If, as we read every day, there is “abundant proof” that Iran is supplying missiles to Hezbollah, then why is the Bush administration tip-toeing around the issue?

You might think, after all, that the White House would be happy to finally have at least some goods on Iran, a nation the administration accuses of running a clandestine nuclear weapons program.

But no. Instead, the United States declines to rip the curtain off the Iranian hand in Lebanon — in a press conference or, better yet, in a special session of the U.N. Security Council, where the world’s attention could put a spotlight on the dangerous gamesmanship of the radical clerics in Tehran.

Not that the Israelis have been shy about publicly fingering Iran, which it blames for supplying the missile that struck an Israeli ship off Lebanon.

But that charge and another — that Tehran’s Shiite shock troops, the Revolutionary Guard, are also helping Hezbollah on the ground — have been issued mostly by Israeli military officials in Jerusalem, and often on a not-for-attribution basis.

In a series of non-denial-denials, the Iranians reject such charges as “meaningless.”

Such posturing would be demolished if the United States or the Israelis took their case to the United Nations, complete with satellite photos tracing missiles from Tehran through Syria to the suburbs south of Beirut.

Of course, such television extravaganzas don’t always work out as well as the first one did in 1962, when the Kennedy administration’s scholarly U.N. ambassador, Adlai Stevenson, used an easel, a long wooden pointer and spy plane photos of Russian missiles in Cuba to rally the world behind a confrontation with Moscow.

The Bush administration dusted off the Kennedy playbook 41 years later when then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell made the U.S. case to the United Nations for toppling Saddam Hussein — much to its regret now, it would seem.

That failed crusade may help explain why Washington and Jerusalem have so far declined to produce must-see TV at the Security Council. And it’s also true that a dramatic confrontation at the United Nations would only put more pressure on the two nations to do something about Iran’s complicity, possibly setting in motion an irreversible march to Tehran.

Unlike the case with Saddam, Iran’s role as quartermaster to Hezbollah missileers in Lebanon is beyond dispute.

With officials in Washington reluctant to supply details for the record, I turned to Rich Reynolds, a recently retired Army colonel who spent the first Gulf War conducting intelligence activities against Iraq and over five years in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. One of Reynolds’ last assignments before retiring in 2004 was as chief of the U.S. military assistance program in Jordan.

“Physical evidence does exist of weapons transfers from Iran to Syria and then from Syria to Iran,” Reynolds says. But it is “only available within intelligence channels.”

Now a senior consultant to the Harbinger Technologies Group, a Virginia-based developer of advanced software for U.S. military and intelligence agencies, Reynolds gave me a briefing on the Iranian connection, drawn from his years of inside experience in the region, that tracks what U.S. military and intelligence sources will say without attribution.

“Iran for years has conducted biweekly Hezbollah support flights into Damascus airport,” he said by e-mail.

“The flights are routed over Turkey and are illegal weapons transfers, but the Turks have refused to force down any of the flights. The Israelis have a very complete dossier on the flights and their deliveries, as the transfers can be seen with electro-optical devises from their Mt. Hermon collection site” in the Golan Heights, which Israel captured from Syria in the 1967 Middle East war.

“The transfers are also detectable by U.N. peacekeepers,” Reynolds added, who are headquartered “near the airport, and [by] foreign military attaches in Damascus. These weapons are then followed into Lebanon by human and technical means.”

(As many as two dozen Israeli spies were arrested by Lebanese security forces in recent days, according a July 20 story in Beirut’s English-language Daily Star newspaper.)

“Lots of photographs exist” of the Iranian supply operations, Reynolds says. The U.N. observers “are in close proximity to Hezbollah, and the IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] are well aware of the location of rockets.”

“The Israelis are very hesitant to reveal photographic electro-optical evidence from Mt. Hermon,” Reynolds says, “because it would reveal to the Syrians some Israeli [surveillance] capabilities and the Syrians would then use that knowledge to counter them.”

Washington, Reynolds says, resists “revealing them for the same reason”— so as not to disclose the quality of its technical collection capabilities, which include satellites and ground-station intercepts of Iranian and Syrian electronic communications.

But pretty good pictures of the Hezbollah positions are available to anybody with a laptop, via GoogleEarth.com.

Reynolds even e-mailed me a couple of photos of the Lebanon-Israel-Syria border region that he had downloaded from GoogleEarth and marked up around the Hezbollah sites.

But Iran and Syria aren’t the only arms merchants in the supply chain, he and others agree. China also has a big-time role in the conflict — another inconvenient truth for the Bush administration.

“China is the only manufacturer of the C-801 anti-shipping missile and the C-802 shore-to-ship version,” one of which was launched at the Israeli vessel, Reynolds said. “Some 60-75 have been transferred from China to Iran. Unless Hezbollah got them directly from China, they had to get them from Iran.”

If they ever do get challenged to answer to their role, Reynolds says, “Iran can claim they didn’t give them to Hezbollah because they gave them to Syria, who then gave them to Hezbollah.”

But there isn’t a fig leaf big enough to cover their tracks to Lebanon — or Hezbollah’s tracks to Iran.

“Many Hezbollah guys have gone to Iran for training with the rockets,” Reynolds says, while the Revolutionary Guards have been training Hezbollah gunners in Lebanon.”

Indeed, none of this is a secret in Lebanon, where the guerrillas preen on TV with their Iranian missiles.

Back in Washington, the easel and pointer collect dust in the White House closet. Not for them another U.N. “Adlai Stevenson moment,” where our ambassador used enlarged photos to demand the Russians admit they put missiles in Cuba and declared he was “prepared to wait . . . until hell freezes over” for a response.

Four decades later, the United Nations doesn’t seem such an inviting theater for the Bush administration. Tied down in Iraq, struggling in Afghanistan and wringing its hands over nuclear weapons in North Korea, the White House now wants the United Nations to make the Iran problem go away.

Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.