Paris, January 24, 2012 – The obsession of the American
foreign policy community, as well as most American (and a good many
international) politicians, with the myth of Iran’s “existential”
threat to Israel, brings the world steadily closer to another war in
the Middle East.

The debate over Iran takes for granted that the country
soon will have nuclear weapons, and would use them. The same debate
back in 2002-‘03 over Saddam Hussein’s alleged possession of WMD's
did the same. After the United States had gone to war against Iraq
no such weapons were found to exist.

The actual winner of the war that followed the American invasion of
Iraq was Israel, which saw Iraq, its principal regional rival,
destroyed at no cost to itself. The military victor of the war, but
politico-strategic loser, was the United States, which destroyed
Iraq, a country in no position to harm the United States, at a
trillion-dollar cost, enormous human suffering and waste, and the
effective transfer of Iraq to Iran’s zone of military and strategic
influence.

The present debate over Iran’s nuclear program, like the pre-2003
debate concerning Iraq’s non-existent WMD program, has never extended
to the most important question in the matter. What difference would
it make if Iran did have nuclear weapons? What could it do with
them, considering the nuclear deterrent force possessed by Israel,
generally thought the fifth or sixth largest and most sophisticated
nuclear power in the world?

Between the start of the nuclear era to the end of the
Cold War, tens if not hundreds of thousands of earnest scholars,
strategists, pacifist activists, journalistic commentators,
politicians, and prospective victims of nuclear war brooded over how
nuclear weapons might be used in war or cold war. So far as I know,
the only conclusive answer we found (I was, on occasion, one of those
people) was that they were only useful as a threat to deter someone
else from aggression. They cannot stop the aggression, but they will
exact a serious penalty for it.