Iraq and Nuclear Iran

• Iran has immediate influence in Iraqi politics because of history and geography, as well as economic, ethnic, religious, and paramilitary ties.

• Primary responsibility for the eight long years of bloodletting must rest with the governments of the Iraq

• France became the major source of Iraq's high-tech weaponry, in no small part to protect its financial stake in that country

• of financial backing came from other Arab states oil-rich Kuwait and Saudi Arabia

• The U.S. objective was not profits from the arms trade, but the much more significant aim of controlling to the greatest extent possible the region's oil resources.

IRAQ and Nuclear IRAN

IRAQ and Nuclear IRAN• In particular the

United States along its allies (among them Britain France and Italy ) provided Iraq with biological and chemical and the precursors to nuclear capabilities.

The Leaders of Islamic Republic Learned two important lessons from their experience:

1. Never again allow yourself to be in a position of such strategic vulnerability

and 2. When you are facing the world’s

superpower, multilateral treaties and conventions are worthless.

“Chemical bombs and biological weapons are poor man’s atomic bombs and can easily produced. We should at least consider them for our defense…Although the use of such weapons is inhuman; the war taught us that international laws are only drops of ink on paper.”

Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani

Parliamentary speaker (and future president)

IRAQ and Nuclear IRAN

• The world would be a more dangerous place with nuclear weapons in Iran. A Persian power with a keen sense of its 2,500-year history, Iran occupies a pivotal position straddling the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf. The country has the largest population in the Middle East, the world’s third largest oil reserves, the second largest natural gas reserves, and aspirations to again become the region’s major power. Add nuclear weapons, and this mixture become highly combustible

• Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad has made a speech to the UN stating his country's "inalienable right" to produce nuclear energy. He attacked Western governments for trying to create an "apartheid" system in peaceful nuclear technology

• The world would be a more dangerous place with nuclear weapons in Iran. A Persian power with a keen sense of its 2,500-year history, Iran occupies a pivotal position straddling the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf. The country has the largest population in the Middle East, the world’s third largest oil reserves, the second largest natural gas reserves, and aspirations to again become the region’s major power. Add nuclear weapons, and this mixture become highly combustible.(The Continuing Problem of Nuclear Weapons.