On Wed, 15 Oct 2003 01:37:37 +0200, Emmanuel Gustin wrote:

The problem with a 'retaliatory' strike is that, even if you
could bring on incriminating documents by trainloads,
the credibility of the USA has now sunk so low that nobody
is even going to bother to read them,

I think there's some trith in this. Last year, I was certain that
Iraq had WMD. It turned out they didn't, and the British and
American dossiers were seriously at odds with the truth.

Now the USA says Iran is building nuclear weapons. Last year, I
would have beleived them. Now I place no trust in their words.

I personally think Iran is the worst of the two and should be bombed
if Tehran does not cooperate with the nuclear inspectors on its covert
nuclear weapons program.

You can't rationally threaten people with bombs and expect
them to disarm... Non-Americans have pride too. The Iranians
are least likely of all to cave in to that sort of pressure; and it
gives them the best motive they could ever have to develop
a WMD capability ASAP.

Indeed. Gaining nuclear weapons would be a rational thing for Iran
to do now, for the same reason that Britain and France had them
during the cold war.

The US can't afford to have a nuclear-armed Iran sitting right next
door when the US is trying to rebuild Iraq and allowing democracy
in that region.

Why not? During the Cold War many successful democratic
nations had the enemy on their doorstep. Of all problems the
problems facing the American efforts Iraq right now, Iran
seems very low down on the list. The real danger is that Iraq
will follow the road of Iran -- that an American-imposed
'friendly' regime will ultimately be rejected by the people and
replaced by a hostile fundamentalist regime.

Yep.

An Iraq governed
by an ayatollah would be an ironic outcome of this war, but
at the moment it looks like the most likely one to me.

I don't know about "most likely", but it's certainly a possibility,
and the US govmt seems by their behaviour to be almost blind to that
possibility.

--
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to it and reversed the last two letters).