Hot Air adds this:
In this case, it would be difficult to blame the rest of the nations in the region. Americans tend to think of the "Muslim world" as a monolithic entity, but in practice, the various Islamic nations are anything but united. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan can abide a nuclear Iran only slightly more than Israel. A nuclear Iran would immediately pursue regional hegemony over the Arab world, a millenia-old dream of the Persians and an equally long nightmare of the Arabs. A lack of enforcement now would touch off an arms race, with weapons not being held by ideological but rational actors like the US and Soviet Union but the messianic mullahs of Iran. The problem would quickly overwhelm the West, and a nuclear war would almost be a certainty.
The most frequent whine I hear about the nuclear club is something along the lines of, 'why does America get to decide who goes nuclear'? The reason is that we have rational leaders and legitimate checks on government power (at least until Obama, that is). Western nations with distributed power are far, far less likely to abuse and misuse nuclear weapons, and we have a vested interest in avoiding a global meltdown because we have the most to lose. Nations with a single, crazy dictator are hideously unstable and simply cannot be trusted with weapons this powerful. Case in point:
North Korea today said it would use nuclear weapons in a "merciless offensive" if provoked — its latest bellicose rhetoric apparently aimed at deterring any international punishment for its recent atomic test blast.
The only thing worse than a nuclear-armed nation with a crazy dictator as its leader is a nuclear-armed nation with an ideologically-driven armageddon-seeking religious zealot as its leader. Unfortunately, that's exactly what Iran is. There's my two cents.
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