No matter who the current leader may be, Iran is still a sovereign nation. But sovereignty is a concept that is mostly ignored by the Bush Administration whenever the nation in question is not the United States of America. Canada got a taste of this first-hand with the softwood lumber fiasco in the world court, but the most visible example of this blatant disrespect for another country is clearly manifested in their manipulations in the nuclear arena, as they try to dictate which nation is "allowed" to have nuclear energy and weapons, and which are not. How the Bush administration assumes or justifies this authority to decide is not found in any treaty, U.N. resolution, or other written agreement. Instead it is self-claimed, arbitrary, and bestowed upon themselves as the current bully on the world's block.
Without question, there is no greater nor effective way to deter military aggression in the world than the threat of nuclear retaliation. For those of us baby-boomers growing up through the cold war with the Soviet Union, we learned this lesson well as we witnessed the biggest and most dangerous arms race in history, and added a new phrase to our universal vocabulary "mutual assured destruction". For almost five decades, we justified our own huge nuclear arsenal with the "deterrence" argument as we boasted of the clean and reliable nuclear energy source born from related military research.
But now that we ourselves have become the most feared military aggressor in the world with more foreign invasions in the last century than even Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, our leaders simply and conveniently, cannot seem to understand how and why another country would like to have the same "deterrence" we enjoyed all along for half a century. The self-righteous Bush administration would prefer to keep their iron grip on the nuclear monopoly and risk yet even another war over the matter. A war that children, other than their own would again, have to fight and expend their lives.
Enough is enough. Each and every sovereign nation on Earth has the right to develop nuclear energy and weapons, provided they do not use them for any offensive purpose. Further, nobody in Washington is so clairvoyant or psychic that they can solely decide in advance what nation will abuse nuclear technology, especially since we ourselves are the only country to every use nuclear energy against another as a weapon. This "minority report" attitude is shameful and borders on paranoia. Nuclear energy is clean energy and now that global warming is finally recognized as more probable than a nuclear attack, we should be encouraging every country to pursue green energy alternatives and should be more concerned about accidental nuclear radiation leakage than whether a nation will make an atomic bomb, and here's why.
We in the U.S. have almost 10,000 nuclear warheads in our current inventory; enough to destroy every land mass on Earth twenty times over. So if any new nuclear neighbors in the world are dumb or bold enough to actually use a nuclear weapon against anyone, we can quickly and assuredly obliterate them from the map. That confidence alone should be enough insurance for us not to hinder the progress of some twenty emerging nations that want and need to join the nuclear age. And for those with short memories, Mr. Bush used over $30 billion of our tax money to implement the famous "Star Wars" missile defense network. So if India, Pakistan and Israel can be trusted to self-impose some discipline with their nuclear programs, then by what authority can we deny the same nuclear rights to Iran, North Korea or Madagascar for that matter?
Ideally, nuclear weapons should be outright outlawed around the globe, but since neither the U.S. nor Russia would ever honor such equal and universal disarmament, the next best solution is nuclear equality. Neither we nor any other third party should deny millions of people in the world the many benefits of nuclear energy simply because their leader is not a friend of Washington. Leaders come and go, and as we have seen with Bin Laden, Gen. Noriega, Marcos, Pinochet, Stalin, Somoza, and the former Shah of Iran, our friends often become our enemies and vice-versa as world dynamics change constantly. Thus, nuclear energy cannot be withheld for the political convenience of a second party much less a third. We have never been appointed as the world's policeman nor asked to be it's babysitter and for us to assume this role is not just wrong, but unethical, immoral, shameful, and even dangerous in that our overt and covert orchestration have historical always come back to hurt us in the long run. For just once, America needs to be less selfish and do what is right for the world.
In the case of nuclear energy, the right thing to do is to support the international bodies that regulate it and stop trying to control and micro manage its application under threat of military force or economic extortion (a.k.a. "trade sanctions"). The deceptions used to promote and implement the Iraq invasion and occupation have already generated more mistrust, contempt, hatred, and enemies for U.S. and we do not need even more that is surely being created by our nuclear monopoly. The UN needs to pass a resolution guaranteeing nuclear rights on an equal basis for all under the umbrella of both a routine and surprise inspection basis.