Give Iran the bomb: it might make the regime more pliable

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2006/10/12/do1201.xml

You see, if I were an Iranian politician, my mind would be made up. If we were all sitting in Teheran and puffing our post-breakfast pipes and pondering the question of Iranian nukes, I am afraid that we might come to a very different answer.

Never mind the bleating from the UN and the snarlings of the Bush Administration and the stream of démarches from Margaret Beckett, which I would file immediately in the bin. If I were the member for Qom South, I would feel that it was my patriotic duty to equip my country, as fast as possible, with the biggest, shiniest, pointiest and most explosive thermonuclear device on the market.

I would want an Iranian nuke not because nukes are some kind of national virility symbol. It's nothing to do with the great spirit of bourgeois rivalry that normally actuates the human race: it's not like wanting a flat-screen television, just because the neighbours have got one.

I think I might genuinely and not unreasonably believe that the possession of a nuclear bomb, and the ability to deliver it over some distance, was the only sure-fire means of protecting my country, and my poor huddled constituents in Qom South, from the possibility of an attack by America.

If I wanted any support for this belief, I would only have to look across the Shatt-al-Arab to the carnage now taking place in Iraq. There, the Americans used their incomparably superior military power to topple a regime, and plunge a neighbouring country into civil war. The tragedy and irony of the whole thing is that Bush managed to take out the one regime in the "Axis of Evil" that was not, in fact, developing weapons of mass destruction.