Iran gets back in the nuclear game...

Well, that didn't last long. The Times reports here:

Defying the warning of European leaders, Iran said Monday that it was removing the seals placed by the United Nations nuclear agency at one of its nuclear sites to restart activities there.

European diplomats said that if Iran did go ahead and resume the nuclear activities, then they would have little choice but to ask for the agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency, to place the issue before the United Nations Security Council for possible political and economic sanctions.

A senior Iranian official, Ali Aghamohammadi, said technicians were going to break the seals to the uranium ore conversion plant in Isfahan on Monday afternoon in the presence of the inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, who are currently in Iran, the IRNA news agency reported.

By the end of the day, however, it could not be determined whether Iran had actually broken the seals...

Iran agreed nine months ago to freeze all its enrichment-related activities for as long as talks with Germany, France, Britain and the European Union continued. The United States maintains, and the European countries had come to agree, that Iran intends to make nuclear weapons. Iran maintains that its nuclear program is for peaceful energy purposes...

Iran says it is keeping its freeze on another, more advanced, process in the program to enrich uranium, which can lead to making nuclear fuel for power plants, or if enriched to high levels, for making nuclear weapons.

And tensions resume... I wonder how Bolton will handle this? (Regardless, this is bad, bad news.)

The more things change...

King Fahd is dead. Not that much will change. (It's Saudi Arabia, after all.)

Or will Abdullah continue to be the reformer he's made himself out to be these past few years?

That's the question that needs to be asked, and the U.S. needs to step up and ensure that its key ally takes the necessary steps to enter modernity. Nothing less should be acceptable.

The hypocrisy of the right

Oh, trust me, there's hypocrisy on the left, too -- and, by all means, tell me about it. But AmbivaBlog, drawing on an excellent post at CommonSenseDesk (which itself draws on three other blogs -- such is life in the blogosphere), looks at why "Being (far) right means never having to say you're sorry". It's all worth reading, whatever your political inclinations.

I would add that the hypocrisy of the right is more visible -- and more troubling -- than the hypocrisy on the left in part because at the moment the right is in power and the left is in disarray. Back at Tufts, where in the early-'90s the left was in power (within the limited context of campus politics) and the right was vilified (and yours truly along with it -- how dare I have criticized the orthodoxy of political correctness?), I wrote extensively on the hypocrisy of the left. In such matters, one tends to direct one's attention at the powers that be, not the powers that be not.

Perhaps it's all a matter of context and perspective. Hypocrisy is everywhere.