[size=75:1l2t5do0]Focus news 25 March 2010

A dangerous game

Unlikely to win the United Nations Security Council's backing for stronger sanctions, the EU and its Western allies ponder what to do next about Iran's nuclear programme.
The Western powers are facing a dilemma at the United Nations Security Council over Iran's nuclear activities. Because Russia and China hold veto power, the Security Council is unlikely to back sanctions against Iran that are strong enough to be effective, and the sanctions that it is prepared to back are unlikely to be strong enough to be effective.
A resolution currently being drafted by the Americans, the British and the French – the other three veto-yielding Council members – is expected to be debated next month, but there is little prospect of Russia or China dropping their opposition to sanctions that target Iran's civilian economy.
Iran says that its nuclear activities – including uranium enrichment – are purely peaceful, an account that is disputed by the West. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN's nuclear watchdog in Vienna, also has its doubts, heightened by the discovery last September of a second, clandestine enrichment facility in Iran.
The allies are now prisoners of their own rhetoric. US President Barack Obama offered to re-engage with the regime in Tehran a year ago, an offer that remains open even after Iran rebuffed it. At the same time, the US administration, backed by the allies, pursued a second track, threatening “crippling sanctions” unless Tehran returned to multilateral talks on its nuclear programme.
China and Russia appear open to the idea of expanding the current UN sanctions, to include additional banks and to add Iranian officials to a list of regime figures who cannot travel abroad. But this is not enough for the West, where the talk is of tougher sanctions being imposed autonomously by the US and the EU, without the UN's endorsement. France and Germany, despite strong business links with Iran, now accept this idea, according to diplomats – on condition that all mechanisms to obtain UN backing are exhausted. The diplomatic focus is now firmly on the Security Council. The British are exploring a ban on investments in Iran's energy sector, although Russia and China are unlikely to back this.
The broad European view is that any sanctions that would make life more difficult for ordinary Iranians are bound to increase the regime's domestic legitimacy, which suffered badly following a rigged presidential election last June. Nevertheless, planners in the secretariat-general of the Council of Ministers have been drafting options over recent months.
The decision is, in the end, political, not technical. The West has three goals: to preserve unity on Iran;
to impede Iran's nuclear programme (or even to persuade the government to abandon it);
and to avoid crippling sanctions. But even in the best case, it can have only two out of the three goals.

Well this is how most trouble starts when someone won't step down so all we can do is prey that this doesn't turn into another Iraq

Fingers crossed they will have learnt from the last mistake and lets face it the US do have a better president than the last