Towards A New Quagmire

Various apparatchiki in the Obama administration have been "expressing fears" about Iran, so Daveybloke's Minister for Wogs, Frogs and Huns has been talking up the advantages of a nice Werritty's War. "If they obtain nuclear weapons capability," Willem den Haag told the Torygraph, "then I think other nations across the Middle East will want to develop nuclear weapons", Iran being the role model the whole Middle East has been looking for thanks to the absence of nuclear weapons in Pakistan, India, France, China, Russia, the United States and somewhere or other else. An Iranian bomb would lead to "the most serious round of nuclear proliferation since nuclear weapons were invented", which would, surprisingly enough, be a Bad Thing, despite several of the weapons of mass destruction listed above having kept the peace in Europe for forty years. The Middle East, you see, has "destabilising effects" which would not be stabilised by the addition of another independent nuclear deterrent, and yet which have not been further destabilised by the likely presence of nuclear weapons in Israel. Allowing Iran to develop its (eminently rational, though quite possibly fictitious) nuclear weapons programme would be, said den Haag, a "disaster in world affairs", as self-evidently our little adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan have not.