It’s nice to have friends again

The Washington Times reports that France is preparing to join the US in tougher sanctions against Iran;

France and the U.S. are in strong agreement on the need for more sanctions against Iran if it does not halt its drive to obtain nuclear weapons, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said yesterday.

Miss Rice and visiting French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said they would keep pushing the U.N. Security Council to approve a third round of sanctions against Iran over its nuclear programs, and Mr. Kouchner said this week he also favored new European Union action against Tehran.

“I think that there is essentially no difference [between the U.S. and France] in the way that we see the situation in Iran and what the international community must do,” Miss Rice said after a working lunch at the State Department with her French counterpart.

But that’s not all;

Bloomberg News reported yesterday that Germany may soon follow France’s lead in backing tougher U.N. action if Iran fails to cooperate.

Ruprecht Polenz, head of the German parliament’s foreign-affairs committee and a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, told the news service in an interview “it now seems legitimate to consider raising the stakes” for Iran.

Germany has recently tightened controls on some sensitive military and high-tech exports to Iran.

So, apparently, President Bush is a visionary and a man ahead of his time – Old Europe is just catching up to him. That must really torque off the Left – well, as soon as they figure out what this week’s events mean. 

Oh, and the other day, Saudi Arabia joined the UN’s IAEA board;

 Saudi Arabia and other US allies were among 11 countries named to the UN watchdog International Atomic Energy Agency’s 35-nation board of governors on Thursday.
 
US allies like Ireland and the Philippines were among the incoming 11 while US adversaries Cuba and Syria were among the outgoing states, part of a regular rotation of board members.

This could make things easier for the United States on the IAEA board, which rules on Iranian compliance with the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), diplomats said.

So, I guess this why Ahmadinejad wants to make a spectacle of himself in New York next week, to show the world how the US persecutes his barborous ass.

Category: Foreign Policy, Terror War