The International Atomic Energy Agency is in danger of moving in the same direction as the discredited, Geneva-based U.N. Human Rights Commission, where human rights violators find refuge and sit in judgment of others.

Last week, the 135 countries of the IAEA conference approved 10 new members to sit on its board of governors, including Cuba, Syria, and Belarus. The 35-member, Vienna-based IAEA board is seen as the ultimate international arbiter on nuclear proliferation. The possibility of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists is a looming security risk, and now terror sponsors have become decision makers.

Fresh from its poor performance two years ago as a U.N. Security Council member, isolated Syria will join those who next month will decide whether to refer its ally, Iran, to the council, where sanctions could be imposed. The board – sans Syria – approved a measure last week declaring Tehran in noncompliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

While the idea that Syria itself might one day possess a bomb should send shivers up one’s spine, Damascus is currently believed to be too strapped for cash to develop any serious nuclear weapons program. However, along with Iran, it sponsors the terrorist group Hezbollah, which could become a factor in Tehran’s nuclear calculations. As the deputy head of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, Ephraim Kam, said, the danger of a nuclear Iran goes beyond the actual use of atomic bombs. Backed by a nuclear safety net, Iran would turn more aggressive, the former top army intelligence analyst said.

“This could be seen, for example, in encouragement of Hezbollah to initiate new attacks against Israel,” he wrote this weekend in an essay published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. Or Iran could raise oil prices, which it has threatened to do already.

Implications could be wider still. “If Iran acquires the bomb, it will encourage other countries in the Middle East to join this nuclear arms race, especially Egypt, and perhaps Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Algeria, and Syria,” according to Mr. Kam. “It would be difficult for a country like Egypt, the leader of the Arab world, to stay out of this circle.”

Analysts in Minsk, Havana, and Damascus instead deem Israel’s atomic capabilities, as reported since the mid-1960s, the real danger to world peace. In what is practically an annual ritual, Europe and America last week defeated an IAEA resolution proposal, pushed most enthusiastically by Egypt, condemning Israel’s nuclear arsenal. Instead, the IAEA approved a blanket statement calling for a nuclear-free Middle East. Israel, a nonsignatory to the NPT, has never opposed such a notion, but it says that all countries in the region first need to drop any desire to annihilate the Jewish state, signing peace treaties and establishing diplomatic relations instead.

If last week’s vote on Iran were cast by the IAEA board in its new composition, diplomats in Vienna assured me, the balance of 22 supporters,12 abstentions, and one nay vote (Venezuela) might have changed a little, but the end result would have been the same. On the Iranian issue, the important camps on the board remain the European Union and America, opposed by China and Russia.

In that respect, the IAEA is not yet as bad as the Human Rights Commission, which even Secretary-General Annan wanted to scrap. But like the discredited Geneva-based commission, the new IAEA board is bound to become more obsessed with American or, more likely, Israeli transgressions, making it less capable of dealing with those who pose real danger.

Adding these new members to the IAEA board “once again delivered a serious blow to the U.N.’s credibility,” Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Republican of Florida, said in a statement Friday. “The IAEA has appointed systematic violators of international agreements, as arbiters of such accords.” Ms. Ros-Lehtinen proposed two new provisions to a list of U.N. reforms demanded by Congress: establishing criteria for IAEA board membership, and forbidding IAEA assistance to terror sponsoring regimes.

As last month’s battle to reform the Human Rights mechanism showed, however, U.N. organs, still plagued by Cold War alliances, are nearly incapable of taking such reform measures. Mr. Annan’s idea of replacing the Geneva-based commission with a Human Rights Council was only approved after human rights violators were assured that the change would be in name only.