Axis of Evil
- "States like these, and their terrorist
allies, constitute an axis of evil,
arming to threaten the peace of the world. By
seeking weapons of
mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and
growing danger."
— President Bush, State of the Union
Address, January 29, 2002
So far this year, our attention has been focused
on only two of the three countries President Bush
named in his "axis of evil" speech. War against
Iraq seems imminent, and a diplomatic crisis
emerges on the Korean peninsula. While antiwar
protests, weapons inspections and nuclear
saber-rattling have distracted the world, Iran has
kept to itself, quietly going about its business.
Now, thanks to U.N. inspectors, it has become
apparent just what that business is.
Mohamed ElBaradei, director of the International
Atomic Energy Agency, recently concluded his
inspections in Iraq and moved on to Iran. There, he
and his team of inspectors discovered
that Iran was building a facility to enrich
uranium—and they found that work on the
facility had progressed much further than
suspected. Moreover, sources inside the IAEA
disclosed that Iran had already operated some
prohibited centrifuges in an effort to test their
uranium-enrichment processes. An expert from the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said
that such an act would constitute a violation of
the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and would be
cause for immediate referral to the U.N. Security
Council.
Iran, of course, claims that its nuclear program
is for strictly peaceful purposes, but one can't
help wondering why a country so rich in gas and oil
resources needs nuclear energy. The answer may lie
in the fact that uranium is an integral element in
advanced nuclear weapons. Whatever the case may be,
this news makes the already-edgy situation in the
Middle East all the more delicate.
A U.S. invasion of Iraq will likely make Iran
even more nervous than President Bush's "axis of
evil" comment. Such military action might spur Iran
to accelerate their nuclear program even further.
On the other hand, if Iraq remains unchallenged,
increasing tensions between Iran and Iraq could
explode like they did in the 1980s—only this
time, nuclear, chemical and biological weapons
could bring Armageddon down on the Middle East.
Regardless of what happens in Iraq, the
U.S./U.N. must handle Iran very delicately. An
undercurrent of progressiveness amongst young
Iranians has grown stronger in recent years.
Handled deftly, this political tension could bring
about a bloodless, democratic revolution in the
Islamic country. But if the brinksmanship being
used on Iraq is applied to Iran, it could unite
young progressives with the autocratic Muslim
clerics who run the country, making a bad situation
much worse.
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noticed that this site doesn't look like it should
in Netscape Navigator. Rather than waste time
jury-rigging it to look right in a
soon-to-be-obsolete browser, I'll just add the
cliché "This site best viewed with Internet
Explorer."
©2003 Michael
Strickland ALL RIGHTS
RESERVED
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