http://www.melaniephillips.com/iran-and-britains-dislocation-from-reality
Anyone who remains blissfully unaware of what passes in Britain for debate about Iran might like to listen here to Wednesday evening’s edition of BBC Radio Four’s The Moral Maze, on which I am a regular panellist.
The show – whose somewhat misunderstood purpose is not so much to discuss an issue in the round as test individual arguments to destruction – featured two particularly illuminating contributions by Professor Michael Clarke, Director-General of the prestigious Royal United Services Institute, and Dr David Rodin, Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict, University of Oxford.
Prof Clarke, who by virtue of his position is one of Britain’s top military analysts, blithely asserted that Iran would not pass the nuclear threshold for another three to four years. On what evidential basis does he put this point so much further down the line than US or Israeli estimates? And anyway, the real point about the dilemma of whether or when to attack Iran is surely not when it might go nuclear, but at what point it becomes impossible to stop it from going nuclear.