Commenting on UK Foreign Secretary Straw’s statement that the concept of military action against Iran is “nuts”, The Telegraph avers that “it would be even nuttier to allow Teheran to have an atom bomb.” The paper gets no argument from me.

Elsewhere in its article, The Telegraph addresses how long it will take the Iranians to join the nuclear club:

Estimates vary as to how long it will take the Iranians to accomplish such a technically demanding task, and how long it will then take them to make an atom bomb. The hawks argue that Iran could have enough material for a nuclear bomb within three years, while the more sanguine members of the international intelligence community say it could take 10 years.

What is not in doubt is that the work now being undertaken at Natanz, and at the processing plant at Isfahan, means the Iranians will soon be self-sufficient in producing weapons-grade uranium. And once they have passed that important milestone, it is then merely a question of when, not if, they develop a nuclear arsenal.

Fortunately, Bush is sticking to his guns. In a speech at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, he did not deny reports that his administration has studied airstrikes as an option if Iran does not agree to abandon its alleged nuclear-weapon development program. In his address, he said that

We do not want the Iranians to have a nuclear weapon, the capacity to make a nuclear weapon or the knowledge about how to make a nuclear weapon.

The Washington Post noted that many military experts inside and outside the government have warned that attacking Iran would be difficult and might set back its quest for nuclear weapons only by a few years while inflaming international opinion against the U.S., particularly inside Iran and the rest of the Muslim world. Some are particularly alarmed by discussions of using tactical nuclear bunker-buster weapons to penetrate the shielding of nuclear sites.

Michael Rubin, a Clinton-era Pentagon adviser on Iran, sounded a different note by saying that Europe should not doubt the administration’s determination to confront the regime:

Many critics say there wasn’t enough planning [before the war in Iraq]. Well, we are taking into account the critics’ suggestions. The lesson of Iraq is that you pursue diplomacy while you plan for war and hopefully you won’t need to do the latter. Europe may wish that the US’s concerns just evaporate. That wish is the quickest path to military action because ultimately the US is not going to sacrifice what it seriously believes is a threat to its national security on the whims of ‘old Europe’.

Meanwhile, David Aaronovitch, in his op-ed in The Times, takes on Seymour Hersh. Referencing an BBC website article in which Hersh tells his interviewer re Bush and Iran: “It’s messianic, I quote somebody as saying,” the columnist says that

Actually that somebody . . . turns out to be a senior member of the House Appropriations Committee (his party is not disclosed), a man who has not attended briefings on the Iran topic in the White House, but who has spoken to others who have, and who told Hersh: “The most worrisome thing is that this guy has a messianic vision.” So the word “messianic”, so widely used yesterday morning, may well come from an anonymous political opponent of Mr Bush. [emphasis added]

Aaronovitch then points out the anonymity of Hersh’s sources:

As well as the unnecessarily reticent House member, there are in the article . . . the following: a former senior intelligence official, a government consultant with close ties to the civilian leadership in the Pentagon, one former defence official, one military planner, one high-ranking diplomat, a senior Pentagon adviser on the war on terror, a discouraged former International Atomic Energy Agency official, a former high-level Defence Department official, one recently retired high-level Bush Administration official, one former senior UN official, a senior Israeli intelligence official, a European intelligence official, another diplomat in Vienna and a Western ambassador there.

So, what’s to make of Hersh’s bombshell?

The problem here is that we simply have to take Hersh and his judgment on trust. This is awkward, because he’s done a lot of good stuff in his career, and some pretty bad stuff. And there’s no way at all of knowing which this is. It just seems a pity that with so much at stake, not even his “formers” are prepared to speak on the record. [emphasis added]

As usual, The Guardian gets it wrong. In addition to its defeatism (“It is time to start planning for a world in which Iran does eventually get the bomb.”), the paper says that “Despite the malevolent rhetoric, Iran’s foreign policy is more pragmatic than revolutionary” and “To say that Israelis can be trusted with nuclear weapons but Arabs or Iranians cannot may sound plausible to Americans but in the Middle East it rings hollow. In the longer term, the only equitable solution is to make the whole region nuclear-free, with no exceptions.”

Is calling for the eradication of Israel pragmatic? Are the concerns of other Middle East countries that Iran’s intention is to become a regionally-dominant power to be dismissed as paranoid fantasies? Is an “equitable solution” one that pits a tiny, nuclear-disarmed Israel of a few million people against much larger and more numerously-populated Arab countries that have wanted to destroy Israel for decades? If Israel were to become nuclear-free, the likelihood of violent conflicts would rise, further increasing the Middle East’s instability. Sure, it’s “unfair” to apply one policy to Israel and another to the Arab (and Persian) countries. But the heightened risk of war is too high a price to pay for an “equitable” solution. Not to mention the almost certain outcome.