OP-ED: US-Iran Talks: What Israel Wants (Daily Star, LEBANON)

Unless effective measures are taken soon, Iran will have a nuclear bomb within a year according to worst-case assessments, or a few years under more optimistic ones. President-elect Barack Obama is publicly committed to a policy of engagement with Iran. The question is no longer whether to engage, but how to do so.

Iran has good strategic reasons for seeking a nuclear capability and it is questionable whether any combination of inducements, positive or negative, can elicit a change in its policies. We will only know, however, if a sincere and comprehensive attempt is made. Time is the biggest problem.

First, the timeline may now be such that there simply is no longer a sufficient interval for an engagement process. Assuming the new administration needs a few months to put its policies in place, the United States will only be ready for engagement in the late spring or early summer. If the worst-case scenarios are correct, this would leave only half a year for dialogue and in reality far less, for agreement would have to be reached well in advance. Conversely, this timeline would allow the US to begin dialogue only after Iran's elections in June, and thus hopefully avoid the need to deal with and possibly legitimize its radical president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

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