Middle East: Lessons Israel and Iran could use - by Imran Khan

"The Cold War." "Freezing tensions." Terms that are familiar to us. The thinking is simple; nuclear armed states do not fight wars with each other.

In many foreign policy circles it is that concept some are turning to and beginning to wonder out loud whether containing a potentially nuclear armed Iran maybe better than an attack on its facilities. An Op-ed in the New York Times explores that theory.

Experts say that an attack, Israeli or otherwise, will only delay Iran and give them ample reason to develop nuclear weapons. All the publicly available evidence suggests that Iran so far has not made the decision to militarise its nuclear program.

An attack would make that decision simple. The only real way to guarantee a nuclear weapons free Iran is to invade and occupy. There are very few that have the appetite for another US led war in the Middle East.

The thinking then is keep up the pressure on Iran and if it makes the decision to go nuclear then let containment be the predominant policy and hope that cooler heads prevail. There is a precedent for this theory, a precedent that is mentioned in the New York Times article

Note EU-Digest: or make the Middle East ( including Israel) a nuclear free zone which more than 60% of the people who responded to an EU-Digest voted for. Disarming certainly is far safer than having everyone have Nuclear Weapons and 'itchy fingers"  ?

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