If Iran’s current efforts to enrich uranium are indeed in pursuit of manufacturing nuclear weapons, as the U.S. government fears, then such a pursuit may be an entirely rational decision on their part.
If they are able to do so without brutal sanctions being levied against their civilian population?
All the better, from their perspective.
First, Iran has dealt with the U.S. violating their sovereignty before.
A democratically-elected, nationalist government was overthrown by CIA-led operatives in reaction to then-Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh’s nationalization of the nation’s formerly British-dominated petroleum company.
The U.S. propped up a brutal dictatorship for 26 years until it was overthrown in 1979. The succeeding governments have been sanctioned and undermined in the global economy by the U.S. and its partners ever since.
Oh, and the U.S. armed Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist military in their war of aggression against Iran in the 1980s — a continuing point of mistrust, understandably.
A little more than two decades after the Iranian Revolution, to their eastern border, they saw the U.S. invade a sovereign nation under conditions that now appear to have been a fabrication of the second Bush administration.
The U.S. acted almost unilaterally to conduct the invasion, given that the U.N. Security Council didn’t come close to buying Bush’s then-Secretary of State Colin Powell’s presentation of the administration’s reasoning for needing military action.
To recall the final weeks before the invasion of Iraq, the Hussein regime was basically doing cartwheels to get the attention of the international community once they realized that an invasion was being planned based on the accusation of their having weapons of mass destruction.
Of course, the regime knew all too well that they did not. And almost certainly, so did the top-level officials in the Bush administration, given how poor their case turned out to be.
The lesson Iran may be taking from the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003?
You’d better actually have the nukes, or else you will certainly be invaded if the wrong person is president of the U.S. and there is enough political will to do so.
Politicians in both the U.S. and Israel have suggested bombing Iran, which they have the capability to do hundreds of times over.
What’s to stop Iran from becoming another Iraq?
The Iranians understand perfectly well that the solution on their end just may be nuclear weapons if they don’t want to radically change their political institutions to better accommodate U.S. interests in the region.
Iran is not allowed, legally, to obtain a nuclear weapon as a signee to the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
However, this is not that big of a hurdle; Israel has nuclear weapons, along with India and Pakistan, both of whom claim to have no obligation to adhere to the treaty because they never signed it.
Israel is purposefully ambiguous about their nuclear arsenal, but everyone knows they have weapons of mass destruction.
Iran is virtually surrounded by U.S. military bases in Turkey, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E., Oman, Pakistan and Afghanistan, has been threatened by other nations and has been meddled with from the outside non-stop for over a century.
While the world is possibly a safer place without an Iranian nuke (debatable, but no time to go over the competing theories of nuclear deterrence here), it’s of vital importance that we understand why they may want one, even if they say publicly they don’t, given that we get to decide if the latest Iranian nuclear deal is maintained by who we send to the White House next.
Scott Schroder is a Senior political science major from Houston, Texas.
