Iran: Defense Secretary Robert Gates says "a pretty rich list" of sanctions awaits the soon-to-be-nuclear-armed Islamofascists in Tehran. But everything on his menu, unfortunately, is laughably mild.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, according to the New York Times, told dinner guests in New York City last week that he would "warmly welcome" increased economic sanctions, because all they would do is further enhance Iran's self-sufficiency.

It is too often forgotten there have always been sanctions against Iran of one kind or another during the 30 years since the Shah departed. The people and government have built up lots of calluses from the slaps on the hand we've given them.

Moreover, the official purpose behind the tougher sanctions now being sought, we are told, is to force this regime — which guns down those who protest its sham elections — back to the negotiating table to talk about its nuclear program.

Talk? The only talk we should seek from Mahmoud and his Ayatollah ventriloquists is to hear them cry uncle and abandon their quest for weapons of mass destruction.

Why should conversations rather than concessions be our goal?

Secretary Gates may be delighted about the "variety of options" he sees available to the U.S. and our allies as punitive measures against Iran, as he told CNN over the weekend. A better description would be "puny."

He spoke of "sanctions on banking, particularly sanctions on equipment and technology for their oil and gas industry." But the energy measures he mentions would not be concrete without China taking part in such sanctions.

In that context, consider the eerie warning from nuclear weapons experts Thomas C. Reed and Danny B. Stillman in their new political history of the atomic bomb, "The Nuclear Express."

They believe "at least in the 1980s, some factions within the Chinese government thought a nuclear detonation, sometime in the future within the West, could be helpful in restoring China's global preeminence, so long as such a device was assembled and fired by other hands."

Real economic warfare is the only kind of "sanctions" that would threaten this regime's existence and force them to kill their nuke program — like some form of oil export and gasoline import embargo that really had teeth. But Europe and much of the rest of the world apparently has to be shamed into taking such a step.

That might happen if we saw some leadership, from somebody.

Unfortunately, the only figure on the world stage with the nerve to tell the truth about Iran being the greatest threat to the world since Hitler is Benjamin Netanyahu, and most of the free world's leaders plug their ears to Israeli prime ministers bearing unpleasant, but truthful, messages.

Why did it take the revelation of a secret Iranian nuclear enrichment facility last week to spur consideration of even these mild new measures?

Middle East Muslim nations recognize the threat that too many in the free West fail to appreciate, as illustrated by British intelligence apparently just being told that Saudi Arabia would agree to Israel bombing the newly-revealed Iranian nuclear site.

The sanctions we are proposing — if we can even get them — are a joke. It will be hard to laugh, however, if the free world's failures lead to the worst happening.