William Pfaff: Is a Nuclear Iran Really to Be Feared?

The obsession of the American foreign policy community, as well as most American and a good many international politicians, by the myth of Iran's "existential" threat to Israel, brings the world steadily closer to another war in the Middle East. The debate over Iran takes for granted that the country soon will have nuclear weapons and would use them. The debate back in 2002-03 over Saddam Hussein's alleged possession of nuclear weapons did the same. After the United States had gone to war against Iraq, no such weapons were found to exist. The actual winner of the war that followed the American invasion of Iraq was Israel, which saw Iraq, its principal regional rival destroyed at no cost to itself. The military victor of the war, but politico-strategic loser, was the United States, which destroyed Iraq, a country in no position to harm the United States, at a trillion-dollar cost, enormous human suffering and waste, and the effective transfer of Iraq to Iran's zone of military and strategic influence. The present debate over Iran's nuclear program, like the pre-2003 debate concerning Iraq's nonexistent WMD program, has never extended to the most important question in the matter: What difference would it make if Iran did have nuclear weapons? What would it do with them, considering the nuclear deterrent force possessed by Israel, generally thought to be the fifth or sixth largest nuclear power in the world? Between the start of the nuclear era to the end of the Cold War, tens if not thousands of earnest scholars, strategists, pacifist activists, journalistic commentators, politicians and prospective victims of nuclear war brooded over how nuclear weapons might be used in war. They cannot stop aggression, but they will exact a serious penalty for it!