This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, November 21st, 2007. I'm Caleb Brown.

Unilateral sanctions, aggressive talk, and a long-standing reluctance to negotiate

mark the United States diplomatic efforts in engaging Iran.

So is it possible that the United States is not genuinely interested in peace with that nation?

And is it too late for the Bush administration to achieve any lasting success at getting a negotiated peace with Iran?

Blue Innocent is a foreign policy analyst for the Cato Institute.

Well, essentially the United States establishes as the precondition to negotiations

with Iran that it ceases its uranium enrichment and we've been stuck kind of in a diplomatic

stalemate over the past year. The United Nations Security

Council has instituted multilateral sanctions, two rounds of multilateral sanctions, and

the United States has its own unilateral sanctions against Iran.

And also the House of Representatives actually passed a bill of the Iran Counterproliferation Act of 2007,

which would actually expand the unilateral sanctions against Iran if passed in the house and then signed by the president.

So this precondition of forcing Iran to actually stop its uranium enrichment is actually kind of funny because you would think that before you enter into a negotiation

you wouldn't establish as the precondition the very goal you'd want to achieve.

There are several problems with that. Number one, It's very difficult to restart centrifuges

once they are stopped. You have to put in all these inert gases, you're putting a

lot of strain on the machines for spinning the uranium.

So it's actually very intensive process.

And so hopefully that shouldn't be a hurdle,

but that's actually become one of the chief reasons

why we haven't been able to progress with Iran on the dialogue issue.

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