Iran really will be next

If Bush doesn’t force Iran to back down, then his successors will

James Forsyth

8 September 2007

All the presidential candidates are determined to stop Tehran

Once Iran was a nuclear power, any leverage on it would be severely limited. Tehran would feel emboldened to ramp up the support that it offers to Hamas and Hezbollah; peace between Israel and Palestine or stability in Lebanon would be almost impossible to achieve in these circumstances. The regime would also throw its weight around in its backyard with abandon. The Persian Gulf would become a Persian Lake. There would be little the Iraqi government could do to deter effective Iranian suzerainty over the south of the country.

Then there are the internal Muslim wars of religion. The Sunni powers in the region wouldn’t take kindly to the first nuclear-armed Muslim state in the Middle East being Shiite. Sunni Saudi Arabia would, intelligence experts believe, respond by purchasing a bomb off the shelf from their co-religionists in Pakistan. Egypt would pull its nuclear programme out of mothballs and drive hard for a bomb. A nuclear Iran would spark a nuclear arms race across a volatile region that is vital to the United States’ interests.

Then there is the question of how Israel would react to a nuclear-armed Iran. It is hard to imagine any country sitting idly by while a state that calls for its destruction develops nuclear weapons: Israel’s history makes such a scenario inconceivable. It is all very well to dismiss Ahmadinejad’s words as mere bombast, but few world leaders pray for the apocalypse at the UN General Assembly. Ahmadinejad did. If Israel believed that America would not act, it would do so — and with justification. The option of turning a blind eye to Iran going nuclear, as the Bush administration effectively did with North Korea, is simply not available to an American president when it comes to Iran. Every candidate in the field knows that they will be held to their words on Iran in a way they will not be on nearly every other foreign policy issue.