Seymour Hersh?s New Yorker article about American forces carrying out reconnaissance missions in Iran to locate hidden Iranian nuclear facilities (presumably in order to destroy them all in a surprise attack) may be ?riddled with errors,? as the White House promptly alleged. Or it may be entirely true. Either way, it may have been deliberately leaked by the Bush administration to frighten Iran. But what was really revealing was the media?s response to it.

There seems to be hardly anyone in the mainstream US media who is willing to question the assumption that Iranian nuclear weapons would be, say, 10 times more dangerous than Chinese nuclear weapons. Yet China is a totalitarian communist dictatorship while Iran is a partially democratic country, struggling to rid itself of the clique of deeply conservative mullahs who have dominated defence and foreign policy (together with much else) since 1979. Why is Iran seen as such a threat?

Iran is not a ?crazy state.? In the 25 years that the mullahs have been in power, they have not attacked any neighbouring state. When Iraq invaded Iran, they fought a bitter eight-year war to repel the Iraqis but accepted a negotiated peace that simply restored the status quo.

Wrong notions

They backed their fellow Shias in southern Lebanon in their resistance to the Israeli occupation and continue to help them today. But if that is support for ?terrorism,? it is only in the specific context of Arab resistance to Israeli military occupation. The only incident of international terrorism in which there was ever any suspicion of Iranian involvement was the bombing of a American airliner over Lockerbie in Scotland in 1988. But the Lockerbie attack was eventually pinned on Libya instead.

As for the Iranian nuclear weapons programme, which almost certainly does exist in some form or the other, its goal is presumably to create a deterrent to Israel?s stock of nuclear weapons. Since Israel has about a 40-year head-start in nuclear weapons production, Iran cannot realistically hope to achieve a first-strike capability against it, but even a few Iranian nuclear weapons that might survive to strike back would effectively remove a nuclear attack on Iran from Israel?s list of options.

Iran?s nuclear programme is not about the US, and the notion that the Iranian government would give terrorists nuclear weapons to attack American targets is just paranoid fantasy. Besides, Iran doesn?t have any nuclear weapons yet, and if it sticks to the agreement it negotiated with the European contact group late last year, it may never have them.

Adrenalin pump

So why this apparent haste to attack Iran now, and why the seeming enthusiasm for such a hare-brained project in wide sections of the US public? After 9/11, there was an enormous need in the US to do something big, to smash stuff up and punish people for the hurt that had been done to Americans. Afghanistan was a logical and legitimate target of that anger, but it fell practically without a fight and left the national need for vengeance unassuaged. The invasion of Iraq was an emotional necessity if the rage was to be discharged, even though it had nothing to do with 9/11 and posed no threat to the US.

All the talk about attacking Iran is the last wave of this emotional binge. The talk is still macho, but the performance is not there to back it up. What the US public gets for all the taxes it pays on defence is armed forces that are barely capable of holding down one middle-sized Arab country.

There simply aren?t enough US troops available to invade Iran, and air strikes will only annoy them. What would really tip the whole area into an acute crisis is a re-radicalized Iran that has concluded that it will never be secure until it has expelled the US from the region.