On: Iran referred to UN Security Council for nuclear non-compliance

Tenth of September, and the Security Council has referred Iran for non-compliance - non-compliance, of all words, for a country whose inspection regime was shattered by bombs.

I think of the League of Nations, that glass arcade where the powers of my decade displayed their diplomacy like commodities in a lit passage. It was called the conscience of the world, and it certified every theft with a stamp. The building still stands in Geneva, I am told, repurposed, its marble polished for conferences. The marble remembers what the resolutions have forgotten: that the stamp was always applied after the decision had been made elsewhere.

Now the same ritual, in a taller building, with better lighting. The strikes came first - the facilities, the inspectors driven out - and then the tribunal convenes to condemn the one who can no longer be watched. It is as if a creditor burned the ledger and then sued the debtor for losing the accounts. The procedure is impeccable. That is what frightens me: catastrophe administered with impeccable procedure, each document filed, each vote counted, the wreckage growing in perfect order.

Face backward from that chamber and what do you see? Not a road to peace but a heap: treaties torn up, inspections broken, cities struck, and now the paperwork of blame arranged neatly on top, like a cloth laid over furniture in a sealed room.

The diplomats call this escalation management. From in front, perhaps it looks like a process, steps, stages, a path. From behind it is only the storm again, and the council’s resolution is not a brake but another gust - it propels us forward while adding its own page to the debris.

Somewhere in Tehran tonight a man who kept the inspection logs cannot enter his own laboratory. His records exist; the door does not. The file is complete. The country it describes is closed.