MADness On Iran

Now that Iran has used the latest United Nations deadline on its controversial nuclear program to reassert its legal right to enrichment under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the international community is mulling those elusive additional options.
The question is stark. Can anything stop Teheran, bolstered by growing oil revenues as well as the triumph of its Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, over Israel, from accomplishing its ambitions to acquire nuclear weapons?
There probably was a time when the mullahs’ unpopularity had sustained the democracy movement. Now the democrats either support Iran’s nuclear program or are too afraid to challenge it. US troops on both flanks – Afghanistan in the east and Iraq in the west – have not deterred the theocracy. The Islamist revolution of 1979 has won a new lease on life that may keep it going for another generation.
Considering America’s dismal standing in the world, China and Russia would probably have blocked Washington’s efforts in the Security Council even without their commercial interests in Iran. The Europeans want to maintain the two-year-old fiction called dialogue with Teheran.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may be the preeminent rabble-rouser in the region. What he says is certainly what Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini thinks. Ahmadinejad’s predecessor, Mohammad Khatami, wasn’t taken too seriously in Washington when he was in office. A tourist who happens to be a former president of Iran would hardly amount to much in Washington. In any case, the world wasn’t really sure whether Khatami genuinely was a reformer or just masquerading as one at a time when the Islamic regime was facing its worst crisis on the streets and in the central bank.
In public, the urgency of continued dialogue with Iran will continue to be stressed internationally. For a country in its 28th year amid empty talk of rewards and penalties, a sudden change of behavior would be irrational.
A little Cold War-type behavior would be in order -- specifically mutual assured destruction. Ahmadinejad wants to nuke Israel and wipe it off the map. Israel can use its nukes to deter the Iranian president. Ahmadinejad probably would like to nuke America too, but he hasn’t said so. As for the Europeans, he knows he would have, in the words of a perceptive observer, to nuke the Little Satan and Big Satan before targeting the Middle Satan. That’s the stick.
Iran essentially wants security guarantees and recognition as a legitimate regional power. The US can provide that carrot. A Shah-era anointment of Iran as the regional cop is not irrational as it might sound. Voices in favor of engaging with Teheran have grown in influential Washington circles. Moreover, Shiite Iran would prove an important ally against Bin Ladenism and other radical manifestations of anti-Americanism occurring from the rival Sunni Islamists.