So let me see. On the one hand, we have a regime that is pressing full steam ahead with its nuclear program and whose president has threatened to wipe another sovereign state off the face of the map.

And, on the other side of the negotiations, we have Her Britannic Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs. A member of the “EU3” – the Franco-German-British team Washington has let take the lead in negotiations with Iran – Jack Straw has been at pains to emphasise that no military action against Teheran is being contemplated by him or anybody else. But in a sign that he’s losing patience with the mullahs Mr Straw’s officials have indicated that they’re prepared to consider the possibility of possibly considering the consideration of a possible motion on considering sanctions for the UN Security Council to consider the possibility of considering.

But don’t worry, they’re not escalating this thing any more than necessary. Initially, Britain is considering “narrowly targeted sanctions such as a travel ban on Iranian leaders.”

That’ll show ’em: Iranian missiles may be able to leave Iranian airspace, but the Deputy Trade Minister won’t. No more trips to Paris for the spring collections or skiing in Gstaad for the A-list ayatollahs.

Needless to say, the German Deputy Foreign Minister, Gernot Erler, has already cautioned that this may be going too far, and that sanctions could well hurt Europe more than it hurts the Iranians. Perhaps this is what passes for a good cop/bad cop routine, with Herr Erler affably suggesting to the punks that they might want to cooperate or he’ll have to send his pal Jack in to tear up their tickets for the Michael Moore premiere at the Cannes Film Festival.

But, if I were Presiden t Ahmadinejad or the wackier ayatollahs, I’d be mulling over the kid glove treatment from the EU and figuring: wow,if this is the respect we get before the nukes are fully operational, imagine how they’ll be treating us this time next year. Incidentally, the assumption in the European press that the nuclear payload won’t be ready to fly for three or four years is laughably optimistic.

So any western strategy that takes time is in the regime’s favor. After all, President Ahmaggedonouttahere’s formative experience was his participation in the seizure of the US embassy in Teheran in 1979. I believe it was Andrei Gromyko who remarked that, if the students had pulled the same stunt at the Soviet embassy, Teheran would be a crater by lunchtime.

So what can be done? Right now, Iran can count on at least two Security Council vetoes against any meaningful action by the “international community”. As for the unilaterally inclined, the difficulty for the US and Israel is that there’s really no Osirak-type resolution of the problem – a quick surgical strike, in and out. By most counts, there are upwards of a couple of hundred potential sites spread across a wide range of diverse terrain, from remote mountain fastnesses to residential suburbs. To neutralize them all would require a sustained bombing campaign lasting several weeks, and with the usual collateral damage at schools, hospitals, etc, plastered all over CNN and the BBC. Meanwhile, Iraq’s Shia south would turn into another Sunni Triangle for coalition forces. Every challenge to the civilized world begins as a contest of wills – and for the Iranians recent history, from the Shah and the embassy siege to the Iraqi “insurgency” and Jack Straw’s soundbites, tells them the west can’t muster the strength of will needed to force them to back down.

But, granted the Iranian destabilization of Iraq and their sponsorship of terror groups in Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority, surely for a $44 billion US intelligence budget it shouldn’t be difficult to find enough spare cash to give them a taste of their own medicine. Who, after all, likes the Teheran regime? The Russian and Chinese and North Korean governments and the fulsome Mr Straw appear to, but there’s less evidence the Iranian people do. The majority of Iran’s population is younger than the revolution: whether or not they’re as “pro-American” as is sometimes claimed, they have no memory of the Shah; all they’ve ever known is their ramshackle Islamic republic where the unemployment rate is currently 25%. If war breaks out, those surplus young men will be in uniform and defending their homeland. Why not tap into their excess energy right now? As the foreign terrorists have demonstrated in Iraq, you don’t need a lot of local support to give the impression (at least to western leftists) of a popular insurgency. Would it not be feasible to turn the tables and upgrade Iran’s somewhat lethargic dissidents into something a little livelier? If they can destabilize us, why can’t we destabilize them? A Teheran preoccupied by internal suppression will find it harder to pull off its pretensions to regional superpower status.

Who else could we stir up? Well, did you see that story in Britain’s Sunday Telegraph? Eight of the regime’s border guards have been kidnapped and threatened with decapitation by a fanatical Sunni group in Iranian Baluchistan. I’m of the view that the Shia are a much better long-term bet as reformable Muslims, but given that there are six million Sunni in Iran and that they’re a majority in some provinces would it not be possible to give the regime their own Sunni Triangle to get into a Vietnam-style quagmire in?

No option is without risks, though some are overstated, including regional anger at any western action: as Egypt and Saudi Arabia have indicated, not many Arab Sunni regimes really wish to live under the nuclear umbrella of a Persian Shia superpower. And, as for the leader most amenable to the prospect, one further reason to put the skids under Junior Assad in Damascus is to underline that there’s a price to be paid for getting too cosy with Teheran.

The British Foreign Secretary’s mullah-coddling is particularly unworthy in that, insofar as Iran has a strategy, the President’s chief advisor, Hassan Abbassi, has based it on the premise that “Britain is the mother of all evils”- the evils being America, Australia, Israel and the Gulf states, all of whom are the malign progeny of the British Empire.

Does he mean it? Well, every risk has to be weighed against the certainty that Iran would use its nuclear capacity in the same way it already uses its other assets – by supporting terror groups that operate against its enemies. In that sense, whether or not America’s at war with Iran, Iran’s already at war with America.

© Mark Steyn 2006