UK: Attack on Iran, big mistake

British lawmakers say ‘Washington and allies’ should not use force on Iran cautioning it could ‘provoke an extremely violent backlash’.

“Any military strike against Iran would have ‘grave repercussions’ for the Middle East,” The House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee said in a Sunday report.

In its ‘Global Security: Iran’ report, the select committee also warned that the use of force on Iran’s nuclear facilities would be “unlikely to succeed”.

The report added that ‘given Iran’s ‘lynchpin’ role in energy security’, launching military strikes against the country ‘would also have a highly detrimental economic impact across the globe’.

Washington and allies accuse Iran of conducting a covert weapons program and have done everything in their power to pressure Tehran into halting its nuclear program.

US President George W. Bush has kept the military option on the table, advocating that the ‘consequences of a nuclear-armed Iran are such that military strikes are justified, whether a smoking gun is found or not’.

The committee, however, urged British echelons to persuade the White House into ‘directly engaging’ with Iran on the nuclear issue, ‘as the absence of such engagement has deprived the international community of a significant diplomatic tool’.

“We recommend that the government urges Washington to consider offering a credible security guarantee to Iran if the Iranian government, in turn, will offer an equally credible and verifiable guarantee that it will not enter into a nuclear weapons program,” the committee concluded.

Iran maintains that as a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty it is entitled to a uranium enrichment program in order to produce fuel for the country’s under-construction nuclear power plants.

MD/HGH

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