Garden, who has advised the British Ministry of Defense and U.S. Department of Defense on military affairs, delivers his assessment of the current and looming problems that threaten global security and how best to approach them.

In the first installment, Garden discusses the current crisis over Iran's nuclear programs.

UPI: This month Iran's nuclear dossier will go before the United Nations Security Council, after negotiations over the country's nuclear programs collapsed. Many members of the international community believe Tehran is trying to develop a nuclear weapon, a charge it denies. How has the current stand-off developed?

Garden: You've got an animosity between the United States and Iran that dates back, even pre-dates really, the hostage-taking in Tehran, the Iranians feeling bruised about the imposition of the Shah, the Americans feeling bruised about the (1979) loss of the embassy after the Shah's fall.

Then during the Iran-Iraq war in which millions died in the 1980s, (there was) effectively a western support for Iraq rather than Iran. Iran seeing Iraq as a continuing enemy under Saddam Hussein and, in the 1990s, us telling the world that Iraq is building nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. Iran saying, so we've got a neighbor that killed millions of us that's producing WMD, and just a little bit further away we've got another enemy Israel, that's got nuclear weapons, and we've got Pakistan which has got nuclear weapons, and we've got Russia and we've got America. So one can see the logic from the Iranian point of view that says if we wish to deter attacks from all these folk then we need nuclear weapons, and nobody's going to help us because they didn't help us last time in all of this, so one can understand that.

Q: What do you think is likely to happen when Iran's nuclear dossier goes before the U.N. Security Council this month, and what in your view would be the best way forward?

A: I doubt that there will be an agreement to put a stiff resolution down, and I think that's right. Given that the real threat, if you consider it a threat, of a nuclear armed Iran is actually quite a long time away, and that the politics of Iran are interesting in the sense that they're not as rigid as they're sometimes characterized, I don't think there is any advantage to the rest of the world to isolate Iran, threaten Iran and make it so that it can't adjust both politically and in its relationships with the rest of the world in a useful way.

So, diplomacy in its slow mode is the thing... (The Security Council members) are going to discuss the case for a couple of months, and they can start exploring sanctions, but I think they don't want to bring it to a head for as long as possible.

Meanwhile there are other tracks to dissuade the Iranians. Things like the Russian discussions on providing Iran with nuclear fuel, anything that slows up the process, gives more time for talking, seem to me to be the useful thing.

But the big problem will be if the Israelis say, enough's enough.

Q: Is it useful to keep the threat of military action on the table?

A: The military threat should be examined at various levels. I don't think it is sensible diplomatically to even talk about it at the official level because in terms of U.N. authorization you've got to go through an awful lot of stages before you get to military force, and if you start talking about it now, you use that bit of your diplomatic armory too early.

The Iranians will be well aware that there are those, particularly Israelis, who argue that a military action is necessary, and there are some in the U.S. who might argue that. So it exists, and they also know that if the U.N. process were to go all the way through in agreement then it could end up that way anyway. So it exists as a fact, but I don't think you want to make it an explicit threat.

Then you come to, what do you mean by military action? The sorts of schemes that are talked about go from precision air strikes against the nuclear developing sites, through to a full-scale attack on other parts of the machinery and government of Iran. Both of those, from a military point of view, are not actually terribly practical.

The idea that it would be possible to cripple the Iranian nuclear program by air strikes is a bit silly, because it would ensure that those within Iran who are arguing for it to go down the nuclear route are given their head, and other sites will appear and the ones that you've missed will be developed. You will generate the thing you fear, which is the acceleration of any nuclear program.

If you think of an invasion on the Iraq model, just the scale of it to start with and the effect on the region, again I just don't see it as a practical thing, particularly when you are fighting two other wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Q: Are we even capable of taking military action in Iran while we remain engaged in these conflicts?

A: If you think of the Iran-Iraq war, you'd be talking about something on that scale, where millions died. Now neither of them were desperately modern in their capabilities, but they had large numbers of people. All Western nations now operate with professional forces that are quite small in number, so the Americans find it difficult to sustain even a peacekeeping type operation now in Iraq. We don't have these mass divisions that we sent for example in World War I, nor do I think our publics see that as an option. So when you talk about military options, you have to say what sort of military option would be possible and what effect would it have? And when you look at them in practical terms, they are all counterproductive. So for all those reasons you've got to push the diplomatic route.

You also have to say, well, if in ten years time, Iraq ends up with a nuclear weapon, what would that mean? We live with a nuclear India and a nuclear Pakistan, we even live with a nuclear North Korea, which is a more random and unpredictable place than any of these. So it is something we should try to stop because the more nuclear weapons there are in the world, the more dangerous it is, but there may be worse scenarios, that is, having an all out war which rages across all of these countries (in the region) than finding an accommodation.

Because of the way things have gone it is likely that Iran will want to keep the nuclear weapon option open; whether it will decide it is worth going to the last stage of coming out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and having a nuclear weapon, I think is still up for grabs. And what we need to do is convince them that the advantages of remaining below the nuclear threshold outweigh the advantages of going beyond it, which may mean we need to give security guarantees of some sort.

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