The New York Times has been criticized for helping terrorists in the past by disclosing investigatory methods and rendition policies and practices, supporting them in its editorial pages and allowing terror suspects to spin their stories in the news section, disclosing methods our nation has used to prevent funds from reaching terrorists, condemned the existence of prisons holding terrorists, criticizing the laws brought to bear to prevent terrorism, and whitewashing or apologizing for terror when it occurs. 

Holocaust-denying, virulently anti-Semitic, aspiring genocidist, on the verge of acquiring weapons of the apocalypse, [who] believes that the end is not only near but nearer than the next American presidential election. (Pity the Democrats. They cannot catch a break.) This kind of man would have, to put it gently, less inhibition about starting Armageddon than a normal person. Indeed, with millennial bliss pending, he would have positive incentive to, as they say in Jewish eschatology, hasten the end.

The likelihood that more restrictive sanctions against Iran will either make it through the United Nations' bureaucratic quagmire or dissuade Iran from darting down the path toward nuclear technology is about as dim as that of a popular uprising among the people under 30 who make up 70 percent of Iran's population. 

We must keep talking to the Iranians, offering carrots even when these are contemptuously tossed into the gutter, because there is no credible alternative. Even threats of economic sanctions must be considered cautiously. Their most likely consequence would be to feed Iranian paranoia, to strengthen the hand of Tehran's extremists. A state of declared Western encirclement could suit President Ahmadinejad very well indeed. 

"We are far less enthusiastic about recent threats--from Capitol Hill and some in the administration--to impose unilateral sanctions on foreign energy companies that do business with Iran. The administration needs all the friends it can get, and this is another case where quiet persuasion can go a lot further than bludgeoning....

[The administration] should start by dropping fantasies of regime change and pledge to re-establish diplomatic and economic ties if Iran abandons its nuclear ambitions. We know the default position is more threats. But sometimes the prospect of profit--and not just loss--works better.

What, then, can the United States do to prevent Iran from developing nuclear technology? Little or nothing. Washington should instead bow to the inevitable.

If Iran is bound and determined to have nuclear weapons, let it. The elimination of American opposition on this issue would open the way to genuine normalization between our two nations. It might even convince the Iranians that their country can flourish without nuclear weapons.

The desire for self-sufficiency, which will drive proliferation forward, is a measure of a new reality in which limited nuclear wars are possible, and the use of a few devices, though locally devastating, will not necessarily blossom into a global exchange. That is the flip side of proliferation...the spread of nuclear weapons, even to such countries as North Korea and Iran, may not be as catastrophic as is generally believed...Furthermore, the evidence that even the poorest or most ideological countries are subject to the conventional logic of deterrence and will hesitate to use their weapons because of the certainty of a crushing response-since they, too, have cities and infrastructure that they will lose.