Tonight’s London ‘Evening Standard’ works itself up into a lather over a statement by Brian Eno — Nick Clegg’s new Youth Guru — that Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons is partly the West’s fault; in his words, ‘we have left Iran really with only one rational option’. Typically, Labour’s John Spellar has tried to make political capital out of this, by calling on Nick to disown Brian Eno, who also reportedly called for Britain to dismantle Trident. I trust Nick will give Spellar the raspberry he deserves.
Quite apart from the fact that much of what Eno says about nuclear weapons would chime in with what many young people in this country think, it is worth examining his comment about Iran seriously. I am in no way a supporter of Iran’s becoming a nuclear weapons power, but I can quite see why Tehran feels it is surrounded by hostile states, including a nuclear-armed Russia (currently cooperating with Iran on nuclear energy, but deeply antagonistic to militant Islam), an ever more unstable nuclear-armed Pakistan, a US-occupied Iraq and a Saudi Arabia that is armed to the hilt with so-called conventional weapons. Moreover, while the Western world’s concern about the posibility of Iran going nuclear is legitimate, when is it going to do something about the one Middle Eastern power that already has a nuclear capability: Israel?
