Washington will not stop Iran pursuing nuclear technology and should not attempt a military “adventure” in the country, an influential cleric said on Friday.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has exhorted Iran to give up what she says is a nuclear weapons program.

U.S. officials have stressed diplomacy but not ruled out an attack against atomic sites, which Iran insists are to meet booming demand for electricity.

“The Persian Gulf is not a region where they can have fireworks and Iran is not a country where they can come for an adventure,” cleric and former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani told worshippers at Friday prayers.

“It is not acceptable that developed countries generate 70 or 80 percent of their electricity from nuclear energy and tell Iran, a great and powerful nation, that it cannot have nuclear electricity. Iran does not accept this,” he added. ~Reuters

Anyone with the slightest acquaintance with modern Iranian history (which would probably exclude most everyone in the present administration) must be aware that Iranian constitutionalist, reformist and nationalist politics have been defined in considerable measure in the past by Iranian resistance to foreign impositions on, or exploitations of, Iranian energy resources. To provoke a confrontation over the Iranian nuclear program, which Tehran publicly claims is an issue primarily of energy policy, is bound to stir up unhappy memories of Mossadeq’s fight with the British over Iranian oil resources (and even unhappier memories of our direct hand in his overthrow–so much for Iranian democracy) and the humiliating conditions of national weakness and practical division between the Great Powers under which the British stake in Iranian oil was first established. In short, such a confrontation is likely to strengthen the current government in Iran, force domestic critics of the regime to rally to the flag in a nationalist response and guarantee that, whatever Iran chooses to do with its nuclear facilities, it will regard America as an even more implacable and unreasonable adversary.

This would be a tragedy, as there is no necessary or real cause for conflict between the two nations. It has been fabricated by men of rather dubious loyalty in this country and has served only to play into the worst stereotypes of America that the Iranian regime can conjure up.