Latest Concerning Iran + Analysis

From the wire at ABCNews:

MOSCOW Apr 21, 2006 (AP)— Russia's Foreign Ministry said Friday the U.N. Security Council cannot consider levying sanctions against Iran until it's proven Tehran's nuclear program is not exclusively for peaceful purposes, a Russian news agency reported.

It sounds like 2002-2003 all over again, doesn’t it? That’s why I think this is going to be a fundamentally different process.

If the matter comes to full debate in the Security Council, I do not think we will see any attempt by the administration to prove the point. Global public opinion will not believe the United States again about proving the existence of a WMD-program. That proof would even be trickier in this case, because it would have to prove intent, rather than existing infrastructure.

So, basically, the Russians are taking advantage of this.

Moscow and Beijing are certainly not going to look at the developments around the Iranian enrichment program in the context of the global War on Terror, but in the context of the global balance of power. For them, having U.S. military presence in Afghanistan, Central Asia and Iraq is already too close to home. While they might not like the idea of an Iran with nuclear weapons, they like the idea even less of another U.S.-sponsored regime change.

But at the same time, they’d rather not have to go down the U.N.-route at all, because they do want to maintain economic relations with us. We would rather not have to go down the U.N.-route again, because Russia and China are certainly going to veto anything substantive. Perhaps we’ll see something minor, like the freezing of the Mullahs’ bank accounts (if they even have those outside of Iran or Switserland), or a condemnation (empty rhetoric). We are not going to see multilateral economic sanctions on oil, and certainly not U.N.-mandated military action.

Likewise, Europe is not going to back us with any more military action – not even limited air strikes against the enrichment facilities. We don’t have the same allies we did in 2003. Spain’s government changed in 2004, and Italy has now turned the page as well. Poland is a more difficult case to gauge. We might have the British, but even that’s not a sure-thing anymore. Netherlands... unsure, and who really cares? (The decision would likely get stuck in committee at this point).

What does this all mean? Bush is really on his own when it comes to coercing Iran into compliance with international regulations concerning nuclear energy. To me, that means that Iran will develop nuclear weapons, unless we do something militarily and unilaterally to stop it.

There are really only a couple of options:
1. Letting Iran have the bomb,
2. Limited ground action or air-strikes, which are uncertain,
3. Full-scale invasion – disaster!

4. Bribe them - which means implicitly recognizing them as a rational state-actor.

Let’s face it, that isn’t a great deck of cards to play with – that’s a big problem. Iran seems willing to hear, at least, how much we're offering to bribe them - but they're not going to do this cheap. A bigger problem is that this administration loves brinkmanship.

Now what, George?