I think that Pete has summed it up about right. The thing is,
Saudi Arabia has made it clear that if Iran has the bomb, then they
will have the bomb too. Next every tinpot country in the region will
want the bomb or buy the bomb.

If Iran thinks that it will be a safer place, with everybody in
the ME armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons and with their
fingers on the button, then they will be in for one horrible shock.

In one thing Arjay is correct. When they blow each other up, the
fallout will sadly blow all the way to Australia. Perhaps we'll
have a planet spinning with cockroaches and ants on board. They
handle radiation far better then us.

All this for Iranian pride. I really don't think its worth it.

So now nationalism is a valid excuse for pestering the world?

If this article, Ali, proves anything, then it is that Iran is even more dangerous than we ever thought.

Germans of the Third Reich also believed that they belong to a great empire and did not consent to their borders.

Arjay

I wouldn't be too hard on the "masses" because nuclear Iran has been a cry-wolf issue for at least a decade - with frequent headlines emerging every time there is not just one US carrier battle group within 1,000 kms of Iran but two or three. The Australian and US publics have mostly tuned-out after a few years.

While over time Iran can only become more organised to manufacture the necessary nuclear explosive (HEU and/or Plutonium) the coming US Presidential election (November, 2012) may be the main reason Israel is talking airstrikes. Israel can:

- create a war with Iran (in, say June 2012) that is a plus for Obama as the US public will rally round him (not an untried Republican candidate) or

- Israel can create a war later (just before or after November 2012) that Obama or a winning Republican rival can't stop because they are preoccupied with the Presidential Election or handing over power (known as "lame duck limbo").

Yabby

I agree the Saudis after:

- completing missile (designed for nuclear warhead) deals with China, and

- suspected financing of much of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program

can rapidly buy nuclear weapons or negotiate oil for weapons deals to catch-up and pass Iran's nuclear efforts.

The Saudis may not even need to wait years to build a reactor or to highly enrich Uranium (HEU). The promise of oil is now worth that much.

However Israel may be waiting for a pretext to bomb Iran's nuclear sites, in retaliation against:

- missiles from Iranian supported Hezbollah being fired over the Lebanese border into Israel or

- the blowing up of an Israeli Embassy, assassination or

- other outrage, or

- an Iranian "attack" on Kurdish northern Iraq (where Kurdish factions fight each other constantly anyway and Turkey invades northern Iraq fairly frequently).

Need to watch Israeli or US pretext campaigns and other signs.

Pete

Many Europeans are proud of their Age of Expansion and past imperial glory, but I doubt that many would want to regain their old empires.

This essay reeks of the same controlled narrative of the German Third Reich arising out of delusions of regaining the mythological glories of a great Germanic past, when it really grew out of the desperate social conditions inflicted on Germany by triumphal Western powers and a rigged US-European financial system.

There are some spectacular omissions from this essay, including the forced abdication of British-appointed monarch Resa Shah in 1940 by the British themselves, the overthrow of elected Premier Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 by the well documented CIA-MI6 Operation Ajax, and the British government’s ownership of more than 50% of Anglo-Persian oil, which directly kept Iranian oil royalties hovering around a meagre 16% for several decades until 1979.

These and other omissions make a farce of the author’s attempt to put Iranian concerns that ‘foreign powers ARE CONSIDERED TO BE a barrier to Iran’s progress, and [that] the reasoning has manifested a degree of xenophobia’. (capitals mine) These are not considerations or perceptions, they are stark reality.

When Iran was firmly under Western control of its military and financial operations, the West had no concerns whatever about Iran having nuclear ambitions, as this 1970s advertisement by a US power company shows:
http://www.globalnerdy.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/shah_shills_for_nuclear_power.jpg

And as for Iran having ambitions to acquire nuclear weapons, this chilling map of US bases surrounding Iran makes a farce of the author’s pontifications that it’s all about regaining a lost Persian empire.
http://files.abovetopsecret.com/files/img/nz4ee4cb31.jpg

Pete, I think that Israel is kind of between a rock and a hard place here. They would be fully aware that if those nations around them, to keep up with Iran, arm themselves with nukes too, with all those
fingers on the button, at some point Israel will cop one or two
and given that its only a small patch of dirt, thats the end of Israel.

So disarming Iran before it becomes a nuclear power, is about the only
option that they have. Once it has the bomb, its basically game over.

Not all expressions of nationalism "[reek] of the same controlled narrative of the German Third Reich", Killarney. Some are merely statements of a preference to make unilateral decisions on one's own country's future. I wonder how we would feel in Australia, if China decided that we were too incompetent to handle our own nuclear future, and insisted that we toe whatever line they felt inclined to draw.

There also appears to be a level of inconsistency (I won't say hypocrisy, although it is a close call) in our own dealings with nuclear countries. India, for example, is not a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, but we seem comfortable to send them our uranium. Iran is a signatory to the Treaty, but we choose to believe they have only evil intentions. Nice.

As Dr Omidi points out:

"Unfortunately, the West and Washington’s policies at present are merely inflaming Iranian nationalism. As George Perkovich, a US scholar on Middle East once observed: 'Nothing fuels nationalism like resistance to public diktat by arrogant, perhaps hypocritical outsiders'."

Amen.