The U.S. has never been good at making sense of Tehran's knotty power structure, and the distrust is mutual: many in Iran suspect that the U.S. is looking for an excuse to attack their nation, as it did Iraq. Full Story »
Posted by Derek Hawkins
Only readers well-versed in the complexity and difficulty of conducting negotiations in the Middle East will appreciate just how enterprising this story really is. Those of us who have followed Dennis Ross' career will cheer from the sidelines; it would be hard to imagine a more astute steward of this process. Since there is little question that, without intervention, Iran's nuclear program will be used to develop nuclear weapons, the matter of negotiating a different outcome will soon go critical. Massimo Calabresi conveys both the urgency of the situation and the difficulty the Obama administration faces; conflict with Iran, centered on the nuclear issue, is likely to become the first major international crisis of Obama's presidency, and world peace hangs in the balance.
My time at Berkeley brought me into frequent contact with Dennis Ross, during which time I became an admirer. Between 1984 and 1986, Ross headed up the Berkeley-Stanford program on Soviet International Behavior, and my emphasis was Soviet Studies.