How bad would Iran be with the bomb?

By Walter Pincus,
WashPost
Published: March 19

Which would be worse if sanctions and diplomacy fail: the aftermath of an Israeli or U.S. attack on Iran to set back its nuclear program, or the Tehran regime having the bomb?

Of course, one hopes the sanctions/diplomacy route succeeds. But what if it doesn’t?

If you measure the level of public discussion, hands down the worst would be having Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and/or President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad armed with nuclear weapons.

However, within the intelli-gence community and among its retirees there are some ex-perienced analysts who believe that Iran’s leaders with nuclear weapons wouldn’t be much different than they are today, with their first concern being holding on to power, not using a weapon to wipe out Israel and thereby bring about their own destruction.

That approach has been sensibly argued by Paul Pillar, a former senior CIA intelligence analyst and a national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005. He was deeply involved back then when internal doubts about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction programs were low-keyed by CIA leaders and ignored by the George W. Bush White House.

(More here.)