Iran and Syria Updates

The next round of talks about Iran’s nuclear program gets underway soon and to mark the occasion, Iran has offered to discuss reducing the strength of the enhanced uranium it is producing. But, Iran will not turn over to international authorities the enriched uranium it has already made.
The talks will take place in Turkey, and considering the amount of time it took just to agree on the venue for the talks, one might wonder how serious the Iranian proposal is, or whether it is just one more time-buying effort by the Tehran regime. But, the suggestion was made by the chief scientist of Iran’s nuclear program and needs to be followed up.
As part of its proposal, the Iranians said that they could in the future cut back the strength of the enhanced uranium they already have stockpiled.
Iran continues to insist that it does not want to make fissionable bomb material but is only interested in making enhanced uranium for peaceful and scientific purposes. Observers believe that Iran’s determination to keep its program intact is part of its reinforcement of the idea that it is a major power.
Downgrading the confrontation with Iran over its nuclear capability seems to be worth making the effort to try to understand just what they are suggesting and to determine if it can be accommodated and controlled by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Meanwhile, the Syrian situation has again come unglued, to no one’s surprise. Perhaps “escalation” would be the better word since today Syrian troops for the first time fired into Turkey refugee camps to try to stop Syrians who were fleeing from northern Syria. Several were wounded or killed. And, an Arab-language journalist was shot and killed by Syrian troops while he was in Lebanon, along the Syrian border. His cameraman escaped injury but says their car was riddled with bullets.
So, Bashar al-Assad’s response to the April 10 ceasefire is to begin a cross-border campaign to stop insurgents and the journalists who are trying to report on their activities.
Kofi Annan’s peace initiative seems to have been toppled by the cynical lies of the Syrian dictator.
What will be the next step, and who will take it? Arm the rebels? Create the buffer zone called for by Turkey to protect Syrian refugees in camps in Turkey? Hold Russia and China accountable for their protégé’s actions? Blockade Syrian ports? Halt all petroleum shipments to China?
There are a lot of possibilities. What we need now is the collective will to begin to implement some of them.