Kouchner uneasy about Iran gas embargo

I'm glad to see French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner talking sense on the proposed embargo on Iranian gas imports.

"I think this is a bit dangerous," Mr. Kouchner said in an interview here, where he is attending the United Nations General Assembly. A blockade would harm the Iranian people, he said, "and mainly poor people."

"This is a choice; we have to study it also," he said. "But it is not my personal favorite at all."

The embargo idea is still taken seriously in D.C.'s foreign policy community -- it was endorsed just yesterday in an op-ed in the Washington Post. But I haven't talked to a single actual Iran expert who thinks it would influence the regime's behavior. In the short term, it would increase fuel prices and hurt Iran's poor; in the long term, it would impel Iran to build more refineries and achieve self-sufficiency.