Is this really a surprise?

Iran defied the United Nations on Tuesday by announcing it has begun converting a large amount of raw uranium to prepare it for enrichment, a process that can be used to develop atomic bombs.

Iran defied the U.N.? Wow, that's strange...especially since the U.N. had taken such a hard line on Iran, and had appeared so...united. Um.

But wait...they also defied, "The Big Three":

Iran had promised Britain, France and Germany last October it would freeze all activities related to uranium enrichment.

But Tehran angered the EU's "big three" by announcing earlier this year that the production of feed material for centrifuges would not be included in the freeze.

Unthinkable! Why would the Iranians risk pissing off the Europeans?

Seriously, though, this is a bit disturbing:

In June, the Pentagon said it was considering the sale to Israel of 500 BLU-109 bombs, designed to destroy reinforced targets, as part of a munitions package meant "to contribute significantly to U.S. strategic and tactical objectives."

So basically we're thinking about selling bunker busters to Israel so that it can blow up Iran's nuclear program. We should have learned by now that if you want a dirty job done, do it yourself. It will look especially bad if we supply Israel the bombs and essentially use them as a proxy, especially in the Middle East, where we don't really need any more bad press. I'm not suggesting we'll get great press if we blow up Iran's facilities ourselves, but it would be better than handing Israel the bombs to do it.

Anybody want to say what should be done with Iran? The U.N. is going to do what they always do, drag their feet until it's too late. So our options seem to be: 1) Try to garner support outside the framework of the U.N. to sanction and threaten Iran into compliance, or 2) Just let them go ahead and build nukes in violation of the NPT that they signed and international consensus.

Some people here don't seem to have a problem with letting whoever can build nukes build them (which seems like a dangerously stupid attitude in light of 9/11). It stands to reason that the more nukes there are, and the more nations have them, the greater the probability that they will be used, and that such use will likely be covert, not overt.