Quite agree BB & bubblyrat.

Show me any Arab country let alone the Iranians who have EVER given a flying fig for their Palestinian Brothers

As I have said before ever since the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, people have lived and worked there. The same would have applied to Palestine after they had taken care of the Israelis

My guess always was that both the Libyan and the Iranian nuclear weapons programmes were mean to be totally secret. Unfortunately for the Iranians they had an old "Atoms for Peace" programme that was a hang-over from the days of the Shah, Libya did not. So Iran had to, and I believe they attempted to, run two nuclear programmes in parallel.

The world was never meant to know about Natanz or Qum. Their "Peaceful" nuclear programme would have been totally transparent to the IAEA Inspectors and it would comply totally with the terms and conditions of the Nuclear NPT. Behind the scenes uranium would have been enriched to weapons grade and bombs manufactured. No need for missiles, a conventional delivery system would not be required. The bombs would be smuggled into their target city locations component by component, assembled and triggered simultaneously. My guess is that the targets would have been Tel Aviv and Haifa. With those cities destroyed Israel would be finished. The outcry in the immediate aftermath would be immense but it would die down and the IAEA would be able to prove that from their records the source of the fissile material for the bombs could not possibly have come from Iran.

Unfortunately for both the Libyans and the Iranians in 2001 an international terrorist group based in Afghanistan launched an asymmetric attack on the USA. This caused the USA to rethink the threat they faced in the light of how successful Al-Qaeda's attack had been. The threat was identified as a similar asymmetric attack this time using nuclear, chemical or biological weapons that could not be directly tied to any country or regime.

The War On Terror was declared and the US President told the world you are either with us of against us. In 2001 Al-Qaeda and the Taleban were driven from Afghanistan. In March 2003 Iraq was invaded by the US to enforce verifiable disarmament and Saddam Hussein was toppled from power. The results of these actions?

- 2003 Libya unilaterally renounces its WMD programme and reveals its completely secret nuclear weapons programme. A programme that up until this time nobody had the slightest inkling of.

- 2003 Iranian dissidents blow the whistle and reveal the location of the secret uranium enrichment facility at Natanz

- 2003 Iran crash stops its nuclear weapons programme and starts urgently developing its missile capabilities. There is a very good reason for this, before when nobody knew about their programme Iran did not need missiles, but now that Natanz had been revealed, Iran had to develop a means of defending herself so as to deter a possible attack from Israel.

- Dr A.Q.Khans network is uncovered and stopped in its tracks.

Far fetched?? Maybe, possible certainly. The standard reaction that nobody would ever do that because of the casualties amongst the Palestinian people only holds good if you actually believe that the Arabs care about the Palestinians. But the actions of the Arabs in their dealings with and treatment of the Palestinians for the last sixty years proves conclusively that they do not care for them in the least, they are merely convenient pawns in the game.