EU Backpeddling on Iran Sanctions Threat?

Scott Gearity, Export Control Blog:

Talk about burying the lede...I was in the midst of reading today's NYT report on the IAEA Iran showdown when this quote bonked me on the head.

"Our goal is not to punish Iran, but to put further pressure on Iran," said a Western diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the talks. "We have no intention of sanctioning Iran; we recognize that sanctioning Iran would hurt Russia and China."

Are sanctions really off the table now? Because if sanctions are out of the picture it's not clear to me what sticks the Europeans have got left.

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After all, last month German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder kicked off his election campaign by telling a crowd that the military option in Iran should be taken off the table. And its not just opportunistic German politicians out to impress their electorate who are undermining the EU's negotiating position. Only last week, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw also ruled out the use of force. That's two-thirds of the EU3 right there. (To be clear here -- most everything I've read on the subject, including and particularly this, explains what a lousy option military force would be against Iran, but it does not necessarily follow that publicly repudiating the use of force moves the US and Europe any closer to achieving their objectives.)

If military force is out and now sanctions are, too, what leverage does the EU3 have left in its negotiations with Iran?

At the beginning of the year Timothy Garten Ash, quoted here by Thomas Friedman, offered some ideas for a joint US-EU approach on Iran:

For two years the Europeans have been telling the Bush administration that its use of force to prevent states from developing nuclear weapons has been a failure in Iraq and that the Europeans have a better way -- multilateral diplomacy using carrots and sticks. Well, Europe, as we say in American baseball, ''You're up.''

''I think this is an absolute test case for Europe's ability to lay out its own idea for a joint agenda with the United States to deal with a problem like Iran,'' said the Oxford historian Timothy Garton Ash, author of ''Free World: America, Europe and the Surprising Future of the West.'' ''O.K., we think bombing Iran is a bad idea. What is a good idea?'' For the Europeans to be successful, though, Mr. Ash said, they can't just be offering carrots. They have to credibly convey to Iran that they will wield their own stick. They have to credibly convey that they will refer Iran to the U.N. Security Council for real sanctions, if it is unwilling to strike a deal involving nuclear inspections in return for normalized economic relations with the West.

''Very often there is the notion that Europe is the soft cop and the U.S. is the hard cop,'' Mr. Ash said. ''Here it must be the other way around. Europe has to talk as credibly about using economic sanctions as some in Washington have talked about using military force.''

...If multilateral diplomacy is to work to defuse the brewing Iran nuclear crisis, ''the Europeans have to offer a more credible stick and the Americans need to offer a more credible carrot,'' Mr. Ash said.

I imagine Ash is disappointed. So far all we've got is a limp stick and an invisible carrot.

There is a third option. Support the people of Iran in the quest for human rights and real democracy inside of Iran. This is what they have been pleading for. They have asked the free world for this support for years. Will the EU and the U.S. finally support their efforts? It is time the free world stand with the people of Iran just as it stood by the people of eastern Europe, Georgia, the Ukraine, Lebanon and elsewhere.