No grand jury yet on Iran and its nuke effort

ï"Nuclear Agency's Action on Iran Falls Short of U.S. Goal," by Craig S. Smith, New York Times, 18 September 2004, p. A3.

The U.S. fails again in its ongoing attempts to get the International Atomic Energy Agency to bump up its concerns to the next level: the "grand jury" that is the UN's Security Council. Instead the IAEA is going to issue more "calls" to Iran to stop enriching uranium and answer the agency's outstanding questions of where exactly it's going with its nuclear power programs.

For now, the Europeans favor this softer approach, because they fear having the matter put to a vote in the UNSC. Not a bad stand on their part, given the situation in Iraq and with North Korea. Only so much the system can handle at any one time, which makes Iran's purposefully move in this direction a good strategic call on their part.

There were always trade-offs with going into Iraq, and if you have to make a call on "who next?" it's definitely North Korea before Iran, simply to relieve the human suffering and repression there, which is far greater than in Brezhnev-era-like Iran, where the revolution is pretty much a faded relic of the past.

So, deciding to go into Iraq may well have bought us a nuclear Iran. How bad is that trade? Not as bad as you would think. Having two nuclear powers in the region (Israel and Iran) would probably trigger some movement toward a more permanent solution for the Israeli-Palestinian Authority stand-off. Why? Iran won't feel itself secure enough on regional security matters until it has nukes. Teheran has watched the U.S. dismember Afghanistan on its right and Iraq on its left, and so the mullahs are feeling mighty nervous right now, even as they plot their designs on the Shiite portion of the increasingly tripartite Iraq. They want the nukes because they believe it will make them serious security players in the regionósomebody who can either be ignored nor contained by external powers like the U.S. or the Europeans.

This scenario pathway is probably inescapable now, but that only means the U.S. will need to get back to some sort of dÈtente-like pathway with Teheran following our national election. This was in the works prior to 9/11, and it will likely have to be resurrected by whoever wins in November. Not because they would want to, per se, but because North Korea will probably take precedence and the system simply can't handle another big showdown in the Gulf so long as Iraq continues to burn.