UN Actions and Inaction

The five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council reached a deal Friday on a resolution that would give Iran until the end of August to suspend uranium enrichment or face the threat of economic and diplomatic sanctions.

The draft was formally circulated to the full 15-member council late in the day and will likely be adopted next week.

Because of Russian and Chinese demands, the text is weaker than earlier drafts, which would have made the threat of sanctions immediate. The draft now essentially requires the council to hold further discussions before it considers sanctions.

"There (are) no sanctions introduced on Iran in the draft resolution which we are finalizing," Russia's U.N. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin said.

Churkin stressed that work on the resolution was not finished, raising the possibility the introduction of the draft could be postponed.

The resolution, drafted by Britain, France and Germany with U.S. backing, is a followup to a July 12 agreement — by the foreign ministers of those four countries, plus Russia and China — to refer Tehran to the Security Council for not responding to incentives to suspend enrichment.

The ministers asked that council members adopt a resolution making Iran's suspension of enrichment activities mandatory. Tehran said last week it would reply Aug. 22 to the Western incentive package, but the council decided to go ahead with a resolution and not wait for Iran's response.

Iran on Friday called again for international negotiations on its nuclear ambitions and said it was considering the incentives. Western nations have dismissed the idea of such talks without a halt to Iran's uranium enrichment.

Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki, speaking to reporters in Malaysia, said Tehran considers the package as a "positive step" toward a diplomatic solution.

I'm not particularly hopeful about Iran's response to this. They'll find even the minor restrictions in this resolution to be far too constricting on their nuclear weapons ambitions.

Guess US Ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, can work with his counterparts after all.

Meanwhile, the UN says that the United States should give the District of Columbia full voting rights, including full representation in Congress. They also said that the US should shut the detention centers where the US is holding terrorists and battlefield detainees who were quite busy trying to kill Americans right up until their capture.

Doesn't the UN have more pressing issues than wonder about how DC is represented? You know, like Sudan and Somalia? At the same time, the UN repeatedly undermines the efforts to eliminate international terrorism and points to international law as though it is a club with which to slug the US and Israel whenever they act in self defense and to protect the rest of the world from Islamists whose intent is to impose their Islamist ideology on the world.