Iran wants the bomb...

And, they're crazy enough to use it...a terrific opinion by piece in the Daily Telegraph. The author, Daniel Hannan, argues that there are several steps, short of war, to try and stop Iran...

Nor can there be much doubt that the reason the ayatollahs want the Bomb is so that they can use it. Look, after all, at what they are already doing. They have armed militias as far afield as the Balkans, the Caucasus and the old Silk Road Khanates.

They have supplied their Lebanese proxy, Hizbollah, with rockets. They have been implicated in the bombing of a Jewish community centre in Argentina.

Can we really be certain that, if they had the technology, they wouldn't tip some of these bombs with nuclear warheads?

It's the Buenos Aires bomb that I find most interesting. What possible strategic interest can the mullahs have had in Argentina? The answer, surely, is that the very remoteness of the target made it attractive: Teheran was flaunting its ability to strike wherever it wanted. That is what makes an Iranian bomb so frightening: we are not dealing, as we were in the Cold War, with a regime pursuing rational aims. The ayatollahs play by different rules.

They advertised this with the very first act of their revolution: the seizure of the US embassy. The sanctity of diplomatic personnel is the basis of all international relations. Even during the Second World War, when mutually antagonistic ideologies struggled to obliterate each other, legation staff were peacefully evacuated through neutral states. By violating this principle, the mullahs were sending out a deliberate signal: your notions of territorial jurisdiction mean nothing to us; we recognise a higher authority than yours.

They got away with it, too. Even while the US embassy staff were being held hostage, the Iranian mission in London was seized. We sent in the SAS, recovered the building, and handed it back to Teheran with a cheque to cover the breakages.

The ayatollahs concluded that they could have it both ways, being accorded the privileges of a sovereign state without having to reciprocate.

That set the pattern for what was to follow. Iran has never shown much respect for state sovereignty.

Like all revolutionary regimes, it has spilled out from behind its borders, seeking to replicate itself elsewhere. It has sought, in particular, to radicalise its co-religionists in the Arab world, prompting King Abdullah of Jordan to warn against a "Shia crescent" arcing from the Lebanon through Syria, Turkey and Iran to the Gulf monarchies.

Yet our response – and by "our", I mean the EU's – has been to pursue a policy of "constructive engagement" in the hope of jollying the mullahs out of their nuclear ambitions. To his credit, even Jack Straw, who was the most visible agent of that policy, and who for a while seemed to be in Teheran every other week, now accepts that it has failed.

But, read the whole thing...