Iran and the bomb

By Salim Mansur 
December 31, 2005
The Toronto Sun
Original Source: http://www.torontosun.com/News/Columnists/Mansur_Salim/2005/12/31/pf-1373982.html

Earlier this month, at a gathering of Islamic countries in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad cast doubt on the Jewish holocaust and declared his country would not be stopped in acquiring capabilities to produce nuclear fuel. 
Two months before, Ahmadinejad had called for Israel to be wiped off the map -- a sentiment widely shared, if not publicly broadcast, by those attending the meeting in Mecca. 
The quest for nuclear weapons in the Middle East can barely be contained by the clerical regime in Tehran. The reason is obvious. 
The Iranian clerics learned from regime change in Baghdad that their survival depends on possessing nuclear weapons. Hence, they will go any distance in repudiating the International Atomic Energy Agency's safeguards to enrich uranium and maintain domestic control of the entire nuclear fuel cycle. 
Iran unquestionably is bound to be the most troubling problem for the UN Security Council in 2006 and beyond, as Iraq had been for the decade after Saddam Hussein's army invaded and occupied Kuwait in August 1990. 
The record of the Security Council and the IAEA to enforce their resolutions on member states in violation of international agreements is bleak. 
The credibility of these organizations -- their functioning depends on member-states -- in securing international peace and disarming rogue regimes was exposed in the UN Oil-for-Food program in Iraq. 
Paul Volcker's inquiry into that program and the scandal surrounding it found some permanent members of the Security Council responsible for the integrity of the United Nations were not above being bribed by a tyrannical regime. 
Russia was the largest recipient of Saddam's bribes. It is an open question if Moscow can be trusted to monitor Iran's fuel cycle, an idea being explored within the IAEA, since Russians are now building a nuclear plant for the oil-rich country. 
As Iran enjoys ever-increasing oil revenues, Tehran has become an attractive customer for Chinese and Euro-Russian arms merchants ready to replace its rusting weaponry to meet its regional ambition. The rising oil income also makes Tehran an expansive paymaster for Islamist terrorism. 
Clerics emboldened 
The divisions within the U.S. and among NATO allies over the Iraq war have also greatly emboldened Iran's ruling clerics. 
Ahmadinejad is the new face of the ultra-conservative Islamist regime, and his brazenly provocative rhetoric indicates a belief that Iran can can outmanoeuvre the West in a confrontation -- based on the assumption that the U.S. will be reluctant to enter another military engagement. 
But confrontation is unavoidable should Iran heedlessly proceed with its nuclear ambitions. For Ahmadinejad and his supporters, if a poverty-stricken Pakistan can become a nuclear state, then there is no reason Iran cannot do the same. 
The world must ask, can it risk a religiously autocratic Iran, which stifles democracy at home and promotes terrorism abroad, acquiring nuclear capability? If the world fails to stop Iran, nuclear proliferation will receive a boost, and countries such as Hugo Chavez's Venezuela will be next to push forward with their nuclear ambitions. 
It is inevitable that another coalition of the willing will have to dispatch Iran's nuclear ambition (just as Saddam's was eliminated by Israel in 1981), unless the Security Council acquires new resolve to hold Tehran accountable to IAEA safeguards. 
The world seems to be similarly situated as it was in the 1930s. Then Hitler, like Ahmadinejad today, made public his views of what he intended to do, and European powers took him to be a clown -- only to discover the clown was lethal.