Flunking Iran

Do Iran's leaders want to be punished? Do they want China and Russia to fall in with the United States, France, Britain and Germany to impose tougher sanctions? Do they want to see the leaders of the Arab world united against them? Do they want to mix it up with Israel and the United States? Of course Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his gang don't say that, but the juvenile games they're playing with the international community make them look more like dangerous delinquents every day.

The report on Iran’s nuclear program released by the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency on Thursday afternoon offers the most recent case in point. If it were a report card, it would give three grades, and two of them would be F's. As for what used to be called comportment? Most unsatisfactory.

Here's the breakdown and background:

Nuclear History 101: Iran gets a passing grade, but barely.  In late August, IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei agreed with Ali Larijani, who was then Iran's top negotiator, on a "work plan" to try to cool off the increasingly tense confrontation between Tehran and the international community. The aim was to resolve critical questions about a part of Iran's nuclear program that it had kept secret for at least 15 years, from 1987 to 2002, while using designs and equipment facilitated by "the father of Pakistan's atomic bomb," the infamous AQ Khan. Were the Iranians making a bomb, too? That was the real question. But in the face of flat denials, the details of the program had to be picked apart.

(Remember, Iran insists its nuclear program was always entirely peaceful. But remember, too, that when the secret program began, the Iranian regime was in the midst of its long, savage, no-holds-barred war with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, who had already used chemical weapons against Iranian troops and was well on his way to developing his own atomic weapons.)

Repeated IAEA inspections since 2003 have turned up traces of nuclear fuel and important isotopes in places the Iranians couldn't or wouldn't explain. There were indications some of the equipment used for enriching uranium might have gone to the Iranian military. It wasn't clear where all the equipment and designs came from, or how they were used. A suspicious document was found that seemed closely related to the manufacture of nuclear bombs.