"To what purpose are powers limited, and to what purpose is that limitation committed to writing,
if these limits may, at any time, be passed by those intended to be restrained?"
-- Chief Justice John Marshall, Marbury v. Madison, 1803

Tuesday, September 14, 2004

There’s a disagreement with how to deal with Iran’s nuclear weapons program.  I’ll give you three guesses who the obstructionist nations are.

A U.S.-European rift surfaced Tuesday over how harshly to deal with Iran and its suspect nuclear program, with the Europeans ignoring American suggestions and circulating their own recommendations to other delegates at a key meeting of the U.N. atomic agency.

Diplomats at a board of governors meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency had suggested earlier that the United States and the European Union were making progress in drafting common language for a resolution that would set a deadline for Iran to meet demands designed to dispel fears it was trying to make nuclear arms.

But the latest draft, obtained by The Associated Press and being circulated informally Tuesday for reaction from other delegations, was nearly exactly the one that France, Britain and Germany came up with Friday — a text that U.S. officials had said would be unacceptable.

And what kind of repressive, fascist demands was Amerikkka demanding the UN make against the peace-loving people of the Islamic Republic of Iran?

The American suggestions also were made available to the AP. They demand Iran grant agency inspectors “complete, immediate and unrestricted access;” provide “full information” about past illegal nuclear activities; suspend “immediately and fully” uranium enrichment and related activities; and meet all agency demands to “resolve all outstanding issues” nurturing suspicions of a possible weapons program.

Ah, so the US wanted to use tough language to give the resolution some teeth, and the Europeans want to draw up a typical limp-dick mean-nothing demand that Iran can totally ignore.  And the rest of the world wonders why so many Americans view the United Nations as a functionally useless organization.