Caroline Glick columns aren’t usually sources of useful commentary, but there was one sentence in her new column that is worth noting:

Israel’s alleged nuclear arsenal, which it has reportedly fielded for four decades, has not led to a regional nuclear arms race.

This is true. It raises the awkward question of why Israel’s nuclear arsenal has never triggered the regional arms race that Glick automatically assumes Iran’s possible future nuclear arsenal would trigger. It is conceivable that all of the states that are considered likely to build their own arsenals in response to an Iranian bomb are U.S. allies and have been dissuaded by Washington from doing so until now. If that’s the case, why then would an Iranian arsenal immediately drive these states to acquire their own? If it is “universally recognized” that an Iranian nuke would trigger a regional arms race, perhaps this is another widely-held, unquestioned assumption that is simply wrong.

Glick adds that “it is clear that Iran’s nuclear project is aggressive rather than defensive,” but this is not clear at all. It isn’t even all that clear that Iran is actually trying that hard to build a nuclear weapon. This is another one of those highly questionable assumptions that almost everyone spouts and for which there is no evidence. After all, which state in the last half century has started and escalated large-scale conflicts with its neighbors, and which one has relied entirely on proxies abroad and otherwise fought only defensive wars? On what basis does anyone assume that Iran’s program is intended for aggressive purposes?

Via Race for Iran, Hooman Majd has a valuable report on his recent visit to Tehran, and he mentions what happened at last month’s Tehran summit on non-proliferation:

Tehran’s nuclear summit in mid-April, dubbed “Nuclear Energy for All; Nuclear Weapons for None” and timed to contrast with Obama’s own summit in Washington (to which Iran was not invited), was, despite a paucity of media coverage in the West, successful in laying out Iran’s stated nuclear agenda — non-proliferation as well as complete disarmament — for a domestic audience and sympathetic listeners in the Middle East, Central Asia, and the developing world. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s opening address to the conference, read by his top foreign-policy advisor Ali Akbar Velayati, in which he emphatically proclaimed weapons of mass destruction haram, strictly forbidden in Islam, went a long way in convincing at least the pious that Iran is not developing nuclear arms [bold mine-DL] (although it begged the question of whether nuclear and Muslim Pakistan, present at the conference, is a sinner state, a question the Japanese representative put to Ali Asghar Soltanieh, Iran’s ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency and a moderator at one panel I observed).

It is always possible that the Iranian government could be engaging in an elaborate diversion for international consumption to satisfy its sympathizers in the developing world and at home while pushing ahead with a nuclear weapons program that directly contradicts all of their public statements on the possession of nuclear weapons. Especially on important security matters, governments lie to their own people and the world often enough. That said, why would Iranian authorities repeatedly insist in public not only that they are not pursuing such weapons, but also state that they are absolutely prohibited from doing so according to the religion on which the regime claims to base so much of its legitimacy? If most Iranians accept these statements, and the government then develops and tests a nuclear weapon, would they not be directly attacking the foundations of the legitimacy and credibility of their entire system? It seems to me that this is rather different from cracking down on protesters or tolerating electoral fraud.

Developing a weapon that their highest authorities have repudiated as immoral in the strongest possible terms might actually result in the mass de-legitimization of the regime that Western pro-Green enthusiasts thought happened over the course of the last year. Would it not make more sense for the Iranian authorities to be going out of their way to lay the groundwork for justifying Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon? Instead of stating that such weapons are prohibited, why not leave the door open to their future development? I don’t propose that other governments accept Iranian government statements at face value, but in the absence of compelling evidence that Iran is actually pursuing nuclear weapons why would we continue to assume that their government is doing something that they claim is forbidden for them to do?

Yes, it’s also possible that the Iranian authorities are using religious language selectively and cynically for domestic and international consumption, but then why is it that hawks regard Shi’te millennarian ideas as critical to understanding the Iranian regime and how it will use a nuclear arsenal in the event that they ever build one? Is it not more likely that the hawks are engaging in half-baked speculation based on a partial and misleading understanding of the thinking of members of Iran’s government? Is it not also more likely that when theocrats declare that something is forbidden they are not making such statements lightly?