Our own Cuban missile crisis

Iran’s leaders may be crazed and dangerous fanatics, but they are not stupid. That is why President Bush is right to show the Iranian regime that he is serious about containing its undisputed ambition to go nuclear in flagrant defiance of the international community. Nobody in their right mind — including President Bush — wants to go to war, let alone launch nuclear missile strikes, as some overexcited headlines in the American and British media have suggested over the past few days. But the White House, as well as Downing Street, would be delinquent if they were not busily reviewing all possible contingencies to deal with Iran.

That senior generals and officials are studying in detail different scenarios to deal with a hostile Iran is not the proof of some secretive neoconservative plot to control the world; it is merely responsible military planning. In its increasingly irrational hatred of US foreign policy and the Bush White House, it is the liberal-Left commentariat in the West that is guilty of evading the principal problem: that the world faces an immense threat from a militant and increasingly emboldened Iran, and one which must be dealt with as a matter of the greatest urgency.