Victor Hanson, too, sees value in nukes for Iran:
If they obtain an Achaemenid bomb and restore lost Persian grandeur, it will remind a restless population that the theocrats are nationalists after all, not just pan-Islamic provocateurs. A nuclear Iran can create all sorts of mini-crises in the Gulf — on a far smaller scale than Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait — which could spike oil prices, given the omnipresence of the Iranian atomic genie. The Persian Gulf, given world demand for oil, is a far more fragile landscape than in 1991.
The Islamic world lost their Middle Eastern nuclear deterrent with the collapse of the Soviet Union — no surprise, then, that we have not seen a multilateral conventional attack on Israel ever since. But with a nuclear Islamic Iran, the mullahs can claim that a new coalition against Israel would not be humiliated — or at least not annihilated when it lost — since the Iranians could always, Soviet-like, threaten to go nuclear. There are surely enough madmen in Arab capitals who imagine that, at last, the combined armies of the Middle East could defeat Israel, with the guarantee that a failed gambit could recede safely back under an Islamic nuclear umbrella.
Lastly, Iran can threaten Israel and U.S. bases at will, in hopes of getting the same sort of attention and blackmail subsidies it will shortly obtain from the Europeans, who likewise are in missile range. All failed states want attention — who, after all, would be talking about North Korea if it didn’t have nukes? So, in terms of national self-interest, it is a wise move on the theocracy’s part to acquire nuclear weapons, especially when there is no India on the border to play a deterrent role to an Iran in the place of Pakistan.
Yet all these "good" things (from whackjob mullahs' views) could founder on one small detail:
There are only two slight problems with this otherwise brilliant maneuvering: George Bush and the government of Israel.
Neither will allow Iran to be a threat to either America or Israel, respectively.
So let me refine my statement about whether Iran benefits from possessing nuclear weapons:
Iran would gain tremendously if it can successfully become a nuclear weapon state and also prevent any other regional state from also getting nuclear weapons.
Iran loses a lot if its pursuit of nuclear weapons draws the violent attention of America or Israel. America alone, though allies would be welcome, can damage Iran's nuclear ambitions with conventional weapons alone. Israel would need to use nukes, I think, to do comparable damage. And if Israel thinks we won't stop Iran, Israel will stop Iran. Which is why I think we will do the job in the end.
And Iran loses a little bit and puts itself at risk for devastaing loss if it goes nuclear and neighboring hostile countries respond by going nuclear. Will MAD work when everyone there is already quite mad?
On a final note, Hanson notes what I've written about before as well: why do we assume that only bad things happen to us if we strike Iran? He writes:
Moreover, who knows what a successful strike against Iranian nuclear facilities might portend? We rightly are warned of all the negatives — further Shiite madness in Iraq, an Iranian land invasion into Basra, dirty bombs going off in the U.S., smoking tankers in the Straits of Hormuz, Hezbollah on the move in Lebanon, etc. — but rarely of a less probable but still possible scenario: a humiliated Iran is defanged; the Arab world sighs relief, albeit in private; the Europeans chide us publicly but pat us on the back privately; and Iranian dissidents are energized, while theocratic militarists, like the Argentine dictators who were crushed in the Falklands War, lose face. Nothing is worse for the lunatic than when his cheap rhetoric earns abject humiliation for others.
One thing for sure, Iran with nukes is nothing but bad news for us. I cannot fathom this president not defending our country by eliminating the Iranian threat before he leaves office.
