The IAEA report documented that Iran was continuing to enrich uranium on a large-scale in defiance of UN Security Council resolution 1696. It also said that IAEA inspectors had found stashes of highly-enriched uranium (HEU) and plutonium hidden at an Iranian nuclear waste site.  

Both materials are directly useful in building atomic weapons but cannot be used in Iran’s declared nuclear power program. (Download a PDF file of the complete report here).

UN Security Council resolution 1696, passed on July 31, gave Iran until the end of last August to suspend all enrichment and reprocessing-related activities in a verifiable manner. If Iran complied, the resolution opened the possibility of economic aid and technology assistance. But if Iran failed to comply, it called for economic and diplomatic sanctions.

Nearly three months have passed since that deadline. Instead of complying, Iran’s leaders have chosen open defiance – bolstered in no small way by the support they have received from Russia, China, and IAEA Secretary General Mohammad ElBaradei, whose rosy pronouncements of Peace in Our Time would be comic if the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran were not so real. 

In their latest reply to polite questions from Mr. ElBaradei’s IAEA, the Iranians said they have no intention of cooperating further with the Agency until “the nuclear dossier is returned back in full in the framework of the Agency.” 

Translated into Brooklyn English: they are flipping us the bird. 

But just in case we weren’t able or willing to separate out this message from the diplomatic cotton candy, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did us all a favor by clarifying his regime’s intentions in remarks on Tuesday.

“I'm very hopeful that we will be able to hold the big celebration of Iran's full nuclearization in the current year,” he said. (The Persian calendar year ends on March 20.)

“Initially, they (the U.S. and its allies) were very angry,” Ahmadinejad said. “Today, they have finally agreed to live with a nuclear Iran, with an Iran possessing (the whole) nuclear fuel cycle.” 

Nuclear experts in the United States, Israel, and Europe agree that mastery of the nuclear fuel cycle will give Iran the ability to make nuclear weapons virtually unimpeded by international restraints. No wonder Ahmadinejad is so happy, and no wonder he continues to defy the IAEA. Until now, no one has made Iran pay a price for its defiance.

On Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert visited with President George W. Bush in the Oval Office. Their discussions focused on Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

Bush told Olmert that the world must isolate Iran until it “gives up its nuclear ambitions.” Olmert repeated Israel’s assessment that Tehran’s goal is to “wipe Israel off the map,” as Iranian leaders have repeatedly stated. 

So here we are again, doing the same old kabuki dance. The United States, Israel, and most of Europe agree that Iran can not, must not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons; and Iran simply ignores us and continues down the nuclear path. 

How long can we tolerate Iran’s defiance of a very clear UN Security Council deadline? If there is no enforcement of those deadlines, does a UN Security Council threat mean anything at all?

These are questions we faced just four years ago in deliberating Saddam Hussein’s defiance of 16 UN Security Council resolutions.

In his address to the UN General Assembly on Sept. 12, 2002, President Bush noted that Iraq had “answered a decade of U.N. demands with a decade of defiance.”

The United Nations and the world “faces a test,” he said then. “Are Security Council resolutions to be honored and enforced, or cast aside without consequence? Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?”

We face precisely those same questions today when it comes to Iran.

What will it be, Mr. President? Does the United States mean business? Does the United Nations mean anything? Will free nations stand up to tyrannies openly seeking to acquire nuclear weapons to hold their enemies hostage?

Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated on Tuesday what he told me this past summer in Israel, during Iran’s proxy war to hold Israel’s civilian population hostage to Hezbollah missile attacks.

“It’s 1938, and Iran is Germany,” Netanyahu said, “and Iran is racing to arm itself with atomic bombs.”

“Believe him and stop him,” Netanyahu added, speaking of Ahmadinejad. “This is what we must do. Everything else pales before this.”

Responding to angry Israel civilians who had lived in bomb shelters for three weeks this summer, Netanyahu told me he thought Israel must “finish the job” against Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

His successor as Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, ignored his advice.

Tehran’s leaders are betting that the United States fears Iran’s long reach, that we fear Iran’s ability to inflict pain on U.S. forces in Iraq, and on U.S. allies elsewhere in the Middle East and Europe through terrorist proxies and missile attacks.

If Iran has succeeded in deterring the United States of America even before it has acquired nuclear weapons, what kind of reach will they have once they can field a nuclear arsenal?

We still have options other than a military strike. As I have advocated many times in this space, I believe our best option is to develop a comprehensive plan to help the Iranian people to get rid of this wretched regime, before it causes more harm to them, to Iran’s neighbors, and to the world at large.

But the one option we do not have is to do nothing.

The nuclear clock is ticking, as Ahmadinejad himself now admits.

It’s your move, Mr. President.