Iran's Challenge to the Bush Doctrine

[mom cat]

Iran's Challenge to the Bush Doctrine

by Roger Howard
Recent press reports have left little doubt where George W. Bush, if reelected in November, will be tempted to train his sights. A senior White House aide said last week that the U.S. president, fresh from toppling the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, may well decide to orchestrate regime change inside Iran.

Although such a policy purports to bring democracy to Iran and end its alleged links to al-Qaeda, there can be no doubt that it would primarily be a response to Iran's nuclear challenge. Topple the mullahs' regime, neoconservatives have long argued, and we can replace it with a new order that, being sensitive to Western security concerns, would renounce any ambition to develop a warhead.

Unfortunately, such an argument is based on very questionable logic. Iran's nuclear aspirations long predate the advent of Islamic revolution in 1979, and any new government replacing the current order would doubtless pursue a warhead just as energetically as the mullahs. The vast majority of ordinary Iranians would also continue to strongly support such a program, seeing the bomb as both a matter of national prestige and self-defense.

But besides being unconvincing, the argument that regime change is a fitting response to the threat of nuclear proliferation is also blatantly self-contradictory.


http://www.antiwar.com/orig/howard.php?articleid=3152