It's a question of honesty. Your conditions of victory are not what you state up front. For the Iran situation, you say you're negotiating to keep Iran from getting a nuke (that's a generic "you", btw), but in fact you're negotiating to be in better position to deal with them already having a nuke.
No, dte. We're still trying to find an arrangement in which they don't get a nuke. Did you even read what I wrote?
The central plank of my proposal is that we make crossing the red line of testing a nuclear device as expensive as we possibly can, and we work as hard as we can to get them to accept an inspections regime that retards their progress towards a weapon as much as humanly possible -- which, as Rith pointed out, is much more than simply having to keep an eye on the sky in case someone makes a random air strike.
A secondary effect is that yes, indeed, we will be in a better position if we fail and Iran does, in fact, get a nuke. I entirely fail to see how that is a bad thing.
It applies to the broader approach that I pointed out in getting this whole line of questioning started. You're lying about your goals, which allows you to lie about your score when it comes time to tally up. Because we always look back on history to determine who won. We don't look back to determine who "managed".
No, I'm not. My primary goal is to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon if at all possible, and my secondary goal is to minimize the negative impact of a nuclear-armed Iran if I fail in my primary goal. Where am I lying about that? Accepting that a policy may not succeed and taking into consideration what that would mean isn't lying; it's realism.
Saying "failure is not an option" and therefore failing to plan for it is doubly pernicious -- it makes discussing the risk of failure more difficult (and therefore makes it more likely that the risk is underestimated), and it leaves you with your pants down in case you do fail.
Now, it's entirely possible for both sides to win since each side will assign different weights to all the aspects of the conflict. Mr. Tyson will win because they raise his hand at the end of the fight; I will win if I don't require a body bag. But that doesn't preclude the concept of winning and losing. And I shouldn't be telling the world that I'm going to win the fight if my actual victory condition is simply to survive.
This isn't a game, dte. We don't count points. This is about trying to find a way in which can muddle along on this planet while killing as few people as possible in the process.
Another consideration is that loudly trumpeting that we'll be OK even if plan A fails might make plan A more likely to fail. That's why we need Velvet Dagger and Rainbows Unicorns, and that's why I don't expect the people actually involved in the process to be entirely upfront about all of their motives. On either side of the dispute.
