Fareed Zakaria, speaking on CNN, spoke against the idea of a strike against Iran to prevent it from becoming a nuclear power. He made a comparison of Iran in 2012 to the Soviet Union of 1952. The United States was anxious to prevent the USSR from becoming a nuclear power, lest it be emboldened in its drive to expand its sphere of influence. Zakaria equated Iran’s desire to get the bomb today with that of the USSR’s nuclear ambitions in the 1950′s.
There is a major difference between the USSR then and Iran today. The USSR and the USA were “opposite numbers”, two huge superpowers with opposing aims that were locked into an uneasy truce. The USSR, beyond its own borders and thoise of Eastern Europe fomented revolution, supplied local insurgencies but did not directly take over areas outside its sphere of influence. It adhered to a set of rules that did not diminish it as a threat, but still made it somewhat predictable.
The difference between the USSR of 1952 and Iran of 2012 is the difference between an ice cold gangster and a deranged psychopath. Iran has openly stated its desire to wipe Israel off the map, and through a proxy army in Lebanon has become a major threat. Iran will not just subsidise dissidents in Israel or even terrorist groups. It works through groups within and around Israel that constitute a physical threat to Israel’s existence. Although it may well be true that Iran would not itself nuke Israel, it is well within the realm of possibility that it could supply nukes to terrorist groups, as could North Korea, another state considered unfit to own nukes.
In the “good old days”, nukes were a “big boy toy”, that didn’t really concern guerilla groups. Now, with “dirty bombs” and mini nukes, the possibilities of nuclear mayhem are far more wide ranging than they ever were in the days when “Mutually Assured Death and Destruction (MADD) formed the perverse cornerstone of a tense peace.
There is no comparison between the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the Islamic Republic of Iran. The attitude of the west should be adjusted accordingly.
