Biden says China will sign on to Iran sanctions

Say whatever you want to about U.S. Vice President Joe Biden -- and, indeed, many people say a lot of things that are not complimentary -- he does tell it exactly how it is. Of course, you're not always sure if he's speaking with the approval of U.S. President Barack Obama, the head of the government, or if he's just revealed something that would have been better kept unsaid, but his comments do have the ring of truth. That is a rare quality in a politician these days. So when Biden told the NBC-TV program "Meet the Press" on Sunday that the United States expected China to agree with international efforts to impose punitive economic sanctions against Iran for refusing to end its nuclear weapons program, he was making perfect sense. "We have the support of everyone from Russia to Europe," Biden told NBC, according to the Reuters international news service. "I believe we'll get the support of China to continue to impose sanctions on Iran to isolate them, to make it clear that in fact they cannot move forward." China, which depends on Iran for oil imports, is the fifth veto power on the UN Security Council and must agree before international sanctions can be imposed or enforced. Iran, for its part, continues to deny trying to build a nuclear weapon and insists its nuclear technology development is intended only for peaceful purposes. But it's illogical for the world's third largest reserves of oil to seek nuclear power for energy -- it has oil. Iran's pursuit of nuclear technology only makes sense if it seeks nuclear weapons. And China certainly understands the threat to the world economic order, in which it is just now getting the upper hand, if an unstable head of state like Iran's Mahmoud Ahmedinejad figures out how to build nuclear bombs.