By Michael Adler
VIENNA, Sept 1, 2006 (AFP) - The international community is moving towards sanctioning Iran for its disputed atomic program but seems to have ever decreasing leverage to halt Tehran's nuclear ambitions, diplomats and analysts said Friday.
Iran defied a United Nations Security Council deadline to halt uranium enrichment, the UN watchdog International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported in Vienna Thursday, setting the stage for possible UN sanctions against the Islamic Republic.
In July the council demanded that Iran suspend all enrichment-related activities by August 31, spurred by US-led concerns that Tehran's nuclear programme is a covert attempt to produce nuclear weapons.
Uranium enrichment makes fuel for civilian nuclear reactors, but in highly refined form can serve as the raw material for atom bombs.
But "the United States doesn't have any instruments powerful enough to convince or coerce Iran to suspend its uranium enrichment program. Neither incentives nor threats are sufficient," Gary Samore, a Chicago-based non-proliferation analyst who was a disarmament expert in the administration of former US President Bill Clinton, told AFP.
A senior diplomat close to the IAEA said "the whole reason of the UN deadline was to weaken Iran, but it didn't work."
Despite a more than three-year IAEA investigation Iran has managed to build up its nuclear program to the point where it is now enriching uranium with a 164 centrifuges when in the beginning they had none, the diplomat added.
"If the Americans had struck a deal, or talked directly with Iran a year ago, they could have frozen the program before they had done any enrichment," the diplomat said.
For his part, Samore said: "Things have gotten worse because two or three years ago the Iranians were still nervous about Security Council action and US military attack and so prepared to limit their projects but now the Iranians are ultra-confident" as the United States is bogged down militarily in Iraq.
In addition, diplomats noted that Russia and China, two veto-holding permanent members of the Security Council and close trading partners with Iran, are reluctant to impose sanctions.
They also said that countries like Italy and Japan, which are in the background on this issue but are key Western allies, were against sanctions that would hurt their considerable economic interests in Iran.
Mark Fitzpatrick, an analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) think tank in London, said however that while the situation was grim, it was not lost.
"The Security Council process is not over. The sanctions negotiations are now only beginning with seriousness because they had to wait until the wire was actually tripped" by Iran not meeting the deadline, Fitzpatrick said.
"It will be very difficult to persuade Russia and China to go along with any sanctions. If they do refuse, the United States will seek to bring pressure on Iran through financial or other means with other countries outside the Security Council process," Fitzpatrick said.
Said Samore: "If the Iranians make progress (in their nuclear program) over the next two years, it is a better than even chance the Israelis or the Bush administration will decide to attack Iran's facilities."
In any case, UN sanctions, which are expected to start with symbolic measures rather than harsh economic ones, are on hold until a last-ditch EU-Iran meeting next week, officials said.
In New York, US Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton said the Security Council would await the results of the talks in Berlin next Wednesday between European Union foreign policy representative Javier Solana and chief Iranian nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani to move towards a negotiated deal.
"Then we will be consulting here and in capitals about where to go from there," Bolton said.
