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14 August 2009

Preparing for a nuclear Iran

The option of military action should be taken off the table now

By George Eaton

David Clark has a fine piece in today’s Guardian rightly arguing that the option of military action against Iran should be taken off the table. Many of those who advocate pre-emptive strikes do so because they assume that a nuclear-armed Iran would immediately attempt to incinerate Israel.

The Daily Telegraph’s Con Couglin, for instance, has claimed that in the post-cold war world Iran cannot easily be deterred from unleashing a “nuclear holocaust”. But as Clark says, such commentators profoundly underestimate the degree to which Iran is transfixed by the political potency of nuclear weapons – the status and prestige that still accrue to countries that hold these weapons, as opposed to the conventional military force they wield. He writes:

Military command and control is the prerogative of the clerical elite, which more than anything is concerned with preserving its own power structure . . . Dark fantasies about pre-emptive strikes on Tel Aviv or nuclear devices being handed to Hezbollah and Hamas have no basis in serious analysis.

One could add that any nuclear strike against Israel would also wipe out the Palestinians and destroy al-Aqsa Mosque, usually considered the third-holiest site in Islam. The human and political cost of such action is too great for the Iranian regime even to consider an assault on the Israeli state. Finally, the threat of external aggression against Iran continues to provide the primary justification for internal repression. This prolongs the wait for a more moderate government that may peacefully abandon the country’s nuclear ambitions.

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Oil giants to join in?

Yet Tehran’s obstinacy in the face of Barack Obama’s appeal to the regime to “unclench its fist” still leaves us with the unpalatable prospect of Iran shortly becoming the world’s tenth state with nuclear weapons.

Clark states, rather too casually, that “proliferation is always a risk”. The truth is that Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons would almost certainly trigger an arms race in the Middle East.

As Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, has warned, three dozen countries “with civil nuclear power have the technologies and understanding to develop nuclear weapons in a short period of time”.

Algeria, Morocco, Egypt and Saudi Arabia have all curiously declared their interest in nuclear power, despite sitting on some of the largest oil reserves in the world. The only long-term solution to nuclear proliferation remains a new global agreement, as sought by President Obama.

At next year’s major conference to review the Non-Proliferation Treaty the five official nuclear weapons states – Russia, the US, the UK, France and China – must outline credible plans to relinquish these national virility symbols.

In the meantime, as Clark soberly argues, the truth is that we must be prepared to tolerate a nuclear Iran. Israel’s acquisition of nuclear weapons in 1967, though publicly revealed by the heroic Mordechai Vanunu only in 1986, cast a shadow over the Middle East long ago.

We need to become far more realistic if we want to see the direct and transparent negotiations that the west so desperately needs with Iran.

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