Brazil's refusal to join Iran sanctions regime means only one thing

Brazil's continued refusal to join Western efforts to deny nuclear weapons to Iran can lead to only one conclusion -- Brasilia is more interested in keeping open its own options to build atomic weaponry than in international peace and security. Does anyone really think that the world will be a safer place if Iran and its crazy leader, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, have nuclear weapons? Of course not, yet Brazil turned down U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's latest offer to the country to join the multination effort to sanction Iran today in Brasilia, according to the Washington Post newspaper. Western nations meeting at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna denounced the recent Iranian decision to enrich its uranium to nearly 20 percent, well beyond the 5 percent needed for nuclear reactors, the Post said. "Iran seems determined to defy, obfuscate and stymie," said Ambassador Glyn Davies, who leads the U.S. delegation to the UN nuclear watchdog agency. Iran says it has no designs on nuclear weapons but needs higher-grade uranium for its medical isotope reactor, a claim dismissed as untrue by Western leaders. Of course, anybody hoping that Brazil, the world's eighth-largest country, would soon be taking its place among the world's most-responsible powers, must be sorely disappointed. Instead of signing up for the world effort, Brazil's leader, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, told a news conference it would not be wise "to push Iran into a corner" on the nuclear issue after his meeting with Clinton. The nonprofit Institute for Science and International Security released an analysis Wednesday that said a stockpile of 20 percent-enriched uranium could be made into a bomb's worth of weapons-grade fuel in about a month, the Post said.

Hard to see what negotiations with Iran can accomplish

It probably can't hurt, but it's hard to see what further negotiations can possibly accomplish given the state of relations between the United States and Iran. The word from Washington is that the United States will, for the first time, take part in talks between Iran, the European Union and other U.N. Security Council members over Tehran's nuclear program, according to the Cable News Network (CNN). According to the U.S. State Department, the Obama administration has asked the EU to invite Iran to new negotiations, in which Washington has previously refused to participate, CNN said. "If Iran accepts, we hope this will be an occasion to seriously engage Iran of how to break the logjam of recent years and work in a cooperative manner to resolve the outstanding international concerns about its nuclear program," said Robert Wood, a State Department spokesman. But Iran has repeatedly refused previous Security Council demands to stop enriching uranium, which Tehran claims is needed to fuel nuclear power plants. The United States accuses Tehran of secretly trying to build a nuclear weapon, a claim the UN is still unable to resolve. The decision to enter the talks is seen as a further move by the new Obama administration to engage the Iran diplomatically after nearly three decades without formal diplomatic ties. But whether regimes like Iran and North Korea can afford to be more involved with the West is an open question, because such involvement brings with it a host of international responsibilities that those those countries don't seem to be mature enough to live up to.