Is a nuclear Iran really to be feared?  PARIS -- The obsession
of the American foreign policy community, as well as most
American (and a good many international) politicians, by the
myth of Iran's "existential" threat to Israel, brings the world
steadily closer to another war in the Middle East.  The debate
over Iran takes for granted that the country soon will have
nuclear weapons and would use them. The debate back in 2002-'03
over Saddam Hussein's alleged possession of nuclear weapons did
the same. After the United States had gone to war against Iraq,
no such weapons were found to exist.  The actual winner of the
war that followed the American invasion of Iraq was Israel,
which saw Iraq, its principal regional rival, destroyed at no
cost to itself. The military victor of the war, but politico-
strategic loser, was the United States, which destroyed Iraq, a
country in no position to harm the United States, at a trillion-
dollar cost, enormous human suffering and waste, and the
effective transfer of Iraq to Ir