Undoubtedly, Americans are suffering from war fatigue. With the 2008 election on the horizon, anti-war sentiment and Bush-bashing is in vogue in the mostly liberal-dominated media. So what are we to make of this report that so suddenly turned all analyses of Iran’s nuclear situation upside down? And how might sanctions work in this environment?

Iran is perhaps the most striking example of the chasm that separates the E.U. from the United States, a divorce that has only been aggravated by the war in Iraq. There are echoes of Cold War Ostpolitik, when West Germany separated its position towards the Soviet Union from its presumed ally and would-be-protector, the United States. At that time it attracted the ire of America and created lasting tensions inside the Western alliance. We are probably at that same point today.

Clearly a nuclear-armed theocratic Iran would be both a lot different and more dangerous than the Soviet Union. It would be every rational person’s nightmare, and this includes most in the Middle East. But for quite some time many Europeans, always eager to “show them Yanks,” have failed to see the danger from a nuclear-armed Iran. This is a country that cannot be constrained by the old Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine, which may be exactly what Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad craves.

What Europeans also fail to see is that Israel, the country that Ahmadinejad and his Ayatollah masters want “wiped out from the face of the earth,” simply cannot let Iran develop nuclear weapons. This is no mere armchair debate for Israel. Iran has already fought proxy wars against Israel on at least two occasions in Lebanon. It also showed Israel that total destruction of an enemy craving suicide is the only possible answer.

Here’s our view: if Iran does not stop its uranium enrichment program and prove it has abandoned its nuclear pretensions, we can expect a U.S.-backed, or at least a U.S.-tolerated, Israeli strike on Iranian facilities, possibly in 2008. If this leads to a wider war, then that would be Iran’s choice. And as President Sarkozy said in August, a nuclear-armed Iran is “not acceptable” because as he and Chancellor Merkel have both stated publicly, Iran simply “cannot be trusted.”

Furthermore, while policy towards Iran may appear to take a different direction in the current U.S. political climate colored by presidential campaign rhetoric, it is unlikely, that an Israeli strike on that country would be opposed by a Democratic administration headed, for example, by Hillary Clinton.

Similar predictions, contrary to the prevailing mood for a dynamic conflict resolution, have recently been voiced by Dominique Moïsi, a European political analyst and senior adviser at the Institut Français des Relations Internationales in Paris.

What then is to be made of the recent N.I.E. report written by three career diplomats in the U.S. State Department? One source quoted in the Wall Street Journal described the authors as “hyper-partisan anti-Bush officials.” More pertinently, as Jed Babbin wrote in early December for Human Events, the conservative Web site, “According to a House source who sat with the three primary authors in a two-hour briefing…the three – Thomas Fingar, Vann Van Diepen and Kenneth Brill – refused to say the 2005 estimate was wrong though adamantly defending their ‘high confidence’ conclusion that Iran stopped developing nuclear weapons in 2003.” Babbin also goes on to remind us that Fingar expressly stated before the House Armed Services Committee last July: “We assess that Tehran is determined to develop nuclear weapons.” Nowhere does Fingar explain what has changed since July. We concur with Babbin’s assessment that the report authors plainly have no real confidence in their own conclusions.

Within days of the report’s publication, E.U. and NATO foreign ministers discussed its conclusions and unanimously decided that its subject, the suspension of the nuclear weapons program, was not the issue; the issue was Iran’s refusal to suspend uranium enrichment – which would enable it to quickly re-start the weapons program. Apparently foreign ministers from the E.U. and NATO believe the N.I.E. report is irrelevant to discussions of continuing sanctions.

It is a fact that the technology for uranium enrichment, en route to a nuclear weapon, is far more cumbersome and challenging than the actual fabrication of delivery systems, which essentially can be accomplished overnight.

Even though the N.I.E. report has caused confusion and the rhetoric is now all over the place (with some European leaders surprisingly taking a more militant stance on Iran), there is still no chance that sanctions could work against Iran – whether imposed by the U.N. (December 2006) or by the U.S. unilaterally (March 2007). The E.U.-27 is Iran’s largest trading partner, and its major trading companies fear that China, Iran’s second-largest trading partner, will steal their markets if they turn the embargoing screw more than they already have (which is very little).

In 2006, the E.U. traded over 25 billion euros with Iran, fairly evenly balanced between exports and imports. China runs a distant second with about 11 billion euros. Of course, Iran has a lot of what Europeans really want: energy sources. Iran beckons seductively as an alternative to Russia’s emerging stranglehold on the E.U. as its dominant energy supplier, especially in natural gas.

Not making the news, but touching the most sensitive issues of nuclear technology and proliferation, is that Europeans (and Americans) could benefit enormously from Iran. Today, Iran burns an enormous amount of oil for power generation, more than 2 million barrels per day. (Iran’s power demand is soaring. Between 2000 and 2006, power generation in the country grew by 66 percent.) Sanctions have hurt Iran in this respect, and peaceful nuclear development for power generation would make sense, freeing huge supplies of oil for the international market. Such an infusion would relieve oil price pressures tremendously. If only Iran could be trusted.

Over the last year roughly a dozen Muslim regimes, all Sunni, declared that they too want to go nuclear. In some cases a factor is the genuine shortage of electricity in the region. But early in 2007, Jordan’s King Abdullah countered that as the main reason, saying, “The rules have changed on the nuclear subject throughout the whole region. After this summer [referring to Iran’s proxy war with Israel in south Lebanon] everybody’s going for nuclear programs.” Thus, the nuclear push results from fear of Shia Iran and its regional ambitions. The predominantly Sunni Middle East does not want a nuclear Iran any more than the West does.

Unable to turn the only trade-sanctions screw that could really hurt Iran, the E.U. has no more clout than the U.N. And if the E.U.’s fear of countenancing force is in fact a fear of a backlash in the Muslim world, then, as the nuclear surge issue reveals, it needs to “get real.” Because – ignoring the usual protesting-for-public-consumption rhetoric – in the event of a U.S.-Israeli strike in Iran, most of the Muslim world would be on the side of the West.

Finally, there has been sharp disagreement here at Energy Tribune over the issue of a nuclear Iran (see “From the Editor” on page 1). The authors of this piece were heartened by John Vinocur’s December 10 piece in the International Herald Tribune, which reported that even European officials who saw the threat of military action as a “verbal plus” now “consider the threat squandered,” given the new N.I.E. The piece also quotes a source close to the International Atomic Energy Agency as saying the new N.I.E. was “mushy.” Unfortunately, Israel doesn’t have the armchair luxury of mushy opinions. Israel knows Iran’s stated intentions for the Israeli people – and that uranium enrichment offers them the means to carry them through.