To the Security Council

Saturday the IAEA voted to refer Iran to the UN Security Council.

The International Atomic Energy Agency's 35-nation board of governors voted 27-3 to make the referral, with five countries abstaining, at a meeting today in Vienna. The Security Council plans to defer acting until March 6, when the IAEA meets again, U.S. officials said.

Iran will immediately implement full-scale enrichment of uranium in response to the Security Council referral, Javad Vaidi, Iran's deputy secretary to the Supreme National Security Council, said in Vienna. Iran also will curtail IAEA spot checks and access to military installations and people, Vaidi said.

Iran can make tons of enriched uranium using thousands of centrifuges, said Ali Soltanieh, the country's IAEA ambassador. Enriched uranium can be used for nuclear energy or nuclear weapons.

In Washington, the Bush administration welcomed the IAEA vote as a triumph for its diplomatic efforts to isolate Iran, and said Iran would have until the March 6 meeting to fully reverse its position on nuclear weapons or face a united world community determined to stop it.

"The vote represents the voice of the entire world community," including Russia, China, India, Brazil, Egypt and Yemen, said Nicholas Burns, U.S. undersecretary of state for political affairs, in a conference call with reporters. "Only the gang of three supported it -- Syria, Venezuela and Cuba. It has no other defenders in the world."

Algeria, Belarus, Indonesia, Libya and South Africa abstained from the vote.

An interesting vote. No surprise that Syria, Venezuela (friend of Mother Sheehan) and Cuba stood in Iran's corner.

Most interesting is India's vote in favor of referral. India has been under intense pressure from both sides. In the end, India may be most concerned about the fate of its agreement with the US. The agreement still needs to be approved by Congress, and there has been concern expressed about India. As a sample, here is Sen. Richard Lugar from a hearing (PDF) last November of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee:

India has never signed the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, the foundation of international efforts to stop the spread of nuclear weapons. India has developed a nuclear weapons arsenal, in conflict with the goals of the treaty. New Delhi in 1974 violated bilateral pledges it made to Washington not to use U.S.-supplied nuclear materials for weapons purposes. More recently, Indian scientists have faced U.S. sanctions for providing nuclear information to Iran.

India's nuclear record with the international community also has been unsatisfying. It has not acknowledged or placed under effective international safeguards all of its facilities involved in nuclear work, and its nuclear tests in 1998 triggered widespread condemnation and international sanctions.

An excellent analysis at Arms Control Today expresses the opposition some in the US have to the agreement with India this way:

The July agreement requires the United States to amend its own laws and policies on nuclear technology transfer and to work for changes in international controls on the supply of nuclear fuel and technology so as to allow “full civil nuclear energy cooperation and trade with India.” In exchange, India’s government would identify and separate civilian nuclear facilities and programs from its nuclear weapons complex and volunteer these civilian facilities for International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspection and safeguarding. Yet, as they consider the deal and ways to transform its broad framework into legal realities, political elites in each country have ignored some crucial issues.

Policy analysts in the United States have debated the wisdom of the deal.[1] This debate has been rather narrow, confined to proliferation policy experts and a few interested members of Congress, and largely focused on the lack of specific details with regard to the deal, the order of the various steps to be taken by the respective governments, and the potential consequences for U.S. nonproliferation policy.[2] The larger policy context of a long-standing effort to co-opt India as a U.S. client and so sustain and strengthen U.S. power, especially with regard to China, has gone unchallenged. There is also little recognition of how the agreement could allow India to expand its nuclear arsenal.

India ultimately appears to have been swayed by a desire not to antagonize Congress.

Note Iran's immediate defiance.

Iran remained defiant, threatening to do precisely what referral was meant to prevent. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ordered the resumption of uranium enrichment and an end to snap IAEA inspections of its nuclear facilities, according to state television.

"As of Sunday, the voluntary implementation of the additional protocol and other cooperation beyond the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty has to be suspended under the law," Ahmadinejad said in a letter to Vice President Gholamreza Aghazadeh, who also is the head of the nation's nuclear agency.

Javed Vaeidi, deputy head of Iran's powerful National Security Council, also said his country "now has to implement fuller scale of enrichment."

This is a dangerous regime, and it would be foolish to merely assume Iran's talk is all bluster.

Writing at the Weekly Standard, Jonathan Last writes about a documentary on human-rights abuses in Iran entitled A Few Simple Shots.

Many scenes in A Few Simple Shots are worrisome, but familiar: photos of dozens of street executions; testimony from former political prisoners who endured terrible torture. One woman, Roya, recalls seeing the scarred back of her cell mate, a young girl. Her skin was pink and shriveled from the base of her skull to her lower back, as if she had been set on fire. The girl had been flogged for 12 continuous hours.

In Iranian prisons, floggings are a matter of course. Another former prisoner, Hojat, recalls how his torturers sometimes beat him with cables; other times they used the fan belt from a car engine, so as to better split the skin.

A teenage girl named Solmaz recounts another horrific story: When she was 15 months old, she was arrested with her mother, Zari. The two were imprisoned in the same cell, but Solmaz was often left alone while her mother was dragged to the torture chamber. Eventually, Solmaz was released to her father, but only after her mother had been executed for being an enemy of the Islamic Republic.

We have seen this before. Regardless of size or ideology, every rogue state from Hitler's Germany to Pol Pot's Cambodia has brutalized its people. In that sense, Iran is no different.

There is one way, however, in which Iran is different. In most repressive states, such atrocities are cloaked in secrecy. Word of Russia's Gulag Archipelago, for instance, was smuggled out over decades and denied by Soviet apologists for generations.

In Iran, however, torture and abasement are not just a province of the secret police. They are also a matter of public policy.

It is time for the nations of the world to gird up their loins and join together and stop Iran's nuclear program before it is too late. How much harder will it be to rein in this murderous regime after they have demonstrated they have nuclear weapons? The time is now, and time is running short.

Tick tick tick...