WASHINGTON, Jan. 20 (UPI) -- French President Jacques Chirac's threat to nuke rogue nations that sponsor terrorism appealed to red meat buffs from Paris to Peoria but it does not hold up to elementary analysis. Teams of jihadis most likely to hit the glass Pyramid entrance to the Louvre museum, or the Eiffel Tower, or the Arc of Triumph, dealing a blow to French grandeur and dignity, will come from a Muslim suburb of Paris or Marseille.
Jihadis bent on harming France may also come from Iraq, trained by al-Qaida-in-Mesopotamia. Or from the Northwest Frontier Province and Baluchistan in Pakistan. Or from Afghanistan where the Taliban is resurgent. Where would Chirac drop a nuke or two? Iraq? Highly unlikely. Pakistan and Afghanistan? Even more unlikely. Which leaves Syria or Iran.
France has vested interests in both countries. Syria could conceivably be nuked by order from the Elysee Palace in Paris. But Syria would disappear as a country. The world might live with that again very unlikely scenario. But Iran? Oil would quickly shoot up to $100 or $200 a barrel, Iranian-sponsored terrorists would be unleashed to hit out indiscriminately all over Europe and North America.
Chirac said the new military doctrine was designed to cope with an increasingly dangerous and unpredictable world where the proliferation of CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear) weapons could become the norm rather than the exception. Unmentioned in Chirac's speech was the need to justify before French public opinion the need to go on spending $3.5 billion a year for the upkeep of France's nuclear deterrent, or 10 percent of the defense budget for some 350 nuclear warheads.
This new doctrine, Chirac explained, was aimed to discourage states that sponsor terrorism. But the trend since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, is for the regimes that aided and abetted terrorist groups inside their own borders to sever such links and tell them they were now on their own. This, in turn, led to the convergence of transnational terrorism and transnational crime. The Afghan opium trade - back at an all-time high -- produces enormous cash surpluses that are divvied up between Taliban, al-Qaida, warlords and druglords and the Pakistani Interservices Intelligence agency.
Chirac's bombshell plays right into the hands of the extremists in Iran. It supplies the flat-earth clerics that are now encouraging Iran's new firebrand President Mahmoud Ahmadinejab a perfect rationale for pressing ahead with its secret nuclear weapons program. And it throws sand in the machinery of the International Atomic Energy Agency that was hoping for a less intransigent policy to come out of current deliberations in Tehran.
