Bolton: Watch out for Iranian 'fairydust'

By Abby W. Schachter
May 21, 2012 
NY Post
http://www.nypost.com/p/blogs/capitol/bolton_watch_out_for_iranian_fairydust_LO2gHWs2D4mkSkRtbQXt1H#ixzz1vbQdbCbm

We had the pleasure of sitting down to an interview with Ambassador John Bolton before he spoke at the 2012 Duquesne Dinner sponsored by St. Vincent College and, not surprisingly, most of our conversation concerned the upcoming reopening of negotiations between Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany. 

When asked to offer a prediction for the outcome of those discussions Bolton warned that the Iranians were likely to try to throw fairydust in the eyes of Western diplomats, which he worries will cause the Europeans and the Americans to accept some new framework for resolving previously unresolved issues. 

Bolton pointed to the ongoing talks between the IAEA and Iran regarding that country's nuclear program and how those negotiations are supposedly moving in a positive direction as evidence that the Western powers wanted to have something positive in hand, going into the meetings in Baghdad later this week. This way, Bolton says, the Iranians look like they are cooperating with the West and that makes it more possible the West will agree to something.

Bolton thinks the Iranians will do what they've been doing for more than two years now and that's to drag out the process of negotiating as long as possible so they can simultaneously keep at their goal of a nuclear weapon. 

When we asked whether the sanctions were working, Bolton admitted that the restriction on Iranian oil sales were causing them some losses but nothing too significant. Iran would rather not be under sanctions, Bolton explained, but it isn't as if they are having any troubling smuggling and getting their oil where it needs to go.

Bolton is concerned that the Europeans are looking for a way out of a confrontation with Iran because they've got other problems to deal with, and that meanwhile the US will go along with a deal that satisfies the Europeans.

We asked why the US doesn't just use Syria as a proxy for Iran (as everyone knows that it is) and confront Iran there, while simultaneously helping the opposition to the regime of Bashar Assad. Bolton dismissed this possibility because of the current occupant of the White House. There is no way to contain confrontation with Syria just to Syria, Bolton explained. He added that with Iranian Revolutionary Guard troops already in Syria, there was no such thing as an Iran-free Syria policy. 

The long-term solution for both countries is to get new regimes, Bolton said, but Obama is not ready for a confrontation with Syria and certainly not with Iran.

When we asked about whether Obama isn't possibly hurting his image by not confronting Syria (or Iran for that matter), Bolton agreed that the President sees the risks in looking weak. But, as Bolton sees it, such concerns are not nearly as important to Obama as his own views and on that score, he has much less fear of a nuclear Iran than he does of, say, a military strike on Iran by Israel.