Iran Cannot be Trusted With Any Power

Iran is not by any means an ordinary or peaceful state in the family of nations. Since its 1979 Islamic revolution, Iran is a nation predicated upon a singular premise: the forceful imposition of Islamic law upon the unwilling. To achieve this end, the Iranian regime has brutally subjugated its own people and terrorized its neighbors; without a doubt, the Iranian government ranks as one of the Earth's most savage and threatening regimes. Furthermore, Iranian political leaders and religious clerics have openly and repeatedly declared that they seek the utter destruction of Israel and the "Great Satan" of the United States . It is in this context that we must evaluate Iran 's desire to unleash the power of the atom and we can come to only one proper conclusion: Iran cannot be trusted with atomic power because it cannot be trusted with any power.

After all, men animated by a similar desire to impose the Islamic creed by force were able to murder almost three thousand citizens of the West armed with mere box cutters. As a weapon of mass destruction, religious faith and coercive politics remains unrivaled and it is this weapon that we must check. In Iran , Islam has yet to undergo a philosophic reckoning that compels its adherents to accept to the rule of reason and acknowledge the existence of the individual rights of man. Until such an intellectual revolution, Tehran will always be a threat to the world the same way t he Christian Rome was threat prior to the Renaissance, Enlightenment and the rise of free and secular states. Let us not forget that the Christian church had its Galileo and Iran today has its Salman Rushdie. If Iran cannot tolerate the freedom of expression of even one dissenting voice, how can we possibly tolerate Iran ?

And let us not forget that Iran sits on petroleum reserves so vast that these reserves can power both Iran 's energy needs and the needs of the larger world for more than a century. Yet despite these reserves (and the Iranians own stunning incompetence in properly harvesting them) were are told that Iran still needs the benefits of nuclear power and that Iran can be fully trusted with the peaceful pursuit of this power.

The reality is that Iran can never be trusted as long as it remains governed by mysticism and it is the right of the free people of the West to deny Iran any tool or implement that can be used by its people to threaten our lives. In rational hands, nuclear power is a tool for tremendous good, but in irrational hands, it represents lethality too terrible to contemplate. Thus if Iran seeks nuclear power, it first must learn the power of these words: "We hold these truths to be self-evident . . ."