Never mind that America’s vast diplomatic corps is constantly talking to anyone and everyone – for example, bilateral meetings with the Iranians in Baghdad despite the fact the U.S. has no diplomatic relations with the Tehran mullahs. Never mind that an incredible number of American “envoys” – in contravention of the laws on the books since the founding of the Republic that private citizens should not attempt to negotiate foreign policy – from Henry Kissinger to Jimmy Carter to Sean Penn, are frequent self-appointed emissaries to avowed American enemies.

But just as the false demands for “multiculturalism” are too often a smokescreen for abandonment of traditional American and Western values, supposed demands for intensified contacts with friends and foes is often subterfuge for avoiding decisions among fundamental and miserable policy alternatives.

The threat which the present regime in Tehran poses to the region and the rest of the world and therefore U.S. security is clear.

Iran’s current principal spokesman, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has repeatedly threatened to “erase from the map” Israel, a member of the United Nations, and Washington’s principal ally in the Middle East. Furthermore, repeatedly the U.S. has been attacked directly by terrorists supported by the Iranian state apparatus and rogue elements associated with Ahmadinejad’s radical wing of the Islamicist movement which governs the country.

That occurred as far back as the 1983 attack by two truck bombs in Beirut on American and French members of the Multinational Force in Lebanon, killing 241 American servicemen: 220 Marines, 18 Navy personnel and 3 Army soldiers. Sixty Americans were injured. A high-ranking intelligence official defector from Iran, claimed to have designed the 1988 bombing of Pan American flight #103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in retaliation for the July 3, 1988, accidental downing of an Iran Air passenger jet by the U.S.S. Vincennes in the Persian Gulf. A U.S. federal judge ruled that the Iranian government financed a 1996 terrorist attack that killed 19 Americans in the Khobar Barracks in Saudi Arabia and must pay the victims' families. America’s commander in Iraq General David Petraeus said September 12: "[I]t is increasingly apparent...that Iran through the use of the Iranian Republican Guard Corps Quds Force, seeks to turn the Sh'ia militia extremists into a Hezbollah-like force to serve its interests and fight a proxy war against the Iraqi state and coalition forces in Iraq". U.S. Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell said in June 2007 there is “compelling” evidence that Iran supports terrorists does the same in Afghanistan.

Washington might have continued to live with the notion that quietly opposing Iranian state terrorism was only part of the overall ‘war on terrorism” with all its elaborate efforts for both unilateral and multilateral efforts at the long term effort to suppress terrorist networks and cells. But there was the breakthrough that the Iranian Islamofascists made, first with Argentina in the mid-1980s, and later with the Russians in the 1990s, to recommence work on the Bushehr nuclear plant, originally undertaken by the German Siemens company [who have just signed a new collaborative agreement with the Russians] for the Shah’s regime.

These events alerted Washington to the possibility that Iran’s Islamofascists were pursuing nuclear weapons. In the mid 90s Washington tried, unsuccessfully, to block the Chinese from selling Tehran a uranium conversion plant and gas needed to test the uranium enrichment process. Finally, in 2002, an Iranian expatriate dissident group went public with the news that Iran was secretly working on producing enriched uranium – something which foreign intelligence agencies, including the U.S. may or may not have known.

But the public disclosure that Iran was trying to produce weapons quality fuel forced the UN International Agency for Atomic Energy [IAEA] to inspect the plants which Tehran had kept secret for 17 years. At the behest of the U.S., the IAEA’s confirmation of the reports forced the UN Security Council last December to enact sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program. The resolution demanded that Iran end uranium enrichment and halt all research and development on methods of producing or delivering atomic weapons. The thrust of the sanctions is a ban on imports and exports of dangerous materials and technology relating to uranium enrichment, reprocessing and heavy-water reactors, as well as ballistic missile delivery systems. The original draft was amended at Russia’s behest to make it less restrictive. China immediately called for a resumption of talks to attempt to defuse the confrontation. But no ban on Iran’s oil exports – probably the only effective non-lethal weapon the world had – was not considered.

Ahmadinejad was probably right when he said, “It [the resolution] is a piece of torn paper ... by which they aim to scare Iranians ... It is in the Westerners’ interest to live with a nuclear Iran”.

But even more revealing was his sly interpretation of the whole charade.

“Give up this muppet game. You [the backers of the resolution] cannot send secret friendly messages to us and at the same time show your teeth and claws. End this dual game,” he said in a speech at the former U.S. embassy in Tehran which he and his former terrorists had occupied and where they had held 90 American hostages in defiance of international law for 444 days.

