Iran is moving away from the idea of having Russia do its uranium enrichment.   Reuters reports Ali Larijani, secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, said the Russian plan to enrich uranium for Iran was not enough on its own to meet Tehran's energy needs.   This comes on the heals of US President Bush advocating the plan.   Iran says it wants to ultimately build 20 power plants.   But this is a plan for the next several decades and surely something can be worked out for the long range plans Iran says it has for power production.   What we are dealing with today is Iran's desire to enrich uranium without any level of transparency, without any supervision to determine that they are not building a nuclear weapon.   Iran wants to have everything on its own terms precisely because what it wants IS to build a nuclear weapon.   The rest of the world has said "uh-ah."   And now Iran is stalling.

I said last week that Iran claims for a "right" to use nuclear power are, on their face, correct.   But under established international treaties, a country only has the right to use nuclear technology if it is 100% transparent and submits to inspections and other supervision to ensure it is not developing weapons.   Given Iran's actions, therefore, it has absolutely no right to develop nuclear power.   It can achieve that right but it must achieve absolute transparency first.

This is all one big dance.   Most of the rest of the world is not interested in dancing.   The options now are for Iran to submit to the rest of the world or risk being pummeled into the ground.   Iran is gambling that the rest of the world does not have the will to stop it from developing a bomb.   Maybe they are right.   But there is no question that Israel, the US, and several other super powers do have such a will.   Iran is gambling at a stacked table.   They may win a hand or two but ultimately they will lose.   The only question is how much they are willing to lose.   Unfortunately what we have here is a child who has already gotten away with far too much bad behavior.   That sort of child often must be scolded far more harshly than a child who is ordinarily well behaved.