Preparing for a Nuclear Iran

That’s the message of the US’s forthcoming $60bn arms-deal with Saudi Arabia. Or so says David Rothkopf anyway:

[T]he reason that the U.S. government — that would not have done a deal like this in the years right after 9/11 — is willing and even a little eager to move ahead with the deal now is that the War on Terror is being overtaken among top U.S. concerns by the advent of a nuclear Iran. 

Now, you may quibble by pointing out that Iran does not yet have nuclear weapons. But this is a purely academic argument. This deal is the latest example of behavior suggesting that the nuclearization of Iran is all over but for the bomb building in the eyes of U.S. and regional strategists.

[… The giant arms deal — 84 new F-15s, 70 upgraded planes, 72 Blackhawk helicopters — is part of the remaking of the strategic lay of the land in the Middle East, a plan to enable the Saudis to gain air superiority over their neighbor.