HOME	Your Most Trusted Source of Foreign News and Views About the United States

By Amir Taheri

Original Article (English)

At a recent Friday prayer session at a London mosque, the "imam" delivering the sermon went through a list of things for which the faithful were invited to pray. There were the absolute musts, notably Palestine, along with optionals, such as world peace and harmony.

One item on the list, however, was new. The believers were asked to pray that "no harm comes to Iran's nuclear bomb."

The London "imam" is not alone in assuming that Iran has, or soon will have, a nuclear arsenal. A Parisian daily has published a dozen articles in the past few weeks making the same assumption, inviting the rest of the world to accept Iran's right to have nuclear bombs. A London daily sees Iran's quest for the bomb as a challenge to the American "neocons."

The Arab media, too, have touched the issue. A Beirut columnist claims that it's a matter of "honor" that Iran have the bomb. After all, when poverty-stricken Pakistan has a bomb, why should Iran, now taking a golden shower [sic] thanks to rising oil prices, be denied the deadly toy? Another columnist defends Iran's "legitimate right" to have "whatever weapons it wants."

The problem is, we don't know whether Iran has nuclear weapons. The leadership in Tehran insists that it will never develop nuclear weapons. Are the believers being asked to pray for a chimera?

If the "imam" and the columnists are right, the inescapable conclusion is that Iranian leaders have been lying all along.

But have they?

The truth is that we cannot know.

IAEA Chief Muhammad Elbaradei

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) which is supposed to keep an eye on Iran's nuclear project will never definitively know. Remember that the IAEA and its Director-General, Muhammad Elbaradei, played a similar game in 2001 when they kept saying in regard to Iraq: "We need a few more months to tell you, we don't know whether Saddam Hussein has a nuclear program!"

Since the issue is likely to be with us for some time, we must know exactly what the terms of reference are.

One point to remember is that this isn't a fight between a plucky Islamic Republic, representing the underdog, and the United States, which leads the camp of "the powerful and arrogant." Dislike of America should prompt no one to cheer the mullahs into a deadly adventure.

Even if Iran did develop a nuclear arsenal, it couldn't threaten the United States. For at least 10 years, any nuclear weapons Iran might deploy would be of concern only to nations in its own region, in other words, the Middle East, the Gulf and the Caspian Basin. If Tehran's current missile development projects prove successful, it is estimated that the Islamic Republic would have the capability to strike targets in Western Europe and North Africa sometime around 2015.

Iran's Hopelessly Inaccurate Shahab-3 Missile

Moscow, which is helping Iran with its nuclear project, should be more concerned than Washington. By 2020, Iran is likely to have a larger population than Russia. If it obtains a nuclear arsenal, it will be in a stronger position to project power into Russia's traditional backyard.

Theoretically, the Islamic Republic might want nuclear weapons for tactical use against U.S. forces in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Gulf and the TransCaucasus [south Caucasus].  However, for the Islamic Republic, such a strategy could be suicidal, because it would mobilize American public opinion for a massive retaliation, as we saw in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.

The 9/11 attack was Osama bin Laden's fatal mistake, because it pushed the American threshold of pain higher than the U.S. was prepared to tolerate. Bin Laden and his cohorts had been attacking U.S. targets and killing Americans for more than a decade, and yet no U.S. administration was able to mobilize domestic support needed for taking decisive military action against them. When Bill Clinton lobbed a few cruise missiles into empty cowsheds in Afghanistan to retaliation against the first al-Qaeda attack on the World Trade Center [1993], the east coast establishment [New York, Washington] castigated him for overreacting and adventurism. The message was that one could kill Americans in small numbers and fear no retaliation.

That is why the best strategy for the Islamic Republic, in dealing with what President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has described as a "clash of civilizations," is to wage a proxy war against the U.S., especially in Iraq and Afghanistan, to bleed the Americans at low but steady levels so as to allow the east coast establishment to continue arguing against any military retaliation.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Iran's Statue of Liberty: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

The best allies of the Islamic Republic are those in the United States that argue that the U.S. should cut and run, allowing Iran to fill the void, both in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then claim supremacy over the entire Middle East. If Iran begins to threaten the U.S. or its allies with nuclear weapons, the "cut-and-run" party will not be permitted to do its work.

The United States is unbeatable in a short war in which it can use its overwhelming technological superiority. But when it comes to long wars in which reasonable numbers of GIs inevitably get killed, it quickly faces the Cyndi Sheehan effect. Then, Joan Baez comes out of retirement to sing about roses, and Gary Hart reappears to sign anti-war op-eds. And then some man who heated George McGovern's soup on the 1972 campaign trail gets on stage to cry about "the new Vietnam," as Edward Kennedy and Jimmy Carter applaud.

So, if the mullahs are worried that the U.S. might hit them, the last thing they should want is to create a situation in which Washington wins the support from the American people to use tactical nuclear weapons against them.

The Islamic Republic's greatest insurance policy against American military action is precisely not to have a nuclear arsenal. Iran doesn't need nuclear weapons and is, in fact, safer without them.

It's not hard to see why. The mullahs have a high threshold of pain and can sustain huge human losses in a conventional conflict with the U.S. In the eight-year war against Iraq, they showed that as long as their regime was not in danger, they couldn't care less how many Iranians died. That war should have ended by 1983 at the latest. Instead it lasted for five more years, because the mullahs could afford to lose more men than Saddam Hussein ever could.

The U.S., on the other hand, has for decades been experiencing a lowering of its pain threshold. To create a situation in which the U.S. can justifiably use tactical nuclear weapons against targets in Iran would be a fatal error on the part of the Tehran leadership.

Those who have any sympathy for Iran should ignore the London "imam" and pray that the Tehran leadership does not embark on an adventure that it might not be able to control.

VIDEO FROM THE MUSLIM WORLD: 'IRAN WAS JUST BUYING TIME'

Hosein Musavian, Iran's Chief Nuclear Negotiator

---