A big opportunity for Putin

Russia has been given a little more time to try to persuade Iran to go for Putin's compromise plan of allowing Iran's nuclear program to continue as long as they carry out the uranium-enrichment process on Russian soil under international scrutiny.

If this works out, it would be a huge win for Moscow and Washington, since a nuclear Iran now seems all but inevitable. If Russia wants to regain anything resembling its old status as a world power, this is the way to do it--by using their sphere of influence to solve problems, not just throw in with the obstructionists of Europe. It's probably too much to hope that this might signal closer cooperation between the US and Russia on the wider war on terror, but I can always hope. They should be our natural allies in this fight, but old suspicions, hard feelings over Kosovo, and foolish, wrong-headed sympathy for the Chechens from some in the US stand in the way. If we could get access to half of what's in the FSB files on Iraq and other Arab countries, where the Russians have operated for decades and always had far better human intelligence than we did, it would go a long way toward making both our countries safer.

The Deadman says, Go Putin and Lavrov!