Why pressing Iran over nukes is a difficult road

The flurry of discussion over Iran's nuclear ambitions came as Iran installed on Wednesday its new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Western observers expect the new president to adopt a more confrontational tone with the West and particularly the US - an approach closer to that of the reigning conservative mullahs than that of outgoing reformist president Mohammad Khatami.

In a letter to the EU3 foreign ministers, the lead Iranian negotiator in the talks, Hassan Rohani, said that Iran is intent on pursuing both the negotiations with the Europeans and its nuclear program, which he insisted is for peaceful purposes.

For some experts, this is part of the same strategy that has allowed Iran - not to mention North Korea - to advance in nuclear know-how. "We've seen this game before," says Jon Wolfsthal, deputy director of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Mr. Wolfsthal says recent events appear at first glance to be a boon to the US, since the topic of Iran could reach the Security Council - where the Bush administration has long wanted it - without the blame for a negotiation failure to fall on the US.

But he questions how "successful" the US strategy of not directly negotiating with problematic nuclear wannabes like Iran and North Korea really has been. North Korea is thought to have quadrupled its number of nuclear weapons during the Bush presidency. "If the proof is in the pudding, then the results are not very good," he says.

Iran still wishes to avoid referral to the Security Council, but at the same time it knows that a referral is unlikely to result in any tough sanctions any time soon, most experts agree. "The unanimity isn't there," says Georgetown's Mr. Brumberg. He notes that Russia has close ties to Iran and is building a nuclear reactor there. Iran has also been developing relations with China and India.

US calculations on Iran are influenced by the key role that Iran plays in neighboring Iraq, experts say. With the Bush administration hoping to reduce troops, avoiding destabilizing trouble with Iran will be uppermost in some minds.

Henry Sokolski, director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, says he sees such political calculations in the intelligence estimate for Iran that now puts any bomb a decade away.

"There may be some involved in the report who are frightened that Bush would use anything more imminent as a pretext to bomb, or others who got cold feet after the Iraq WMD intelligence that went wrong," Mr. Sokolski says.

In any case, he dismisses the estimate, noting the US developed its bomb in less than a decade. "Are we saying the Iranians are further behind technically than we were in 1940? It's absurd."

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