If you want a barometer for how badly the misnamed war on terror is going, consider that the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism is threatening to build an Atomic Bomb.

We are a long way from not permitting “the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most dangerous weapons,” as President Bush promised in the new war’s first State of the Union Address. Since he said those words, the slave state of North Korea has obtained and tested a nuke, and helped the Syrian Ba’athists in their bid to do the same.

Today Pyongyang has agreed in principle to begin dismantling this program in an accord reminiscent of the deal it struck in 1994, which we now know they violated at least in spirit, if not letter, in or around 2002.

The Iranians by contrast are rejecting even a North Korea deal, preferring instead to assert the Islamic Republic’s right to make nuclear fuel for what it barely bothers to insist anymore are peaceful purposes.

The American republic is caught among some bad options. President Bush, contrary to the assertions of those who obsessively hate him, is not preparing to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities. For now he is betting that the Mullahs can be cajoled and come to their senses.

Hence the new round of sanctions aimed in part at Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, which would direct the Treasury Department to seize any assets Iran’s main branch of the military would be stupid enough to hold in an American bank. It’s really another loud warning to European and Japanese bankers to follow through on their promise of divestment. Let’s hope one of these days the Saudi princes whose security our tax dollars and advisers provide will use their oil to pressure the Chinese to join the rest of us against the Iranians.

The Bush plan goes like this: Starving Iran’s oil sector of western capital will spur their ailing supreme leader to still Natanz’s spinning centrifuges and live up to the terms of the agreement to which the regime acceded in 2003.

If I were a Democrat running for president, I would present the Bush administration’s Iran and North Korea policy as proof that its Iraq war failed. Remember the primary reason the White House presented for invading Iraq was because after 17 U.N. Security Council resolutions and the imposition of two U.N. sanction regimes, the world could no longer afford to appeal to Saddam’s rationality. The dictator endured, indeed orchestrated, the malnutrition and impoverishment of his people and still failed to satisfy any United Nations inspectors.

Given the sovereign respect America affords every other nuclear state, why would anyone expect Iran’s rulers to give a damn about their country’s unemployment or inflation statistics? Also where are these “rational actors” inside a regime that has spent the last seven years purging any and all reformers of the Islamic revolution?

The inadequacy however of the sanctions option does not necessarily mean that bombing Iran’s known facilities to smithereens is not without serious risk. To start, we can be sure the Mullahs will use the event of aerial strikes as a pretext to further jail, torture and murder their own liberal opposition. One of Iran’s greatest opposition figures, Akbar Ganji, this month asked Congress to pass a resolution promising not to send any more money to the opposition in his home country.

Also Mr. Khomeini’s Iran has proven all too willing to use terrorism to advance its statecraft. Whether it’s trying to assassinate the prince of Bahrain, supporting Hezbollah in Lebanon or bankrolling the irredentist side of the Mahdi Army, Iran has too many options for terror retaliation. Add to this the prospect that Hezbollah may have operational cells in America, as the director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell, said earlier this year. Bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities is both a bad option and a last resort.

Finally, at least for Democrats who say they are nominally interested in halting the Mullah quest for nukes, there is the Mohammed ElBaradei option. Perhaps, the time is ripe, as the director general of the International Atomic Energy told CNN on Sunday, for “creative diplomacy.” Time to lower the temperature and accept for now Iran’s enrichment of uranium in exchange for the cooperation they promised back in 2003.

Senator Boxer, a Democrat from California, is intrigued. She said everyone wants to avoid a confrontation with Iran. “We don’t want to go that way. Let’s calm down the rhetoric. Let’s work through diplomacy. There’s lots of back channels. I think ElBaradei was right when he said, look at North Korea.”

The problem with the approach favored by what might be called the “Ask Nicely Democrats,” is that it runs the risk of — in the words of the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan — “defining deviancy down.” According to the commander of our troops in Iraq, David Petraeus, Iran’s Quds Force has orchestrated the murder of our soldiers and funded and armed the worst terrorists in the country. As I reported in July, the Iranians host senior Al Qaeda leaders who meet regularly in the eastern part of the country, in a tactical alliance with whom they share a common foe today. In addition to all of this, Tehran has snubbed numerous offers from the west to obtain nuclear fuel in exchange for real guarantees they will not build nuclear weapons.

Had it not been for the invasion of Iraq, politicians of both parties would call this kind of behavior what it is: acts of war. As it stands, six years into what the president insists is a war on terrorism, we can’t bring ourselves even to speak plainly about our enemies.

elake@nysun.com