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A U.S.-Iranian Conversation

Perhaps there is some hope anyway in the news - well, seemingly as only "revealed" in an op-ed column by Roger Cohen in the NY Times - that there is a dialogue underway between the US and Iran.

"The United States and Iran are talking to each other about the elimination of an entire category of weapons of mass destruction. That is a good thing. On the eve of Barack Obama's inauguration, it shows there is nothing in the DNA of the two nations that precludes dialogue.

The discussions - often bruising but never to the point of a breakup - are proceeding within the framework of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. That's an unwieldy name for something the world should cheer.

The OPCW brings together 185 nations working in near total obscurity toward an April 29, 2012, deadline for the final elimination of the scourge that has brought death and agony from the fields of Flanders in World War I to the Tokyo subway in 1995.

Countries representing 98 percent of the global population have adhered to the Chemical Weapons Convention, which came into force 11 years ago. More than 40 percent of the world's 71,000 metric tons of declared chemical agents, most of them in the United States and Russia, have been destroyed."

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