For engaged in two still inconclusive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Bush Administration had turned to multilaterialsm. It has pursued a negotiated settlement with the Iranians – offering economic encentives [lifting the unilateral American sanctions which have crippled the Iranian economy] if the Tehran regime would abandon its drive for nuclear weapons. Apparently unnoticed by the Bush critics, it has worked this strategy multilaterally by encouraging the West Europeans with their huge commercial ties to Iran to actually directly conduct the negotiations.

But, in fact, the Tehran mullahs have used the Europeans’ cynical dialogue with Tehran to gain time and continue their nuclear program. Obviously they believe that by offering business to European firms they can continue to avoid any decisive effort to block their drive for weapons of mass destruction. Iran’s ambassador to Germany, Seyed Hossein Mousavian, told a German newspaper Germany could expect to win $25 billion in fresh business with Iran as long as Bonn did "not yield to the will of the United States." And so far Berlin’s Iron Lady Chancellor Angela Merkel, in all fairness trapped in a coalition government where her Social Democrat foreign minister often announces diametrically opposed policies, hasn’t firmed up – even with a recent invitation to the Ranch in Texas.

All this finds the U.S. – as so often in the days of the Cold War – building strategies to protect the Europeans [and, agreed, long-term American interest] from themselves, often without European public approval and adequate coordination of their governments, and sometimes in their direct contravention to mutual interest. One has to go no further than the U.S. massive effort to reduce European dependence on Russian oil and gas through the encouragement of alternate routes to market for new Central Asian hydrocarbon developments or the current effort to establish a anti-missile defense [obviously initially aimed to protect against the growing Iranian missile competency] with installations in the Czech Republic and Poland. This at the time the Germans have tried to connive to steer new Russian gas supplies around Central European and Baltic allies or permit the Russian monopoly Gasprom to expand its ownership of distribution networks in their countries. It is no secret that Russian President Vladimir Putin thinks he has a crucial hydrocarbon weapon in his effort to restore some semblance of Soviet power to his realm.

The next bit of farce is being enacted at the UN where the Egyptian head of the UN IAEC has comes in with his latest report on Tehran’s complicance/noncompliance with the Security Council’s resolutions. Muhammad El Baradei has obscured his findings that the mullahs are not, in fact, ending their uranium enrichment program. [His predecessor, the quintessential Nordic appeaser, Hans Blix, who managed to muck up the Iraqi question before the American invasion, earlier had said he had not looked on the right floor of a building when the Israelis decided to take out Sadam Hussein’s earlier nuclear effort in 1981.] Now the Council would in theory, having issued a two month ultimatum in their last resolution, have to take tougher measures, even authorizing military action.

But, instead, a game of chicken with enormous portent is being played out.

"The more concessions we give to the Great Satan [the U.S.], the hungrier it becomes for more," Ahmadinejad said in a recent speech.

"Those who press us to climb down [on the nuclear issue] are traitors whom we shall expose." Ahmadinejad not only rejects the offer of the U.S. and its allies to supply Iran enriched uranium for any peaceful purposes. "There is no reason why we should become dependent on the seven [current producers of enriched uranium] . . . when we have both the natural resources and the technology to satisfy domestic demand and even have some exports."

Unfortunately, that claim resonates not only with the lunatic fringe of Ahmadinejad’s supporters – some of whom are such religious fanatics that they welcome the ultimate End of the World scenario which would bring back The Lost Imam. But it also calls to the pangs of nationalism that reside in many of the increasingly rebellious but uninformed youth that make up more than half of Iran’s population under 30 and who face increasingly miserable and frustrating economic prospects, a collapsing infrastructure, inflation and an AIDS epidemic.

Iran’s Turkish and Arab neighbors are as worried about a nuclear Iran as as the rest of the world. But in the end their attitudes, given their own weaknesses and dependence on U.S. aid and commercial relations as well as its nuclear shield, will be determined largely by American resolve. Whatever their professions of loyalty and confidence in the corrupt UN agencies where they send their parasitic diplomats, multilateralism is rhetoric not the stuff of everyday politics.

That’s why Bush’s repeated insistence that military action against Iran’s nuclear weapons facilities is not an option to be taken from the table is an important part of the play. The multilateral charade may continue. But for Washington having almost always underestimated the time needed for potential opponents to develop weapons of mass destruction in the past – from the Soviet hydrogen bomb to the North Korean nuclear capacity – the clock on multilateralism is ticking ever so loudly. And, for some, at least, the sound drowns out the sloganeering in Iowa and New Hampshire.