The International Whaling Commission begins its week-long annual meeting today in Muscat, Oman. At the top of the agenda for the 40 member nations gathered on the Arabian Peninsula will be the same item that’s been there for 12 years — the moratorium on commercial whaling.

It’s likely those, led by the United States, who favor continuing the moratorium will prevail. But opponents, led by Japan, are gaining strength.

Japan has some new allies in its quest for the resumption of commercial whaling. Most are small, impoverished island nations, several in the Carribbean. All are the recent recipients of generous Japanese aid and investment.

Such as Antigua, which changed its mind about whaling at about the same time it opened a new $20 million commercial fisheries complex, a gift from a friend in the Far East. Antiguans say there is no connection between its revised position its spanking pier/freezer plant. The Japanese say they’re not buying votes, they’re opening dialogue. Whales, in their language of squeaks and whistles, probably say “baloney.”

Actually, it’s hard to figure just what the Japanese are grousing about. They already kill 400 or more minke whales a year for purported scientific research. The byproduct of that research — tons upon tons of whale meat — conveniently ends up in Japanese markets. Japanese whalers repeatedly have been caught using slow-killing cold harpoons (the basic steel spear, banned by the IWC) instead of the approved grenade harpoon. While a grenade or two can dispatch a whale quickly, the internal explosions damage too much flesh. Bad for research and unsightly on the plate.

This is the age of the whale as icon for nature’s majesty, yet there remains substantial opposition to limiting whaling to the sustenance of aboriginals. And some blame for Japan’s deception belongs to the IWC for sending a mixed message.

The IWC was formed in 1948. Its stated purpose was “to provide for the proper conservation of whale stocks and thus make possible the orderly development of the whaling industry.” The stated purpose of the 1986 moratorium was to allow for a stock assessment and the development of a new harvesting plan. Clearly, the IWC’s unstated purpose today is the protection of whales and the elimination of the whaling industry. And the 12-year-old moratorium is not a moratorium at all (that is, a pause), but a permanent ban.

At the urging of its aboriginals, Canada withdrew from the IWC in 1982 to protest the unannounced and undebated shift it saw taking place in IWC direction. Iceland did the same in 1991. Norway and Greenland want to resume commercial whaling. Pockets of interest remain in Russia and other former Soviet republics. If killing whales is wrong, so (although to a considerably lesser degree) is saying one thing and meaning another.

The United States Senate got it right this week in unanimously endorsing Sen. Olympia Snowe’s resolution calling for an international ban on commercial whaling and also on Japan’s so-called scientific harvest. The resolution flat-out states that whales simply are too intelligent to be eaten.

The IWC would be wise to adopt a similar straight-talk approach. If the majority of IWC nations wants to condemn whaling as barbaric, it should say so and then back it up with a ban, not an open-ended moratorium. Japan can still call its bribery dialogue, buit it least its scientific research won’t end up as steaks and fillets.