LONDON: The neo-con regimes in Washington and Tehran are on collision course after last week’s announcement by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that his country has ‘joined the nuclear club’.

Being able to enrich uranium to a low level of 3.5 per cent is a significant breakthrough for the Islamic Republic, but it still leaves it a long way from the 93 per cent-plus needed to make a bomb. In the United States, however, the doom-sayers and war-mongers — who often overlap — reacted with a hardening of rhetoric. The fundamentalists on both sides are in danger of talking themselves into a war.

The rising drumbeat of warrior journalism has almost created the illusion that a US military attack on Iran is inevitable. Writing in the New Yorker last week, Seymour Hersh even quoted a former Pentagon official as saying that defence chiefs have considered targeting Iran with nuclear weapons to destroy underground research sites. Few believe the US would be reckless enough to use such weapons.

Some kind of attack is possible, but it is neither imminent nor inevitable. In the meantime, the US administration should reflect on the words of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who warned that any military strike on Iran would spark a ‘dangerous explosive blaze’ in the Middle East.

Some neo-cons in the US believe that a military air assault would cause the people of Iran to rise up against their leaders. In fact, every analysis suggests that a threat of military action would only rally Iranians behind their undemocratic government.—Dawn/The Observer News Service