Iran's nuclear threat

It seems so incredibly obvious that Iran's current struggles with the IAEA mean that Iran dearly wants to develop nuclear weapons to destroy some of its archenemies like Israel or possibly even the US. What else would you expect from a head of a state that openly airs his desire to attack his neighbor Israel?

For me it seems suicidal to even plan attacks on Israel, one of the nations not caring about the NPT, because they officially not own nuclear weapons, even though they most likely do. Nevertheless, taking a strong stance against Israel is incredibly popular amongst the islamic oriented nations surrounding this country, and thus might be nothing more than a rhetoric figure to get acceptance for the Iranian government, no matter how determined and evil it might sound to foreign ears.

The current media coverage of Irans nuclear facilities, and the correlated spin of the threat imposed to World Peace (as if it ever existed in modern times) reminded me of the situation just before the invasion of Iraq. I got inspired to compare these two events by an essay of Georg Meggle, professor for philosophy at the university of Dresden, Germany.

Furthermore, I read an article about potential economic reasons for the US to start the 'Iran belongs to the axes of evil and needs to be incapacitated' spin, and to coerce international organisations into activity. The article I'm referring to is written by Krassimir Petrov and was published on 18. January 2006 on Energy Bulletin. Krassimir Petrov has received his Ph. D. in economics from the Ohio State University and currently teaches Macroeconomics, International Finance, and Econometrics at the American University in Bulgaria.

To cut a long story short, what we think to 'know' about the 'evil intentions' and the 'belligerence' of Iran is certainly more related to assertive propaganda than to hard facts. Irans society is so unwestern that we cannot easily rely on polls and media reports like we could with for example European countries. So I hesitate to simply assume than Irans plans focus on and intend nothing else than 'having the bomb'.

As yet, there is as much evidence of the development of nuclear weapons in Iran as there was evidence for the development and existance of WMDs in Iraq three years ago. Surely, I would appreciate some facts indicating that I'm (and more important, and Meggle and Petrov are) entirely wrong, and that the most belligerent nation since the 2nd world war, the USA, is right in assuming that the Iran (like the Iraq some short time ago) poses an unacceptable threat to the rest of the world.