This is a guest post by Kenneth Bandler, Director of Communications for the American Jewish Committee.

One answer to Iran’s quest for nuclear capability apparently is for the United States - and other Western nations - to facilitate nuclear proliferation throughout the Gulf.

President Bush plans to sign a nuclear cooperation agreement with the United Arab Emirates before he leaves office. Wall Street Journal reporter Jay Solomon writes that the Bush administration has championed the UAE nuclear agreement as a model for promoting peaceful nuclear energy while guarding against weapons proliferation.

While the White House and UAE government are celebrating this milestone - the first nuclear cooperation accord between the U.S. and a Middle East country - some in Congress are voicing deep concerns about the inherent dangers to providing nuclear technology, even if ostensibly for civilian use, to a country that is Iran’s largest trading partner.

A bill introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives by Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen would require the President to confirm that the UAE is complying with UN economic sanctions against Iran, is targeting logistical and financial networks that support terrorist organizations, and is meeting IAEA standards for civilian use of nuclear technology.

For its part, the UAE, which holds about eight percent of the world’s oil reserves, insists that it needs to develop a nuclear capacity to meet projected domestic energy needs. Anwar Gargash, the UAE Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, quoted in The National, the UAE English-language newspaper, said the plan is to build “a fleet of nuclear reactors” to provide up to 15,000 megawatts of power by 2020, to meet more than one-third of projected demand for electricity. The UAE, a federation of seven sheikdoms, has a population of less than five million.

Like the US, Britain and France initialed earlier this year nuclear cooperation accords with the UAE. Hope is blossoming in each country that their companies will get the lucrative contracts for supplying equipment and training for the nuclear reactors. Such competition may skew recognition that nuclear power development brings a risk of nuclear weapons proliferation.

British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, quoted in the same piece in The National, said: “We face a growing risk of nuclear weapons proliferation as nuclear reactors become a growing source of power. That is why the UAE programme is so important.”

Shouldn’t there be a quid pro quo? After all, Iran depends heavily on the UAE as the transshipment point for refined oil and for technology with military applications. The UAE also is one of Tehran’s largest financial partners; it could therefore exert economic pressures on Iran that might, in accordance with UN Security Council resolutions, bring real pressure on the regime to desist from its nuclear program.

“The UAE, like other Gulf countries, is trying to perform a high-wire balancing act when it comes to Iran,” write Michael Jacbson and Matthew Levitt of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “On the one hand, the gulf countries don’t like Iran, fear the prospect of it developing nuclear weapons and would prefer not to anger the U.S. On the other hand, they would like to avoid antagonizing Tehran - the emerging regional power - and they enjoy the benefits of strong commercial ties to Iran.”

One watchdog is just as concerned as members of the U.S. Congress.

A US-UAE pact could become “the model for future U.S. nuclear cooperative agreements with Algeria, Saudi Arabia and Libya - nations that all have been suspect at one time or another of harboring nuclear weapons ambitions,” Henry Solkoski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, told Global Security Newswire. The U.S. “will end up having [provided] these states with starter bomb kits,” he said.

This brings us to the central question. What is the urgency for the lame duck U.S. president to ink this agreement? Seems it would be more prudent - and safe - to wait for the incoming Obama administration and 111^th Congress to settle in and close the deal with the UAE, if it indeed is worthwhile for all concerned, as long as our Western allies agree to holding back, too.