Good article "The dire potential fallout from Tehran's bomb"

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=5&article_id=10488



Although the United States and Iran have no diplomatic relations, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and Iran's Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi sat next to each other at a seafront restaurant at Sharm el-Sheikh a week ago and exchanged "polite dinner conversation." They were both attending the international conference on Iraq at the Egyptian Red Sea resort.

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At the heart of their dispute are rival geopolitical ambitions: each wants to be the dominant power in the Gulf. Controlling the entire northern coast of the Gulf, Iran wants to be recognized as the major regional power. A country of 70 million people, it dwarfs the string of Arab sheikhdoms across the water over which the U.S. extends military and political protection.

Nothing illustrates the U.S.-Iranian competition more clearly than America's strenuous efforts to keep Iran out of the nuclear club - of which membership is so far limited to the U.S., Russia, China, Britain, France, India, Pakistan and Israel. The stakes are high. If Iran were to acquire the bomb, this might inhibit U.S. regional interventions, such as its war in Iraq. Israel's monopoly of weapons of mass destruction would be broken. The two allies would no longer be able to over-fly more or less what they please, browbeat their local opponents and threaten them with military strikes. The balance of power would no longer be so overwhelmingly in their favor. They would have to accept - their nightmare scenario - a situation of mutual deterrence with Iran.

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In the 1960's, Israel used lies, deception and theft to build its nuclear weapons. Iran seems to be following this example. It insists that its nuclear program is entirely for peaceful purposes, although it seems to have acquired in the late 1980's nuclear blueprints and samples from Pakistan. Iran has said that it does not and will not seek to acquire nuclear weapons. It has signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) as well as its additional protocol, which provides for snap inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency, and has committed itself to full cooperation and transparency with the Vienna-based agency. But can it be believed? Iran is a large country and its installations are widely dispersed. Some of them are buried underground.

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