The international dispute coalesces around IRAN's drive to create a nuclear industry. They claim this is for peaceful nuclear power generation, which they are entitled to do under the non-proliferation treaty, of which IRAN is a signatory. There is wide-spread suspicion however that their real aim is to have their own military nuclear deterrent (which they deny), and that they would attempt to use this to become the regional power. The principal reason the dispute has lasted so long, is that the USA under Bush Cheney would have nothing to do with a diplomatic solution. Hang tough, as with North Korea, has been the driving US foreign policy during their tenure, and has got precisely nowhere. Our monthly Update describes something of the effect of the relatively light economic sanctions, imposed by the US and UN to date. We are of the view that for a nation whose citizens in large numbers, are prepared to strap on explosive vests and dive under opposing tanks, economic sanctions will not cause hardships sufficient for them to force the real leadership, the mullahs, into making the level of concessions required.

It is true that currently there is outrage in IRAN from car-owners unable to get newly rationed petrol, but this is as much at the incompetence that has allowed this major oil producing nation to have to import its petroleum from some sixteen other nations, due to a failure to invest in refining plants. Rationing is a collateral effect of the expected increase in sanctions, when the government realized their vulnerability to these imports becoming blocked. Unpopular though they knew it would be, rationing is their first defensive move to avoid total gridlock. Whilst Iranians as a whole are somewhat weary of the inefficiencies of so many years of a priest-run theocracy, it would be fatal to think that they are about to rise up, as Washington 'regime-change' theorists might want to believe. The citizens only have to look across the border at the civil war raging in IRAQ's cities and towns and they will not opt for that.

Taking a lead from the N. Korean experience, entering intensive negotiations, perhaps allowing the enrichment of nuclear fuel to a level required by a civilian program, in return for the acceptance of close oversight by the UN agencies, is what is now needed.
Quite apart from the dangers for the world of the confrontation with their (oil producing) Arab neighbours, another highly dangerous element here is that due mainly to the belligerent style of the Iranian president - Israel, threatened by him with annihilation - can and will intervene militarily at any point they believe that their national survival requires this. In such complex circumstances, the judgment of history is likely to condemn the government of a so-called enlightened nation who would not negotiate, but rely solely on threats of war, or bringing the most stringent economic pressure on a proud and ancient people, whose leaders have already proven their ability to maintain national unity and to rally their citizens.