DAR AL HARB/ISLAM: IRAN WILL DO WHAT IT PLEASES, JUST AS IT HAS ALWAYS DONE...

Iran has the upper hand

Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, presumably with the blessings of the country's theocrats, has provided an excellent, and subversive, demonstration of how to defy the United Nations and get away with it.

He has ignored not just one but two Security Council resolutions to suspend Iran's uranium enrichment program and instead has forged ahead while world leaders scratch their heads and bicker over how he can be stopped.

By now, the answer may well be that he can't be. This week International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohammed ElBaradei reported that, as the United States has claimed, Iran is only three to eight years from having nuclear weapons capability.

IAEA inspectors recently found 1,300 centrifuges in operation and producing nuclear fuel at Natanz, Iran's nuclear enrichment facility. As many as 3,000 centrifuges could be installed by this summer. Experts say that once these are in operation, Iran could produce one nuclear weapon per year.

Nice work for a country that professes to have only peaceful purposes in mind for its nuclear program. Iran insists that it has a right to whatever enrichment it wants under the Nuclear Non- Proliferation Treaty -- which strictly speaking is true -- but there is little motivation other than weapons development for the kind of enrichment program that Iran is nurturing.

What to do now? ElBaradei suggests "comprehensive dialogue" with Iran and perhaps allowing Iran to continue enrich ment activities on a limited scale under strict IAEA supervision. His reasoning is that this would at least keep Iran under the nonproliferation treaty umbrella and keep inspectors in the country.

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1) Iran has the upper hand