Iran appears poised to thumb its nose at the UN and at the United States in particular.

A defiant Iran kept on enriching uranium in advance of the U.N. Security Council’s Thursday deadline for Tehran to freeze such activity or face the threat of sanctions, U.N. and European officials said.

The Bush Administration has done a good job to date keeping the international community focused on the threat of a nuclear Iran, and in light of Congress’ recent passing of a bill stating that an attack on Israel is an attack on the United States, Iran’s nuclear proliferation truly is the headline of this day. Some view it as merely a “Wag the Dog” type diversion from Iraq, but scores of pages have been written detailing the impact a nuclear Iran could have upon the Middle East and the world at large.

The good news, however, is that the U.S. currently believes Iran is about 5 years away from creating their own nuke.

The U.S. military is operating under the assumption that Iran is five to eight years away from being able to build its first nuclear weapon, a time span that explains a general lack of urgency within the Bush administration to use air strikes to disable Tehran’s atomic program.

The bad news is that such a timeline allows complacency and removes the need for a focused policy.

Advocates of stopping Iran’s nuclear ambitions point to gaps in what the U.S. intelligence community really knows about Iran’s secretive process. They also point to the fact that Iraq was much closer to building the bomb than the U.S. thought in 1991, when Operation Desert Storm air strikes destroyed much of Baghdad’s atomic capability.

Some of this impatience was revealed in a bipartisan report Aug. 23 from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The report, which dealt with Iran’s support for terrorism and quest for weapons of mass destruction, chastised the U.S. intelligence community for not devoting sufficient resources to Tehran. It also indirectly criticized current intelligence reporting on Iran as too timid.

“An important dimension of the detection of Iran’s WMD program is how intelligence analysts use intelligence to characterize these programs in their analysis,” the report said. “Intelligence community managers and analysts must provide their best analytic judgments about Iranian WMD programs and not shy away from provocative conclusions or bury disagreements in consensus assessments.