In a sensible world...

The US has yet to play its highest card: an offer, comparable to that made to, and accepted by, North Korea, of a comprehensive refashioning of the strategic relationship between the US and Iran. Unless and until that bargain is explored, it will never be clear whether Tehran could be persuaded to eschew the nuclear course.

-- from Bush heads for a dreadful miscalculation over Iran by Philip Stephens.

P.S. 1 Nov:

...a fissiparous, unstable and increasingly militarised Islamic regime, whose president has called for Israel to be removed from the map, is deliberately proceeding towards the threshold where it could, if it chose, swiftly take the last step to having a nuclear weapon. Among the probable consequences would be a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, with Sunni Muslim powers such as Saudi Arabia deciding they need their own.

Where are the German, British or Italian intellectuals and peace activists raising the alarm about this? Where have all the demos gone? Nuclear proliferation makes the risk of the actual use of nuclear weapons greater than in those last years of the cold war, though the scale of annihilation would be smaller. You may object that Israel, Pakistan and India already have their bombs. Yes, that's bad, and the west has flagrant double-standards in respect of India and Israel - but this is no argument for letting others obtain their own instruments of mass carnage. Four wrongs don't make a right.

-- from Facing disaster in Iran, Europe must finally make the hard choices by Timothy Garton-Ash.