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Friday, February 02, 2007

A moment of honesty from a western leader

Jacques Chirac's 'mental sharpness' has been called into question for saying that a nuclear-armed Iran would not be "very dangerous". "Where would it drop it, this bomb? On Israel? It would not have gone 200 metres in to the atmosphere before Tehran would be raised".

Faced with calls for official clarification' from 'foreign governments'- (we can all guess which ones those were), Chirac was forced into making a humiliating climbdown.

He should have held his ground. Because what the French President originally said was correct. A nuclear-armed Iran would not be very dangerous. In fact a nuclear-armed Iran- and the acquisition of nuclear weapons by other countries threatened by the insatiable neo-conservative war machine, such as Syria, would be the best guarantor of peace in the Middle East. The only way to stand up to bullies is to make them fear you as much as you fear them. And in the sphere of international relations that means nuclear deterrence.

The President of Iran has of course denied that his country has any plans to build a nuclear bomb and that his only interest is to develop nuclear energy. In the interests of peace, I do hope he's lying.

UPDATE: Stephen Pollard clearly doesn't understand the principle of nuclear deterrence (funny that, seeing that he supported it during the Cold War) . And Stephen ,while we're at it, if you had evidence that Milosevic was a 'genocidal butcher', why on earth didn't you send it to The Hague?

1 comment:

Mick Stone said...

Nuclear deterrence only works for nations fearful of what may happen to their own populations, not for religious fanatics who see the death of their own as martyrdom on the way to ushering a new messianic era.

That said, Iran has many proxies in the terrorist world who can place atomic explosives right here in Australia, without Iran being directly involved. To let Iran and its proxies acquire such weapons is nothing short of self-destructive lunacy.