Dear America,
For decades...seventy years or so really...all you had to do to vilify someone was to call him a communist. After the formation of the Soviet Union, "reds" were the monsters seen under every bed, but in the late 1980's, international communism as led by the USSR became a historical relic as a parade of Russian leaders marched through the Kremlin, each leaving behind a somewhat more sophisticated, and as it turns out, a somewhat more corrupt political scion until the current iteration of post-communist leadership, Vladimir Putin, ascended to what has become more of a throne than an office. In the 1970's, an ayatollah in Paris threatened the Shah of Iran with death if he didn't abdicate his throne, and ultimately the ayatollah unseated him. With that political cataclysm, a new international threat was born: the Islamic theocracy, which Iran continues to be today. Now, as the Iranian government ostensibly pursues nuclear arms of their own, the world impugns them and their motives--despite the presumed presence of nuclear weapons in Israel a few hundred miles from Iran's nearest border with it, about which no one seems concerned--and firmly ensconces them under every bed in the world as the next great threat to us one and all. Frankly, I doubt that Iran could ever ascend to that level of menace, and to say that I doubt it is a generous measure of my skepticism about the hand-wringing public consternation in which political leaders in many nations, especially the conservative politicians in this country, are indulging. None-the-less, if we assume that a "nuclear Iran" is a goblin legitimately worthy of fear, the real question becomes obvious: what if anything do we do about it. To answer that question, we must start with a determination of what we can do about it, which is where the conservative ballyhoo falls short. There are really only three options.
The first, and most obvious, is to just let it happen. Nuclear defense programs in other nations that have managed to develop "the bomb" have cost them enormous sums of money over the course of generations now, and if we want to impair Iran's hegemonic strivings, there is probably no better way than to encourage them to spend half their governmental revenues on defense, largely nuclear bombs and missiles, neither of which will ever be used as is demonstrated by the fact that neither of them ever has been used...by anyone including the members of Reagan's "Evil Empire" and George W. Bush's "Axis of Evil." That's what the rest of the world's paranoid nuclear powers do. We live in a world in which the well established motif of MAD, that is Mutual Assured Destruction, is the paradigm on which politics are conducted by nuclear nations, all of which comes to a great "sound and fury, signifying nothing"...but folly. If we really want to hurt Iran, that's the way to go.
The second is a treaty like the one that Secretary of State John Kerry is trying to negotiate with Iran as we speak...or write, I guess. The United States and its allies involved in the negotiations are trying to hem Iran in with sanctions so that by treaty it won't be able to develop a nuclear bomb for at least ten years, the thinking being apparently that by then we will be able to come up with a better idea for either inducing them to forgo such an effort or preventing it in some practical terms. That makes sense in that it seems possible, even if what eventuates from the negotiations is a pact as holey as Swiss Cheese and just as much a matter of taste for those who have to eat it. Still, it would act as a constraint against overt nuclear militarism, and even if Iran cheats to the extent that they develop nuclear capacity anyway, so what. If Iran ever used a nuclear bomb on anyone--and it must be considered that for a bomb to be usable the Iranians would need to concomitantly develop a missile capable of delivering it, not just to Israel but to the United States as well--its own devastation would be essentially guaranteed, and immediately so. Thus, the first and second options work together to inflict on Iran nothing less, and nothing more, than the fruits of its own folly, and why should we try to tell them that what they are doing is a foolish thing, and they are doing it to themselves. If they want to cheat and lie, which the rest of the world thinks Iran's leadership perceives to be a best practice, let them. It amounts to nothing in the final analysis, but with a treaty we at least have effected an official stance for them to be bound by, even if in name only. And then there is the third option...the conservative's option.
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Your friend,
Mike
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