The Iranians said the step was only for research on enriching uranium, and outside experts said Iran was still years away from producing enough fuel for a bomb.
But the United States and its European allies condemned the action and stepped up a campaign to persuade the board of the International Atomic Energy Agency to refer Iran to the United Nations Security Council for possible sanctions, perhaps by the end of the month.
It was unclear whether Russia and China would support a move toward sanctions, even though both called on Iran as recently as this weekend not to resume enrichment. A European diplomat acknowledged that there was still an "obvious reluctance" by the two countries to "gang up on the Iranians."
As we know, the Bush administration has essentially dropped the hardline stance it took over two years ago when the Iranians first begin to push to reinstate their nuclear program. Public talk of striking Iran over the program is much less frequent now, even among conservative commentators who can afford to be flip about strategy and lives. And while military strategists are certainly working up various alternatives for how we could get at Iran's nuclear facilities, as I've discussed in an earlier post such options are extremely limited and there's virtually no option which guarantees we could eliminate Iran's nuclear program entirely (and of course we'd seriously piss them off as a result.) This is almost certainly a direct result of how much more difficult things have been in Iraq then the administration anticipated they would be. This is also extremely unfortunate, as pretty much no one in the world thinks that Iran having a nuclear weapons capability is a good thing, and one should never have to completely abandon the credible (if unstated) threat of force in diplomacy. And while the administration has at least informally adopted Europe's carrot-and-stick approach, it remains to be seen whether Iran will decide that the result is worth the risk and continue developing their program.
2 comments:
Our ability to effectively deal with Iran is yet another casuality of the war in Iraq.
Well, not completely. Only a "credible" threat of force. Usually though, we don't use force to get what we want. Sometimes bargains are made because we can back our position with a big stick, but most of the time we can bargain with people for what they want that we can give them. Hopefully we can find a peaceful way out of this.
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