In an adroit feat of diplomacy, U.S. President Barack Obama has just managed to get Iran to hit the “pause” button on its rush to build a Bomb. He may well have staved off a Mideast war. And Washington and Tehran are talking to each other in friendlier terms than at any point since the 1979 Iranian revolution.

This is some of the best news the Middle East has had in years.

Yet what was Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s reaction? His Conservative government is “deeply skeptical” of the deal to curb Iran’s nuclear program. For those who care, Ottawa is not prepared to give Tehran “the benefit of the doubt,” Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird says. It won’t ease the smallest sanction.

That chilly riposte sounds like a feeble echo of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hawkish view that the deal is a “historic mistake” that can only make the world a more dangerous place. That’s no big surprise, given the Harper government’s lockstep support for Netanyahu.

But it does raise a question Parliament might want to ask this prime minister: If not this particular deal, then what? What do the Conservatives have in mind, short of cheering the Mideast into another war, praying for regime change or imposing more sanctions, with no assurance that any of it will stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons? Does Harper have anything constructive to contribute?

If not, why this coolness to a promising diplomatic effort by our close American allies, with British, French, German, Russian and Chinese support? Even Saudi Arabia, Iran’s bitter rival, saw the merit of this deal.

Once again, Harper has failed to show up when the world needed leadership. He could have congratulated Obama on a job well-begun, if far from completion. He could have put Canada’s nuclear and arms-control expertise behind the package, urging the Iranians to seize the historic moment. Instead, Baird carped from the sidelines. This won’t endear the Conservatives to the Obama administration or Congress. It won’t help repair our own badly frayed relations with Tehran, or raise our stock in the world.

Like Canada’s snubbing of the United Nations, the Commonwealth and climate change under this government, it’s another sadly missed opportunity. There was a day when Canadian diplomats would have worked the corridors with our allies, drumming up support for an arms-control pact of this sort. Now we watch from the sidelines, casting doubt on the efforts of others.

Temporary though it is, the six-month deal brokered by Obama is a badly-needed breathing space.

For temporarily freezing Iran’s nuclear program and accepting tougher UN inspection, President Hassan Rouhani gets some $7 billion in relief from the $120 billion in economic sanctions that have crippled the country. If he cuts a comprehensive deal to ensure that Iran’s program is strictly peaceful, Iran would gain $60 billion a year from the lifting of all sanctions.

In the meantime Iran will stop producing uranium enriched beyond the 5-per-cent level needed for power reactors. It will also dismantle links between its existing networks of centrifuges, and not install or start up new ones. It will dilute half its stockpile of 20-per-cent uranium back down to a safer 5 per cent, and turn the rest into oxide which is harder to use militarily. All this will leave Iran with less than half the fuel it would need for a single bomb. Meanwhile, work on a plutonium reactor at Arak, which offers a second path for bomb fuel, will be stopped.

All must be verified, of course. That’s where Obama’s own “skepticism” kicks in, and rightly so. But the deal itself is sound. Freezing Iran’s nuclear program, rolling it back to where no bomb is on the table, and trying to negotiate a strictly civilian program deserve better than a shrug from an ally. How about praise and support?

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