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Iran: Chose your unhappy ending!

Iran, the country, its President and its nuclear ambitions, float in and out of the news. It is hard to determine to what extent that is the fault of the media. Whatever the reason, it would seem it Iran, and all that goes with the country, is certainly at the moment a potential boiling cauldron.

The Economist reflects on and considers where things are at in its cover story this week "The Riddle of Iran". The 3 options it suggests as possibilities on where things are headed aren't particularly "happy" ones either for the region or the world as a whole.

"What Iran is doing at Natanz is entirely illegal. It has signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and says its nuclear aims are peaceful. But having spent decades deceiving nuclear inspectors, it is disbelieved even by its friends. A year ago this month Russia and China therefore joined the rest of the UN Security Council in ordering Iran to stop. It carried on regardless. The Security Council followed up with two resolutions, in December 2006 and March this year, repeating its demands and applying sanctions. The centrifuges spin defiantly on.

So what next? This story could have at least three unhappy endings. In one, Iran ends up with nuclear weapons, bringing new instability and a hair-trigger face-off with nuclear Israel into one of the world's least-safe neighbourhoods. In another, America or Israel take pre-emptive military action and manage to stop it, even though such an attack would almost certainly have very dangerous consequences of its own. In the third ending, Iran is attacked, and enraged, and retaliates—and still ends up with a bomb anyway."

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