Essential Reading to Understand The Headlines

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Monday, February 7, 2011

The Dangers of the Iranian Nuclear Program In Light of the Arab Uprisings

Those in the Intelligence community has known for a long time what other countries in the Middle East like Saudi Arabia feels about a nuclear Iranian regime. Now every person in the world who cared to read newspaper reports about the leaked US diplomatic cables knows as well that the region's leaders not cooperating with Iran are on edge. They ask the US to do something about it and they would even turn a blind eye if Israel (a country they don't like as well but would rather live with) decides to take matters into its own hands.

In reality any sort of military option is dwindling as days go by since there is no conclusive intelligence now what kind of capability Iran has and if such a military strike will have high degree of success. Now let's say that the US and Israel decides to keep the status quo as regards the Iranian nuclear program. What will nervous countries in the Middle East do? One option will be to arm themselves with nuclear weapons as well to protect their people and serve as a deterrent to an Iranian attack. The US may even be tempted to sell such weapons since it could get more revenues to aid its ailing economy. We will now be in a dangerous scenario of a Middle East nuclear arms race.

Now in light of the recent uprisings in the Middle East as what is happening to Egypt, this is going to be particularly troubling. We have seen how volatile a region this could be as regimes can be suddenly toppled like in Tunisia. What if this happend to an Arab country which has a nuclear weapons program? A radical Islamic movement like the Muslim Brotherhood replaces that power vacuum and finds a gold mine of weapons of mass destruction automatically in its hands! Then the danger meter really goes on high alert for the Western world and in Israel.

The Egyptian protests is a dangerous lesson which the US must fully study in light of the Iranian nuclear weapons capability. It must be able to imagine such possibilities because their Iranian adversaries are probably dreaming of it as we speak since it is just another road to chaos which would bring about their prophetic theology.