La Bombe Atomique

Oh shit, world war three is coming. Well, maybe. News today that France is posturing for conflict with Iran.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/france/story/0,,2170890,00.html

While I really don’t think that Iran having nuclear weapons is going to be a good thing for the international community, looking at the situation I really can’t blame Iran for trying to get the bomb.

It’s no secret that the US and Iran fucking hate each other. The yanks have somewhat toned down their threats of late, but there is a large subset of the US administration that has openly spoken of attacking the country. Now France is threatening action. At least it’s multilateral warmongering I guess.

Without diverging too much into the mistakes of the Iraq invasion, I believe it’s exactly situations like this where the repercussions of that event can be most felt.

While France has deliberately mentioned war in order to highlight the issue, I don’t really think they are pushing for conflict. What they really want is for the situation to be resolved through diplomacy, and through the UN. Herein lies the problem. The US invaded Iraq without the approval of the UN Security Council. So why should Iran believe that complying with any UN directives will save their country from attack or invasion? Hell, Iraq wasn't even actually making WMDs and they still got destroyed. So even being innocent is still no guarantee of safety.

Without trust in the UN’s power to resolve issues like this, the only insurance against attack is to become a nuclear power. So I reckon they’ll keep trying it until we get, as Sarkozy says, “an Iranian bomb or the bombing of Iran”. Not really hoping for either option personally.