ARTICLE: "Iran's Progress on Nuclear Fuel Brings New Urgency, Divisions," by David Crawford, Marc Champion, and Neil King, Jr., Wall Street Journal, 16 May 2007, p. A10.

Another headline that's getting routine: we're surprised at how far Iran is on nukes, and that gets people more bothered and more conflicted on how to act.

ElBaradei says, "Keeping them from getting the knowledge has been overtaken by events."

Right.

We made those events happen by the choices we made (Afghanistan, Iraq) and the company we keep (Pakistan) and the tasks we put off (North Korea) because of the worn-out enemy images we can't discard (China).

Overtaken by our foreign policy, perhaps, but hardly by some detached "events" beyond our control.

We made our calls, which I agreed with and still do, and now we have to live with them on Iran, which isn't going away and needs to be penetrated now in the only sensible manner we can muster, given the tie-down in Iraq: economic connectivity.

Nixon slayed the Sovs this way, like the Bride slayed Bill in Vol. II: they walked away, never knowing how they had sold their souls by opening up, thus leaving themselves subject to dropping oil prices and our defense hike later, neither of which wasted their system, but simply made clear (as did their misadventures in the Third World with the aid-sucking Countries of Socialist Orientation and Afghanistan, plus their aging dependents in East Central Europe) how dysfunctional it was because pricing had no meaning for the vast majority of it and where it started to have meaning, it was all disastrous and sapping of public morale and belief in the system. Gorby shows up to fix and inadvertently ends up dismantling, all because Nixon laid the groundwork back a dozen years earlier in the greatest act of strategic jujitsu known to history.

But we can't do that with Iran, can we? We're too proud, and too bossed around by the Saudis and Israelis. And Iran is too clever, which is why their economy is collapsing outside oil, which is peaking truly there due to lack of investment, which it cannot obtain without opening up.

We have Iran over the barrel but can't see the opportunity because of our strange fixation on global gun control.

Does anyone think SALT killed the Sovs? Or was it simply a mechanism for accessing them in the "postwar" of nuclear deterrence, the same situation we're running into with Iran.

A Euro diplomat defines it simply: "This is a major change; it shows that time is very much on Iran's side."

Yeah, so long as we keep playing the wrong moves on the wrong board.