It’s something to try to imagine what the Iranians are going to make of the remarks by the president of France. Monsieur Chirac confided this week to reporters of the New York Times, the Paris Herald, and Le Nouvel Observateur, that he doesn’t think it would be much of a problem for the world if Iran had a pair of nuclear weapons. “Having one or perhaps a second bomb a little later, well, that’s not very dangerous,” he told reporters. He speculated that Iran would never use a nuclear weapon on Israel because “it would not have gone 200 meters into the atmosphere before Tehran would be razed.”

It was a notably irresponsible performance, even for Monsieur Chirac, and the geezers over at the Quai D’Orsay must have fallen into their bouillabaisse. The president hastened to withdraw his comments, going so far as to bring the reporters back to the Palais Élysée to explain himself and claiming that he thought the interview was off the record. Aside from the fact that his comments are out of line with stated French policy, what’s disturbing is that the president of France clearly thinks deterrence in the form of mutually assured destruction is the way to handle Iran. In thinking this way, he and other European policy makers are subscribing to an outdated strategy that will not work for this conflict.

Mutually assured destruction depends on both sides of a conflict considering their own rational self interest in the course of making military decisions. In a scenario where one side holds a fanatical religious worldview that blesses violence and finds redemption in death, this strategy is clearly faulty. Aside from all that, the destruction that is, in Monsieur Chirac’s own mind, mutually assured is that of Israel and Tehran, not of Paris and Tehran, which makes his comments even more offensive. Follow the logic and one eventually sees that the only moral position the West can take is one that marks Iran’s developing a nuclear bomb unacceptable in its own right.