Iran now has backed off from a demand that had stalled an agreement worked out by France, Britain and Germany to freeze all of Iran’s uranium processing activities. After a week of tense negotiations, Iran has agreed to include 20 disputed centrifuges in the freeze. Iran had sought to have them exempted from the agreement and wanted to use them for research purposes. The devices can produce either low-level nuclear fuel for power plants or highly enriched uranium for the cores of nuclear warheads.

Iran’s concession satisfied the International Atomic Energy Agency, which quickly adopted a resolution welcoming Iran’s suspension of sensitive nuclear activities as “a voluntary, non-legally binding, confidence-building measure.” The full text of the resolution, not immediately disclosed, is said to direct the agency head, Mohamed El Baradei, to report immediately any evidence of incomplete suspension.

The outcome is far from satisfactory to the Bush administration, which is convinced that, despite Iran’s denials, it has a secret program to produce nuclear weapons, not just to produce atomic energy. But the three European countries have rejected American proposals for a harshly worded resolution that could open the way to action by the United Nations Security Council and possible sanctions.

In the so-called Paris agreement, reached in early November, the three European countries offered political, trade and nuclear incentives in exchange for Iran’s suspension of its uranium-enrichment program. Iran insists that it doesn’t want to develop nuclear bombs but needs nuclear power for its energy requirements.

To reach agreement, the European negotiators included some sweeteners. The resolution is said to call Iran’s freeze voluntary and not legally binding. And the 20 centrifuges are to be monitored by cameras rather than being sealed. The Bush administration is said to be unhappy with these conditions, but continued violent opposition to the American occupation of Iraq has left U.S. military forces stretched to near the limit. And Britain, the administration’s major ally in the Iraq war, is firmly committed to the diplomatic route with Iran.

The administration’s misgivings about the European deal with Iran are based partly on a belief that the “old Europe” nations are easy marks when it comes to dealing with nuclear threats and that the United Nations inspectors can’t be trusted to discover and deal with violations. But France and Germany’s caution over Iraq are now more understandable and U.N. inspectors were effective in discovering and destroying Saddam Hussein’s chemical and biological weapons and dead right in declaring that he never did have much of a nuclear weapons program.

Still another argument for going slow against Iran is the scarcity of information and the memory that the scary warnings about the Iraqi threat came from self-serving Iraqi ?migr?s headed by the Pentagon favorite, Ahmad Chalabi. Similarly, Iranian self-serving ?migr?s sounded the alarm about a threatening Iranian nuclear weapons program. Caution, this time, is prudent.