Here is a safe bet: International bodies that were asked to referee in two major global crises will soon issue reports that will help dangerous regimes escape punitive action.

Next week, the United Nations secretary-general, Kofi Annan, will present a report on Sudan’s atrocities, and soon after the International Atomic Energy Agency will assess Iran’s violations of nuclear arm treaties.

The reports will be comprehensive and nuanced, but the upshot in both cases will be the same. It always is: Progress has been made by Tehran and Khartoum, but more needs to be done.

As was the case with Hans Blix’s reports on Iraq, the quarrelsome sides in the mythic “international community” will carefully read those parts that strengthen their case, and ignore the rest.

The result: Both reports will fail to trigger action that might, in one case, help to curb a nuclear weapons-thirsty government known for perpetrating global terrorism, and in the other prevent a criminal regime from murdering more of its own people.

Late last month, the Security Council resolved to threaten Sudan with sanctions if it fails to stop within 30 days the deadly rampage it had initiated against villagers in its Darfur region. But the punitive measures can only be triggered if Mr. Annan reports by the end of August that Khartoum is not cooperating.

Soon after that resolution passed, Mr. Annan’s envoy to Sudan, Jan Pronk, signed a typical U.N. “plan of action” with Khartoum and proceeded to preside, along with Sudan’s foreign minister, over its implementation.

Remember, the foreign minister, Mustafa Osman Ismail, represents the same government that had unleashed the Janjaweed on Darfur farmers and gave that horse-and-camel-riding militia air support that helped in murdering 30,000 villagers and turning some 1.5 million into refugees.

After meeting four times in two weeks, all Mr. Pronk got from Mr. Ismail was better access for international aid workers to refugee camps; a promise to “soon” hand the U.N. a list of Janjaweed war criminals; and, most cynically, a deployment of Sudanese military and police to protect the refugees.

As expected when foxes are dispatched to defend hen houses, African Union monitors reported last week that Sudanese troops “harassed and brutally treated” the refugees of Darfur’s Kalma camp.

And if proof is needed that horrors in Darfur have not waned in August, the U.N reported that last week 500 new terrorized refugees crossed the border between Sudan and neighboring Chad, the largest number in two months.

Regardless, the U.N. is about to lavish some praise on Khartoum for the steps it has taken. “It’s our way,” one official explained. “We prefer the carrot to the stick.”

But as John Prendergast, a Clintonera State Department point man on Africa, told me, the stick is all but gone. The agreement signed between Sudan and Mr. Pronk “further undercut international leverage,” he said. A longtime Sudan watcher, he observed that this approach has taught the regime in Khartoum “that it can do enough – or usually just say enough – to escape any serious international response.”

And Iran? The IAEA is expected to soon issue a report for its mid-September board of directors meeting in Vienna. A knowledgeable Western diplomat there told me recently that the report will neither exonerate Iran nor produce any “smoking gun” against it. In other words, he predicted, it will not “convince enough countries that this warrants going to the Security Council,” where sanctions can be imposed.

Even as some in Washington urge immediate pressure to move the issue to the council, others want to wait until Europe, which has tried to engage Iran diplomatically, will acknowledge failure.

In Sudan and Iran, “you have some very recalcitrant governments that have to come under even greater pressure to live up to their international obligations,” the American national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, told the United States Institute of Peace on Friday. But her tough words somehow seemed less threatening when she added, “We and the Europeans have been very much united on both these fronts.”

The Bush administration has been accused of “unilateralism” for so long it now prefers to keep America’s international muscles dormant until at least after the election. That might be too late for the people of Darfur. In the case of Iran, we all might be in danger.