Dumb Luck

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad thinks that barring Iran from dealing with any of the European countries that permitted the Danish cartoons to be published will somehow actually force those countries to clamp down on the free speech rights of the newspapers to actually print the cartoons.

Silly Ahmadinejad. He's played this right into the favor of all those who want to make sure that Iran never gets its hands on nuclear weapons. He's inflicting the damage on Iran, not on Europe. Iran needs Europe to continue functioning, not the other way around. Boycotts will only mean that Iran's public will have less stuff than they already have.

The list, which already included Denmark, where the 12 caricatures first appeared last year, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and Spain, expanded Saturday to take in New Zealand and Poland.

All this comes as Iran is facing Security Council action (as far as harshly worded resolutions will go), and the US and Europeans are wondering just how far along Iran's nuclear program truly is.

The IAEA had referred Iran to the UN Security Council. Iran's bosum buddies were against even that action:

The resolution, which passed by a vote of 27 to 3 with five abstentions, reflects increasing suspicion around the world that Iran is determined to develop nuclear weapons.

Cuba, Syria and Venezuela voted against the resolution, which would also delay any concrete Security Council action against Iran for at least a month. Algeria, Belarus, Indonesia, Libya and South Africa abstained.

So what did Iran do? They said that their deal with Russia was dead. Big deal. It should never have even been a consideration in the first place. Iran also said that they'd resume enrichment at Natanz. That's not surprising either - especially since it was suspected that they were doing this in secret. We now know that they're working on it, and it's only a matter of time before they have sufficient weapons grade materials.

Text of the IAEA resolution can be found here.