News headlines on Monday about Iran’s 11th hour agreement with the European Union’s incentive-riddled nuclear proposal could have been a cause for celebration if the signing party in Tehran was not an intrinsically rogue regime, deservedly labeled as the most active state sponsor of terrorism.

Having mastered the art of protracted nuclear diplomacy through endless negotiations, Tehran could be only months away from the nuclear point of no return. The Europeans are not denying that Iran is running an extensive and robust nuclear weapons program. To deal with this threat, however, they insist on appeasing the mullahs out of their rogue behavior.

The "all carrot, no stick" nuclear agreement between the European Union and Iran will only expedite Tehran's relentless drive to acquire nuclear weapons. It provides a diplomatic cover under which the mullahs' regime will gain valuable time to reach the nuclear point of no return. As such, it would be a grave mistake to embrace this agreement as a victory for nuclear non-proliferation.

The agreement certainly opens a new page in the EU's record of appeasement of terror-prone totalitarian regimes, above all Iran. The rogue and terrorist nature of the mullahs’ regime as well as its twenty-year long campaign of lies and deception to conceal its extensive nuclear program render hollow any commitments made by Tehran.

According to the text of agreement released Monday, Iran is only suspending its nuclear fuel cycle as long as negotiations over trade and security continue. Given Tehran’s track record in prolonging similar talks, it could take several years. Years of “constructive dialogue” between the EU and the ruling tyranny in Iran has brought no results. Besides, if for any reason these talks break down, Tehran has declared it would turn the nuclear fuel cycle on.

The agreement, which does not include any automatic trigger mechanism in case Iran breaches its commitments, provides Tehran with perfect diplomatic cover to advance its nuclear weapon program in secret. This diplomatic breathing room also allows Tehran to pick when and how it will decide to back out of the agreement as it has done so successfully in the past. The mullahs' decision to flout their international agreements usually comes when the concessions of their foreign counterparts are too far underway to easily reverse.

Equally disturbing is the EU making a charade of the war on terror by putting a “For Sale” sign on the EU’s list of terrorist organizations. According to the New York Times, among the incentives proposed to Iran by the Europeans was the “continuation of a policy defining as a terrorist organization the Iranian opposition group known as Mujahedeen Khalq.”

By including this “carrot” in its offerings, the EU has made it clear that a combination of political and business considerations prompted it to include the Iranian Mujahedeen (MEK) in the list of terrorist organizations three years ago.

Ironically, according to the Wall Street Journal, it was due to the revelations made by the MEK in August 2002 that exposed “two decades of Iranian nuclear double-dealing with the International Atomic Energy Agency by revealing a secret enrichment facility at Natanz and a heavy-water plant at Arak.”  Subsequent disclosures by the group exposed the vast scope of Iran's clandestine atomic weapons program.

Now, by vowing to shun and silence this group, the EU is implicitly signaling to Iran that it would impede further revelations by the MEK which would discredit pledges made by Tehran. It is also telling the mullahs that EU countries have no intention of seeing this regime replaced.

In a recent commentary entitled “Axis of Weakness,” Jeffrey Gedmin, Director of the Aspen Institute in Berlin, wrote, “A German friend of mine once explained to me, with some embarrassment, how the policy [of constructive engagement] works: Europe is nice to the mullahs, and when this fails, well, Europe tries to be a little nicer.”

Victor Davis Hanson, a military historian and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “the 20th century should have taught the citizens of liberal democracies the catastrophic consequences of placating tyrants.”

He contended that the root cause of the September 11th tragedy was the precedence left by the 1979 U.S. embassy takeover in Iran. “Roll the tape backward from the USS Cole in 2000, through the bombing of the U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998 and the Khobar Towers in 1996, the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993…, until we arrive at the Iranian hostage-taking of November 1979,” Hanson wrote.

There is an abundance of tough, but ineffective, talk about Iran. Washington needs to put together an overall coherent policy to facilitate the replacement of the current Iranian regime by the Iranian people. Short of a military invasion, everything else should be on the table. To demonstrate this, Washington should devote our full diplomatic and political resources to the Iranian people and their legitimate democracy movement.

Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly in September, President Bush said, “For too long, American policy looked away while men and women were oppressed, their rights ignored and their hopes stifled. And that era is over.”  Now that he is re-elected, he ought to put the diplomatic and political weight of the United States behind the democracy movement in Iran and the anti-fundamentalist democratic opposition that is working to unseat
the ruling tyranny.

Strategically speaking, this approach, and not the “engagement” policy -- a legacy of the Clinton administration -- still lurking within our foreign policy-making circles, would be the only effective way of dealing with the menace in Tehran.

David Johnson is a co-founder of the US Alliance for Democratic Iran and its Director of Operations.

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