This kind of story has been repeated so often it's getting to be a running gag.

It's painfully obvious that Iran knows damn well the U.N. has got absolutely nothing to use against it, and even if it did, it wouldn't have the will.

The back and forth can't be anything other than a deliberate thumbing of the nose at the attempts to keep their regime from building a nuclear weapon--a regime that has, in as many words, spoken with approval of a first strike at Israel. No doubt this plays well to the Islamist factions in Iran and elsewhere.

I don't have any easy answers for this.

But there is one thing people have to try and drill through their brains: whatever the answer is, it isn't the United Nations. If Democrats in particular don't realize this, their foreign policies are going to be impotent at best, disastrous at worst.