Do Iraqi Documents Give Some Hints About the Iranian Regime's Nuclear Strategy?

By Barry Rubin

Using captured Iraqi documents,  Hal Brands and David Palkki, <a href="http://www.fpri.org/enotes/2011/201108.brands_palkki.iraqnuclear.html%22%3Ehave published </a>an interesting short paper for the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), “Why did Saddam Want the Bomb? The Israel Factor and the Iraqi Nuclear Program.”
They begin:

“On March 27, 1979, Saddam Hussein…laid out his vision for a long, grinding war against Israel in a private meeting of high-level Baathist officials. Iraq, he explained, would seek to obtain a nuclear weapon from ‘our Soviet friends,’  use the resulting deterrent power to counteract Israeli threats of nuclear retaliation, and thereby enable a "patient war”—a war of attrition—that would reclaim Arab lands lost in the Six Day War of 1967. As Saddam put it, nuclear weapons would allow Iraq to “guarantee the long war that is destructive to our enemy, and take at our leisure each meter of land and drown the enemy with rivers of blood.”

While an analogy doesn’t prove the point, I think that contemporary Iranian thinking is equivalent: get nuclear weapons and use them for what I call a defensive umbrella for aggression.

Read it all
http://pajamasmedia.com/barryrubin/2011/08/18/do-iraqi-documents-give-some-hints-about-the-iranian-regimes-nuclear-strategy/