Turkey's prime
minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was expected to come to the White House
on Thursday for a meeting with President Barack Obama. Erdogan's visit
has now been postponed, and the decision to postpone comes on the heels
of the Turkish leader's high-profile visit to Iran this week.
Tehran threw
President Barack Obama a badly needed "lifeline" for his Iran policy at
last week's nuclear discussions in Geneva: It promised U.N. access to a
recently declared nuclear site and committed "in principle" to ship
low-enriched uranium, or LEU, abroad to make fuel rods for producing
medical isotopes. If Geneva had been a "bust," Obama would have been
committed to mustering international endorsement for what his secretary
of state calls "crippling" sanctions against Iran -- even though no
Tehran's disclosure that it is building a second uranium enrichment
plant near the holy city of Qum has derailed the Obama administration's
already faltering efforts to engage with Iran. The United States will
now cling even more tightly to the futile hope that international
pressure and domestic instability will induce major changes in Iranian
decision-making.
This week, Barack Obama's Middle East peace envoy George Mitchell met in New York with Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak to begin discussing a potential "compromise" regarding the continued expansion of Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territory. Israel's continued settlement expansion has been at the top of America's Middle East agenda since Obama's Cairo speech in June, when he declared that "the United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements."
Many in Iran and the West assume that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's re-election was the product of fraud. American Iran expert Flynt Leverett told SPIEGEL ONLINE that the irregularities likely weren't as bad as in Florida in 2000. Now, the US has to make the regime an offer.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad scored an overwhelming victory in the Iranian presidential elections held on Friday. Are you surprised?
