Iran, Nuclear Weapons, and the Sudetenland: Anybody Remember the Munich Pact?

Iran's only reason for maintaining a secret nuclear program for sixteen years is to generate electricity. That's according to Iran's President Ahmadinejad.

He's the same man who told students at Columbia University that there were no homosexuals in Iran. They didn't buy it, and I'm dubious about his claim that Iran's secret nuclear program is just for power generation.

It's not quite so secret now, of course. The outside world caught wind of what was going on about four years ago. The good news is that Iran is letting International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors take a look at the nuclear energy facilities that Iran officially has. The bad news is that IAEA inspectors aren't allowed to snoop around unless they ask the Iranian government first. Then, if they get permission, they have to wait until Iranian authorities say it's okay.

That situation does not fill me with reassurance.

The new French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, said yesterday that the world had a choice, according to ynetnews.com:

• The world's powers get very busy with diplomacy, putting controls on Iran's nuclear program.
• A messy alternative:
  "an Iranian bomb or the bombing of Iran."

I was somewhat surprised to read that a French president considered an Iran with nuclear weapons as something that could really happen.

That's a mildly hopeful sign.

France has made its willingness to help nations set up non-military nuclear facilities. "France is ready to help any country which wants to possess civilian nuclear energy," French president Sarkozy said, according to "Energy Daily."

The way Iranian munitions show up in Iraq, exported with the intent of killing people who are helping Iraq set up a moderately stable government, I doubt that Iran would be satisfied with letting a nuclear stockpile go unused.

I want very much to believe that the situation with the Iranian ayatollahs and enriched uranium can be resolved peacefully.

Resolved without the sort of accommodation that Neville Chamberlain, Edouard Daladier, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini made in 1938. That 'peaceful resolution' lasted about a year: less, from the point of view of the Sudetenland and Czechoslovakia.