NYdailynews.com, Washington, May 04, 2010

It was hard to tell amid the histrionics at the United Nations on Monday, but the U.S. has rolled out a new way to put the screws to whiny Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:

Get with his program.

Ahmadinejad has called for the spread of nuclear know-how and technology. So President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton happily agreed to help – starting with Iran’s neighbors.

It would all be for power generation and medical research, the U.S. insisted. ’We will work to ensure that nations that abide by their obligations can access peaceful nuclear energy,’ Obama said in a statement, pledging million toward the effort.

The Iranians, of course, were free to believe that Jordan, Turkey, Egypt and the Arab Gulf States were getting nuclear technology for peaceful purposes, and not to counter Iran’s drive for the bomb.

And if the tyrants in Tehran start losing sleep over the prospect of nuke-savvy neighbors, wouldn’t that be a shame?

Clinton jumped on the universal nuclear enjoyment theme, knowing the Iranians wouldn’t enjoy it. ’We will help expand the ability of all states to utilize nuclear energy,’ Clinton said in her remarks at the UN conference on compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Mideast experts said the U.S. was talking up the spread of nuclear technology in the region to reinforce another round of UN economic sanctions aimed at Iran’s push for nuclear weapons.

Iran has already defied three previous rounds of UN sanctions, and Ahmadinejad showed no signs of fearing a fourth. And even though a military option down the road remains officially on the table, the Pentagon isn’t sure it would work.

Message sent

So the expansion of civilian nuclear programs ’is a not-so-subtle way of sending a message to Iran,’ said Ken Pollack, a Brookings Institution scholar and former National Security Council director for the Persian Gulf.

’This is a threat to Iran,’ Pollack said, of giving its neighbors nuclear technology. For such states as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, ’it’s a way of saying to the Iranians that we can go down the same path you did.’

Ahmadinejad played the victim card to the hilt yesterday.

’None of the non-nuclear-weapons states has ever been able to exercise their inalienable and legal right to develop the peaceful use of nuclear energy without facing pressure and threat at some level,’ he complained.

Even the mild-mannered UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon wasn’t buying that one.

In his opening remarks to the conference, Ban urged Iran to ’engage constructively’ with the treaty members. ’The onus is on Iran to clarify the doubts and concerns about its program,’ he said.

Then he topped everybody else in dissing Ahmadinejad.

The U.S., British and French delegations walked out as the Iranian president was speaking, but Ban threw protocol aside and left the hall before Ahmadinejad even entered.