According to a CBS News article, Obama is sticking with his stance on Iran. In other words, he is willing to negotiate with them. In Obama's own words, he would use “big sticks and big carrots” in an effort to dissuade Iran from making further progress towards building a nuclear weapon.
According to Obama, “My whole goal in terms of having tough, serious, direct diplomacy is not because I'm naïve towards any of these regimes. I'm not. It is because if we show ourselves willing to talk and to offer carrots and sticks in order to deal with these pressing problems and if Iran then rejects any overtures of that sort, (then) it puts us in a stronger position to mobilize the international community to ratchet up the pressure on Iran”.
“Ratcheting up the pressure on Iran” is easier said than done because Iran has vast oil reserves and unlike Iraq,; security forces and police seem to be loyal to their leader, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. There's no easy answer to the current impasse over Iranian nuclear weapons. If the UN imposes sanctions, all Iran has to do to retaliate is to pull its oil off the market and that would surely have hugely negative ramifications (if Iranian oil is pulled off the market in response to UN sanctions, oil prices could skyrocket to US$150 or even US$200/barrel). Complicating matters is that we can't go into Iran like we went into Iraq because the armed forces are loyal to their commander and very disciplined and we simply don't have enough manpower to go into Iran. If this situation demands a military solution, it must involve troops from other countries.
