Now that Iran has said Nah, what will the US and the world do?

Yesterday, I was so busy waiting for Doomsday, that I didn't blog about Iran and its nuanced negative response to the package of incentives provided by the five permanent members of the UN security council (The US, France, Britain, China, and Russia), which called for it to suspend its nuclear program in exchange for some incentives. Instead, Iran called for serious talks in an obvious attempt to gain more time and to divide the international community. There was no doubt that Iran was going to give a negative answer to this proposal because after all, it has the upper hand right now as this report from Britain's Chatham House shows. Iran has, therefore, no real incentives to give up the pursuit of a nuclear program, which does two essential things for them. First, it forces the world to give Iran a lot of attention and to treat it as a serious country. Second, it enables its theocratic government to survive by making it difficult for the Bush administration and others to pursue a policy design to insure that there is regime change in Iran. The biggest question is what does the US do now. Richard Holbrooke has advocated direct talks with Iran because he said that it was foolish to let others communicate our message to Iranians when it is clear that it won't have the same impact and that its meaning and significance will be diluted by the interpretation and the bias of the third party. However, I think that it is going to be difficult for the Bush administration to change its Iran policy because it would be an admission that the old policy was not only wrong, but also foolish, simplistic, and dangerous. The response of the State department to the Iranian response shows that nothing is going to change for a while. Thus, the same old and pointless dance between Iran and the US will continue until the US finally recognizes that either it has to take on Iran by going to war, which is virtually impossible given the fact that Iraq and Afghanistan are still unstable or it has to deal with Iran. The New York Times in its editorial on August 21, 2005 made a point, which I believe is relevant to this situation even though it made it about France and its reluctance about contributing a significant amount of troop to UNIFIL, “A second-tier power can sidestep difficult choices. The superpowers cannot.” The US is a superpower and it has to make the difficult choice to deal with Iran before it becomes impossible to do so and before it becomes a real and just an eventual threat to the world.