The insecurity council
For months now, I’ve been reporting that there’s no news in the news reporting on Iran and the threat of sanctions. It’s amazing that frequent stories appear in the elite media carrying sound bites or quotes from major UN or US government officials threatening to…what…have another meeting to consider imposing sanctions on Iran for exploring uranium enrichment? How passive and unthreatening is that?
Enough that Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has not only called their bluff every time they wagged a finger, he’s now ridiculed the whole process.
Iran called the threat of international sanctions over its disputed nuclear program a “rusty” weapon and repeated Sunday that it would not abandon uranium enrichment.
He seems to be stating the obvious, unfortunately.
The six countries at the center of efforts to persuade Iran to drop uranium enrichment _ a key step toward making nuclear weapons _ said Friday they have agreed to pursue possible sanctions.
How many times over the past year have those member nations “agreed to pursue possible sanctions”? I’ve lost count. That amounts to talking about talking, and never really getting to the talking. And when they do, it’s talk about possible sanctions, which they threaten to consider, but always put off until the next meeting. So they’ve agreed to pursue possible sanctions again. This is not news. Nor is this…
However, all five permanent security council members _ the U.S., France, Britain, Russia and China _ along with Germany stopped short of demanding Iran be punished by the U.N. Security Council.
Iran knows the game.
“Both officials and people in Iran have always viewed threats of sanctions as a rusty and derelict weapon,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini said at a weekly news briefing. “They are accustomed to the threats.”
Is anybody at the UN paying attention to that backhanded dismissal? It’s more scorn than defiance.
Anyone with children knows that if you don’t follow through with consequences when your warning is dismissed, children will not only continue the offensive behavior, they’ll regard you as as a pushover.
A lot of these news stories refer to the Security Council trying the ‘carrot-and-stick’ approach. I’m beginning to wonder who’s holding the carrot, and who’s holding the stick?
