Madam, - Raymond Deane's attempt to portray Iran as an innocent player in the Middle East arena (June 13th) isn't even remotely credible.
The wholesale export of terror has been the central tenet of Iranian foreign policy since the 1979 revolution. Ayatollah Khomeini promised upon coming to power that "we will export our revolution. . .until the calls 'there is no god but Allah' are echoed around the world".
Shi'ite unrest was immediately fomented in various countries around the Middle East, leading to widespread riots in Bahrain, Kuwait and the Saudi province of Hama.
Contrary to what Mr Deane believes, it was Iran which provoked the Iraqi invasion of 1980. As early as June 1979, Iran was urging the Shi'ite majority of Iraq to overthrow the Ba'ath regime, and funded numerous underground groups. Following an assassination attempt on Tariq Aziz and the bombing of 20 Iraqi officials in April 1980, Iran began hostilities.
Far from appearing as the "victim", Khomeini embraced the war and vowed it would continue "until the downfall of the regime governing Baghdad". The cost and unpopularity of the ensuing eight-year war, however, taught the Iranian elite that influence in the region could best be attained by funding and arming proxy terrorist groups.
The most successful of these has undoubtedly been Hizbullah, which the Iranian Revolutionary Guard has been training in southern Lebanon since 1979. Tehran dictates all the main strategy to leader Hassan Nasrallah in his "holy war" against Israel, and provided significant backing to Hizbullah's bombing of a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires in 1994, which killed 86 and maimed 200.
Iranian commitment to Israel's destruction extends further to the direct financing of Palestinian terrorists such as Islamic Jihad and more recently, to the provision of training and logistical support to Hamas.
Mr Deane's confident dismissal of Iranian nuclear ambitions is at variance with the May 2008 report of the International Atomic Energy Agency which expressed "serious concern" that Iran is both hiding details of work on nuclear warheads and defying UN Security Council demands to cease enriching uranium. The report, along with recent pictures of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad walking through columns of enrichment centrifuges, goes a long way towards puncturing the effect of last November's US National Intelligence Estimate, which merely stated that Iran had halted "conventional" work on nuclear arms in 2003.
Given this evidence, it is easier to identify the "unaccountable, belligerent rogue state" in the Middle East. The real "threat to humankind" lies squarely with the mullahs of Iran, whose desires for Islamic hegemony in the region are further underpinned by their determination to destroy the Jewish state. - Yours, etc,
STEVEN CORCORAN,
Lawrence Grove,
Clontarf,
Dublin 3.