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Tehran Believes the U.S. Has Already Accepted a Nuclear-Armed Iran
[New York Post] Amir Taheri - As Tehran sees it, the U.S. administration has already accepted a nuclear-armed Iran as a fait accompli and is only trying to secure some concessions from the Khomeinist regime. According to an editorial Sunday in the newspaper Kayhan, which reflects the views of the leadership in Tehran, the U.S. is "in a state of strategic desperation" in the Middle East and has no stomach for a serious confrontation with Iran. The editorial claims: "They have no long-term plan for dealing with Iran....Their strategy consists of begging us to talk with them." "America's strategic needs in the region are so intense that the Obama administration is prepared to accept the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran," the editorial said. It claimed that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has already informed allies in the region of that "acceptance." "In her speech last week, Clinton accepted the assumption of a nuclear-armed Iran. She only tried to show that the threat posed by a nuclear-armed Iran has been exaggerated and that the classical doctrine of deterrence through Mutually Assured Destruction could work with Iran as it did with other nuclear powers." In this theory, President Obama is trying to establish a linkage, whereby Israel would accept a nuclear-armed Iran while Iran would withdraw its opposition to a two-state solution for the Palestinian problem. Yet even a tacit acceptance by America and Israel of a nuclear-armed Iran may not be enough to persuade Tehran to accept a two-state solution that would allow Israel to exist as a Jewish state. Abandoning that position wouldn't be easy for Khamenei and Ahmadinejad, who've built their reputations as radical Islamists in part on their insistence that no Jewish state should exist in "the heart of the Muslim world." Of course, the regime might simply opt to use dissimulation, a technique sanctioned under Shiite Islam for deceiving the "infidel." The Islamic Republic could withdraw its opposition to the two-state solution in exchange for America's accepting Iran as a nuclear power; then, after the world has learned to live with a nuclear-armed Iran, Tehran could revive its goal of wiping the Jewish state off the map.