The announcement by the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency that he had reached what the New York Times characterized as “something of a breakthrough” with the Iranian regime is igniting all sorts of speculation in respect of the talks that began earlier today at Baghdad. The IAEA announcement came on the eve of the Baghdad parley between the Iranians and representatives of the permanent members of the Security Council of the United Nations plus Germany. Our own estimate is that this is going to be a classic case of how the appeasement will prove to be not in the agreement — if one is finally struck — but in the entering into talks in the first place. The talking is the appeasement.

Feature, for example, the phrase that Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic fixed on in the dispatch this morning in the New York Times. It was in this sentence: “The six powers also want Iran to export its current stockpile of 20 percent uranium and down the road, to dismantle the once-secret Fordo enrichment plant, deep inside a mountain near the holy city of Qom, that is producing it.” The phrase that brought Mr. Goldberg up short was “down the road.” It is “not an expression,” Mr. Goldberg writes, “that would cause the Israeli prime minister, or the defense minister, to call President Obama and tell him that they are taking the military option off the table.”

On the contrary, Mr. Goldberg suggests, it “would actually cause them to think — not that they don’t think this already — that the Baghdad talks are a charade.” The nature of the charade, by our lights, is that the deal being dangled at Baghdad is an invitation to a process. We would not be agreeing to give the Iranians the Sudetenland, so to speak; we would be agreeing to give them standing. The other things they want — such as Israel — they no doubt figure can be dealt with “down the road.” Time, after all, is on the Iranians’ side. Which is why they are so patently playing for it, even if our side is dickering for it. It is one reason why we have, on occasion, summed up our own position with the slogan “diplomacy as a last resort.”

It would be one thing if the Iranian regime had defeated us on the field of battle and we were suing for peace. Absent such a catastrophe, what in the world are we doing in talks with the mullahs and their camarilla? It is not as if, say, the Iranians have elevated to office via a free and democratic election a government that speaks for the Iranian people. We are treating with a regime lacking in legitimacy about an issue that, by its nature, cannot be settled peacefully, save by a democratic revolution in Iran itself. The Atlantic is dialing back its estimate of war to 37% from the 48% as recently as March. That’s according to the Atlantic’s dial. On the Sundial of Middle East War Prospects, the very existence of talks with Iran is nudging the dial in the opposite direction.