John Pilger makes some pretty good arguments on an article published on Antiwar.com:
Unlike Israel and the United States, Iran has abided by the rules of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, of which it was an original signatory and has allowed routine inspections under its legal obligations – until gratuitous, punitive measures were added in 2003, at the behest of Washington. No report by the International Atomic Energy Agency has ever cited Iran for diverting its civilian nuclear program to military use. The IAEA has said that for most of the past three years its inspectors have been able to “go anywhere and see anything.” They inspected the nuclear installations at Isfahan and Natanz on 10 and 12 January and will return on 2 to 6 February. The head of the IAEA, Mohamed El-Baradei, says that an attack on Iran will have “catastrophic consequences” and only encourage the regime to become a nuclear power.
Unlike its two nemeses, the US and Israel, Iran has attacked no other countries. It last went to war in 1980 when invaded by Saddam Hussein, who was backed and equipped by the US, which supplied chemical and biological weapons produced at a factory in Maryland. Unlike Israel, the world’s fifth military power with thermonuclear weapons aimed at Middle East targets, an unmatched record of defying UN resolutions and the enforcer of the world’s longest illegal occupation, Iran has a history of obeying international law and occupies no territory other than its own.
The “threat” from Iran is entirely manufactured, aided and abetted by familiar, compliant media language that refers to Iran’s “nuclear ambitions,” just as the vocabulary of Saddam’s non-existent WMD arsenal became common usage.
The emphasis is my own. He clarifies a remark by Ahmadinejad that has been translated as Israel must be wiped of the map, which unfortunately - not speaking Iranian - I can’t confirm, but this is no blindly pro-Iranian puff piece:
Ahmadinejad compared the demise of the Jerusalem regime to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The Iranian regime is repressive, but its power is diffuse and exercised by the mullahs, with whom Ahmadinejad is often at odds. An attack would surely unite them.
No, Iran is not likely guilty of the excessive charges the U.S. keeps throwing at it, and while they are not exactly an anarcho-capitalistic libertarian paradise, they shouldn’t suffer Iraq’s devastating fate just because they happen to disagree with two other nuclear powers.
Here’s the full article. Extra credit points: read Ayn Codina’s essay on Antiwar.com