The International Atomic Energy Agency's Mohamed ElBaradei has finally publicly admitted the obvious: Iran is not willing to prove that its nuclear program is solely for peaceful purposes. Even more obvious: the reason for Iran's reluctance is that its nuclear program is not for peaceful purposes. Far from obvious: whether the civilized world will take decisive measures to ensure that the Islamist mullocracy does not acquire the ultimate weapons of mass destruction.
On November 26, before his retirement from the nuclear watchdog organization, ElBaradei gloomily told the IAEA's board of governors: "There has been no movement on remaining issues of concern which need to be clarified for the agency to verify the exclusively peaceful nature of Iran's nuclear program. We have effectively reached a dead end, unless Iran engages fully with us." With clouded syntax but no feeling for irony, he observed that the September revelation of the existence of the hitherto secret nuclear facility near Qom reduced "confidence in the absence of other nuclear facilities under construction in Iran which have not been declared to the agency."
The likely result is passage of a new IAEA resolution against Iran this week, sponsored, significantly, by the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China. But this is rather like telling a disobedient child, "If you don't do what I say, I'll--tell you again!" The toothlessness of the exercise may well be the reason that Russia and China have signed on. Iran, understanding the situation very well, yawned. Iran's ambassador to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, coolly said: "We expect that the agency plays its essential role facilitating cooperation for technical cooperation and this environment of the agency should be depoliticized. Any gesture or move jeopardizing this spirit of cooperation, of technical cooperation in Vienna, will be counterproductive."
A more interesting question is whether IAEA action will be followed by a U.N. Security Council sanctions vote. Precisely because this would have some teeth, don't hold your breath.
The United States must act independently, and, if others will follow, assume a leadership role. President George W. Bush let Britain, Germany and France take the lead in nuclear negotiations with Iran for many years. One can speculate about his reasons; but one reason may have been to show the world unequivocally that negotiations would fail, without any rational way to blame America.
That point being proved beyond a reasonable doubt, it falls to Obama to draw conclusions from those failed negotiations, as well as the failure of his own good-faith efforts to engage with the mullahs. U.S. sanctions must be imposed without delay. (See "It's time for crippling sanctions on Iran.") Sanctions may not be enough. Obama has carefully maintained that "no options are off the table." Unfortunately, in the dangerous world we live in, and the far more dangerous world we would live in with a nuclear-armed Iranian mullocracy, that needs to not be meaningless bluster.
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