Quote:This just makes me want to puke.

Interesting. My initial reaction was a sense of relief. Remember Wrath and Pride are two of the seven deadly sins.

http://www.whitestonejournal.com/seven/

Machiavelli Wrote:

Quote:This just makes me want to puke.

Interesting. My initial reaction was a sense of relief. Remember Wrath and Pride our two of the seven deadly sins.

http://www.whitestonejournal.com/seven/

Wrath and pride have nothing to do with either your holiness. It has to do with setting a precident for caving to blackmail.

You may be all for it Dogger, but it's no way to run a country.

Ninerfan1 Wrote:

Machiavelli Wrote:

Quote:This just makes me want to puke.

Interesting. My initial reaction was a sense of relief. Remember Wrath and Pride our two of the seven deadly sins.

http://www.whitestonejournal.com/seven/

Wrath and pride have nothing to do with either your holiness. It has to do with setting a precident for caving to blackmail.

You may be all for it Dogger, but it's no way to run a country.

I doubt that a quid pro quo exchange played any part in this.

This is the perfect case of how diplomacy can be effective. The UK leveraged its international relationships to isolate Iran, at a critical time in the UNSC. The longer the crisis lasted, the worse Iran was going to look to the P5, the more hardened EU opinion would align against them -- remember, the EU is their primary market due to the ILSA sanctions. They realized that they risked overplaying this. Or, more to the point, the mullahs convinced Ahmedinejad that he was overplaying it and the latter did not think it was worth a confrontation with the former. Just speculation there -- the case could have been reversed. From that point, it was all about waiting and offering face saving measures.

I think Iran comes out of this looking good in terms of international public opinion, who are pre-disposed to seeing things from their side -- but looking quite bad from the perspective of many key foreign capitals. They've lost a lot of credibility. Moscow and Beijing may not want to go out on a limb for them in the future when a stunt like this could be coming down the road. In the end, a big miscalculation by someone in Iran. Played quite nicely by Blair.