Iran's Nuclear Deterrent

George W. Bush is spoiling for a war with Iran before his sordid spell in the White House ends. He wants it so badly he can taste it. In fact, it's so tangible and endearing to him that he's now given it a pet name: World War III.

Bush has made it an article of global faith that the world can't live with a nuclear-armed Iran, and that the community of civilized nations has a duty to keep Iran from ever acquiring nukes. He backs this up with the fatuous contention that the heads of state of all the significant industrialized countries are in lock step with him on this, and that it's one of the few things he and Russian President Vladimir Putin still see eye to eye on -- he made this last assertion on October 18, the same day Putin made it clear that no such consensus exists.

"...if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing [Iran] from having the knowledge necessary to make a nucular weapon.”

-- George W. Bush

Bush's latest rant on Iran is pointless, counterdiplomatic, perhaps evidence of a worryingly unbalanced state of mind. Dennis Kucinich and I are not the first or only observers to suggest this.

I do have a question, though, that I haven't heard anyone else ask: Where does the US supposedly get the authority, the moral imperative, to dictate to the Iranians and to the world that Iran can't have nuclear weapons?

This question is worth analyzing because public discussion of Iran's nuclear ambitions virtually unanimously assumes Iran has no right to develop a nuclear capability. That was the consensus at last night's Democratic Presidential debate, where Tim Russert framed the issue to suggest candidates' positions should be differentiated according to what Iranian weapons development provocation should trigger an attack. Even opponents of Bush's expansive military doctrine and the Iraq occupation frequently agree that military action to prevent Iran from acquiring nukes is justified.

Does anyone ever ask how or why?

The authority the administration claims flows from Iran's supposed violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which Iran signed onto in 1970, by embarking on a nuclear energy program with the potential for weapons development. The UN has imposed political and economic sanctions on Iran over this, but the fact is, NPT signatories are allowed to develop nuclear energy for power generation, so long as they don't build nuclear weapons.

Iran maintains it isn't building any nuclear weapons. Of course, Iran could be and probably is lying about this, but that can't be proven, leaving European and Asian governments who are trading partners with Iran a convenient excuse to play down tensions with Teheran.

That leaves the Bush Administration dependent on its own doctrine calling for pre-emptive attacks on states sponsoring terrorism, especially Bush's floridly named Axis of Evil. The administration hopes to inspire, among lawmakers who would have to authorize a strike, sufficient fear of the potential for an Iran in possession of nuclear technology

• to use it offensively to threaten Israel's security and the security of other countries in the region -- possibly even to strike Israel itself, and

• to pass the technology along to terrorist entities who might use it against the West and especially the US.

Some would argue the Senate already has given the President the tacit approval on October 25 when it signed off on the designation of Iran's Revolutionary Guard as sponsors of terrorism and proliferators of weapons of mass destruction.

An ascendant Iran, nuclear or not, certainly is a threat to the post-Cold War world order, but Iran functions mostly outside that order. Iran does sponsor causes antagonistic to the US, to our policy and our military forces in Iraq, and to Israel. But I've argued before that supporting anti-American insurgents, and even supplying them with cash and weapons, makes Iran guilty of nothing that hasn't been standard operating procedure for the US for the last 60 years.

Nested within all of the rhetoric about Iran's nuclear program is the assumption that, if Iran built nukes, its intentions would be to use them offensively. Since a nuclear first strike launched from or traced to Iran would invite Iran's annihilation, it seems reasonable to question that scenario.

Iran's governing ideology and foreign policy may be repugnant, but no one questions Iran's sovereignty. With sovereignty comes the right to self-defense. If Iran were willing to admit that it is attempting to build nuclear weapons, it would have a reasonably compelling argument that it needs nukes to defend itself from increasingly likely military attacks by its most hostile enemies, chiefly the United States.

Consider:

• Shi'ite Iran borders Pakistan, which is Islamic but more than 75% Sunni, politically unstable, and nuclear-armed to the teeth. Iran is within easy missile range of nuclear-armed India, China and Russia, not to mention the nuclear states in Europe.

• Iran's two most hostile adversaries, the US and Israel, are obvious nuclear threats. Israel has both nukes and ICBMs to deliver them; the US can nuke anyone it chooses to strike, anywhere on the planet. The US military is on the ground in neighboring Iraq and Afghanistan, in former Soviet 'stans in Central Asia, in Sunni Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait -- the Saudis being regional rivals with Iran for power and influence. The US almost certainly has clandestine operations inside Iran itself.

• The US clearly demonstrated that it is prone to irrational acts of hostility when it followed up the Bush Axis of Evil pronouncement with the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The other inescapable lesson of the Iraq attack comes from the choice of target: Of the three Axis countries, we invaded the one that most clearly did not have the capability to counterattack with weapons of mass destruction. We spared North Korea, an actual international proliferator of WMD technology with whom tensions with the US were at least as high at the time as they were with Iraq. The obvious difference was that an attack on North Korea would have been far costlier and might have met retaliation in the form of a nuclear strike on the invasion force or on Seoul. The object lesson? The way to avert an increasingly credible threat of attack by the US is to develop and brandish nuclear weapons.

I believe there is sufficient will in the Congress to prevent the administration from actually taking us to war in Iran. Assuming that's the case, the next US president will have to take the world as he or she finds it -- the administration will no longer have to view it through the neoconservative lens of its predecessor. The new administration will face an increasingly multilateral world, and will be challenged to find ways to co-exist with an influential and possibly nuclear-armed Iran. It will have to own the realization that for the first eight years of the 21st Century, the most dangerous, aggressive and destabilizing regime in the world has not been Iran at all. It's been us.

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