
[Washington Post] David Ignatius - There's wide support, in principle, for a process of "engagement" between the U.S. and its adversaries in the Middle East. Does Iran really imagine that it can engage the U.S. when its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said last week that Barack Obama was following the "crooked ways" of his predecessor and that Israel was a "cancerous tumor"? That's a recipe for stopping dialogue rather than starting it. The first challenge in Iran is what might be called the "two clocks" problem. Administration officials want a slow clock, in the sense that they favor a careful process of sustained, direct dialogue. But they also realize that a fast clock is ticking on the Iranian nuclear program and that by next year the Iranians could have enough fuel to make a bomb. Efraim Halevy, a former chief of Mossad, the Israeli spy service, highlighted this problem in a recent e-mail to me. "The strategy of engagement will succeed only if the Iranians realize they do not have all the time in the world to negotiate." He argued that the U.S. should "limit the dialogue to a very few months."