Summary
Can Iran's race to nuclear weapons be halted? The experts shudder and look with alarm at the dithering IAEA and the naive efforts of a detumescent European Union. So far, the earnest applications of 'soft diplomacy' by Britain, France and Germany have achieved negligible results. As with the weapons inspectors, duplicity is the name of the game for Iran's skilful negotiators, who run rings around the European infidels sent to buy them off.
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The Deadly Threat of a Nuclear Iran
The Middle East is on the brink of going nuclear, and the rest of the world is fiddling or looking the other way. The United States is draining its energies in Iraq, the Europeans are fussing over 'soft power' diplomacy, and the UN monitoring agencies are dithering. 'We are not asking the tough questions,' a senior official in the Vienna-based UN nuclear-monitoring industry told me this week. 'We are not being persistent. We are too afraid to offend. We are failing.'
One of the problems is that the Americans have lost credibility over Saddam's supposed weapons of mass destruction. But my Vienna source is less concerned that Washington was wrong in Iraq than that the UN monitoring agencies are afflicted by creeping paralysis in Iran. At a moment of global crisis, relations between America and the...See the full content of this document
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