Why the West will attack Iran

Why did French President Jacques Chirac last week threaten to use non-conventional – that is, nuclear – weapons against terrorist states? And why did Iran announce that it would shift foreign-exchange reserves out of European banks (although it has since retracted this warning)? The answer lies in the nature of Tehran’s nuclear ambitions. Iran needs nuclear weapons, I believe, not to attack Israel, but to support imperial expansion by conventional military means.

Iran’s oil exports will shrink to zero in 20 years, just at the demographic inflection point when the costs of maintaining an aged population will crush its state finances. Just outside Iran’s present frontiers lie the oil resources of Iraq, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan, and not far away are the oil
concentrations of eastern Saudi Arabia. Its neighbors are quite as alarmed as Washington about the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran, and privately quite happy for Washington to wipe out this capability.

..The same Europeans who excoriated the United States for invading Iraq with insufficient proof of the presence of weapons of mass destruction already have signed on to a military campaign against Iran, in advance of Iran’s gaining WMD. There are a number of reasons for this sudden lack of squeamishness, and all of them lead back to oil.

Asia Times