Mahmud Ahmadinejad, President of Iran.

Despite Iran’s agreement to ship out some of its nuclear fuel, the UN Security Council announced last night a new draft resolution on sanctions against the recalcitrant Islamic Republic. Good idea – or very bad?

In a surprise move, Tehran announced Monday that after a weekend of negotiations with the leaders of Brazil and Turkey, it had agreed to a nuclear fuel swap deal, the same deal it walked away from in October 2009. Pundits, observers and politicos were of two minds about the decision: That this was either a legitimate breakthrough with the difficult nation or it was a sly attempt on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s part to deflect pressure for more sanctions.

Last night, however, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton nonetheless announced that the UN Security Council would be pushing ahead with sanctions designed to punish Iran for its nuclear ambitions: The five permanent members of the Security Council, including Russia and China, agreed to a draft of sanctions against Iran, aimed at the country’s military and financial institutions and to be instituted next month. These would be the fourth round of sanctions against the Islamic Republic, another attempt to force the nation to abandon what the West claims is a nuclear programme aimed at building a nuclear weapon.

Despite the widespread doubt over the purity of Ahmadinejad’s intentions in accepting the swap deal, not everyone, however, is pleased with the decision to move ahead with sanctions. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Brazilian President Lula da Silva, who brokered the deal with Iran and say that new sanctions are not necessary, may be “disappointed”, BBC reported today. Erdogan called on the international community to support the deal, though BBC also noted that he also warned that if Iran did not give up its fuel in one month, it would be “on its own”.

“Disappointed” at the undermining of their diplomatic efforts may not be the word for it. Teymoor Nabili, The Americas blogger for Al Jazeera, wrote today, “Lula had barely 24 hours to savour the success before Hillary Clinton took all the wind out of his sails. With a rhetorical pat on the head for him and his Turkish allies, Clinton dismissed the whole process as meaningless, and announced that Iran will face more sanctions.”

Which gets at a central contradiction in Washington’s treatment of the deal. According to Nabili, US officials seems to want it both ways: Susan Rice, US ambassador to the UN, claimed that smacking down Turkey and Brazil’s diplomatic achievement with more sanctions constitutes “making manifest and real the dual track approach”, and that the door to a diplomatic solution to Iran’s nuclear ambitions remains open. “[A] couple of journalists tried to point out the contradiction: with Brazil having coaxed Iran into some fairly major bargaining concessions, didn’t Washington’s sanctions bombshell actually constitute a slamming of the diplomatic door?” Nabili wrote. “No-one seemed to hear the question.”

Julian Borger, diplomatic editor for The Guardian, agreed that this decision will certainly anger Turkey and Brazil, “who will see it as the established powers quashing a genuine attempt at mediation by two new voices on the world stage”, and will “leave behind a bitter taste of unfairness at the UN”.  But he also saw the Security Council’s decision less as a slight against Turkey and Brazil or a schizophrenic attempt at good cop-bad cop, but “a clear signal that they were not impressed”: “The reason seems to be that Iran was over-confident, offering too little and asking for too much.”

The New York Times, however, in its leading editorial today, supported the UN’s decision to push ahead with the sanctions and saw no contradiction in pursuing them while encouraging diplomatic talks. Moreover, the paper claimed that Brazil and Turkey should sign on to the sanctions, because “like pretty much everyone else, they got played by Tehran.”