Pace Marx and Engels, a spectre is haunting the next President of the United States. The spectre is shaped like a missile, tipped with a nuclear warhead and is Iranian in origin. More than that, if the former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer is correct, the next President will be dealing with the fallout of the military action against Iran which the current one is about to assent to.

Writing in the Beirut Daily Star, Fischer argues that the US’s “misguided” policies in the Middle East have strengthened Iran, resulting in some “surprising, if not bizarre, alliances: Iran, Syria, Hizbullah, Hamas and the American-backed, Shiite-dominated Iraq are facing Israel, Saudi Arabia, and most of the other Sunni Arab states, all of which feel existentially threatened by Iran’s ascendance.”

Fischer goes on to say:

“Iran’s nuclear program is the decisive factor in this equation, for it threatens irreversibly the region’s strategic balance. That Iran - a country whose president never tires of calling for Israel’s annihilation and that threatens Israel’s northern and southern borders through its massive support of proxy wars waged by Hizbullah and Hamas - might one day have missiles with nuclear warheads is Israel’s worst security nightmare. Politics is not just about facts, but also about perceptions. Whether or not a perception is accurate is beside the point, because it nonetheless leads to decisions.”

Decisions, Fischer continues, which will be taken before America votes for a new President in November:

“While Israeli military intelligence is on record as saying that Iran is expected to cross the red line on the path to nuclear power between 2010 and 2015 at the earliest, the feeling in Israel is that the political window of opportunity to attack is now, during the last months of Bush’s presidency.”

If Iran wants to avoid, Fischer concludes, a situation that is “…serious. Deadly serious,” then “serious” negotiations have to begin now.

Fischer’s prediction shouldn’t be dismissed lightly, although three points should be noted. Firstly, as Fischer says, the imperative of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons is not just an Israeli doctrine; the Arab states share it too, and will thus be considered parties to any military action that is taken. Secondly, Israel is a strong candidate to carry out an air assault against Iran’s nuclear facilities, but so is the US; moreover, whichever country does it, the action will be interpreted in the Middle East, in the anti-war movement and in much of the press as a joint action to further the aims of “Zionism” and “imperialism”. Thirdly, it is not strictly true that, absent George Bush, the window for military action closes entirely; all the Presidential contenders (most recently, Barack Obama speaking today at the AIPAC convention in Washington) agree that Iran cannot be permitted to weaponize its nuclear program.

Fischer’s prognosis becomes even more interesting in the light of Amitai Etzioni’s disclosure of a recent conversation he had with “a high ranking adviser to one of the leading presidential candidates—someone likely to make it into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” who told him, “We just have to get used to a nuclear Iran.”

This view, Etzioni observes, is rooted in the rational deterrence theory beloved of Cold War realists. Etzioni notes that some scholars, including John “Israel Lobby” Mearsheimer, encouraged states like India and Ukraine to maintain nuclear arsenals on the grounds that deterrence is hardwired into such a formidable capacity. The tougher you are, in other words, the more secure you are. And no-one wants to commit suicide.

Perhaps, says Etzioni, but hard to make this case where Iran is concerned:

“I am one of those who holds that the opposite is true; that many states—Iran, among others—have leaders who are very capable of acting in ways that are profoundly irrational, hence posing a serious threat both to other countries as well as to their own. We now have a new report that says volumes on the limits of rationality of heads of state.

George Piro, the FBI agent who interrogated Saddam Hussein over several months, has just revealed what he learned about the Iraqi dictator’s mindset leading up to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. It turns out that Saddam did not expect that the U.S. would respond to his WMD posturing with a full-scale ground invasion. Saddam ‘told me’ Piro says, that ‘he initially miscalculated … President Bush’s intentions. He thought the United States would retaliate with the same type of attack as we did in 1998 … a four-day aerial attack…He survived that one and he was willing to accept that type of attack.’ This was not merely some minor tactical ‘misunderstanding’ or ‘miscalculation’ on Saddam’s part; it turned Iraq into an occupied land, caused hundreds of thousands of casualties, a regime change, and, ultimately, his execution.

(One reason Saddam opened up to this rather low-ranking agent was that he believed that the agent was a direct emissary from President Bush. This suggests how gullible even heads of state can be—not exactly what we’d consider rational.)

The conclusion is not that the next American president should refuse to talk or negotiate with the likes of Kim Jong Il or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. After all, we talk even to mental patients. However, to dismiss concerns about verbal threats made by such leaders, especially when they are backed up with nuclear arms, is nothing but irrational.”

Etzioni’s conversation with the unnamed official (he abides, he says, by “Chatham House rules”) suggests that the slide to military confrontation with Iran may not be as inexorable as Fischer believes. More importantly, discussion also has to focus on the aftermath, particularly the impact of a decimated Iran on the rest of the region. In that sense, Iraq, Lebanon and Gaza are vital and potentially lethal flashpoints. With so many US troops in Iraq, as well as a large NATO-led force in Afghanistan, “the aftermath” - as it came to be known in Iraq - is certain to heighten the caution of military planners.

That said, political conditions are more benign for military action now than they were in the run-up to the Iraq war. Ironically, given the depth of anti-war feeling in these countries, France and Germany have since elected governments that are robustly pro-American. In the UK, even if Gordon Brown’s Labour government collapses, a Conservative successor is unlikely to waver in support for the United States.

Most importantly of all, those predicting or supporting military action calculate that nothing could be worse than a nuclear-armed Iran. With every public statement he makes, Ahmadinejad does little to dissuade them.