Why Iran Wants the Bomb

Alastair Crooke on Iran's regional intentions:

The significance of this for Obama is that he is not facing just the issue of Iran's nuclear program. This program is rolled into a more substantive and sensitive issue, one at the heart of the Iranian approach to negotiations: whether Israel and the U.S. -- nuclear weapons issue apart -- are able to come to terms with an Iran that is, and will be, a preeminent power in the region.

At present, these two issues have been conflated. Iran has signaled on various occasions that the nuclear issue could be resolved, but first it wants to know the answer to the wider issue: Can the U.S. bring Israel to accept Iran as a principal regional power? Can the U.S. accept such an outcome?

All here in the region understand the significance of this question: It is not just the nuclear weapon possibility that concerns Israel; it is the fact of Iranian conventional military power too. Already it is the conventional military power of Iran and its allies that is circumscribing Israeli conventional military freedom of action in the region. What we are dealing with is whether Israel and, by extension, the U.S., can accept that Israel will no longer enjoy its hitherto absolute conventional military dominance in the region.

I've never been a big proponent of focusing Iranian engagement and/or isolation on the nuclear question. I understand why this is the case, as a nuclear weapon obviously presents the most existential threat to the Western world, and the most accessible and digestible argument for democratic leaders to take back to their citizenry.

But it should be remembered, despite the revisionist theories of a few, that Iran's revolutionary regime has a bloody and brutal record of expansionism in the Middle East. It turned a two year border war with Iraq into an eight year total war of attrition to overthrow the secular dictatorship in Baghdad. They plotted and supported coups, assassination attempts and upheaval throughout the Arab sheikdoms, and of course, helped build the most tactically proficient terrorist organization in the Mideast—Hezbollah.

This policy has of course softened and curtailed with time, change and maturity, but the desire to be a hegemonic player has never fully waned. A nuclear armed Iran is not simply a threat to American allies, but a geopolitical game changer in the region.

UPDATE: Or, what Andrew Sullivan's reader said.