Before The Bombs Fall, Remember.

The Scotsman's Brian Wilson turned out a column last Sunday that makes me proud of my homeland and hopeful for a modicum of Scottish cannyness in international affairs. Entitled "Remember how we got here before the bombs fall on Iran" it takes a short but informative tour through the history of foreign meddling in Iranian affairs since the Tehran Conference of 1943. It covers the British occupation and the Shah and the democratic government of Dr Mohammed Mosadeq:

who promptly set about nationalising the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which was the forerunner of BP.

The British and Americans smelt communism, plotted Mosadeq's overthrow and in a 1953 coup restored the Shah, who then, over the next 25 years, became an increasingly dictatorial and reviled - though unarguably pro-Western - ruler. Hardly surprisingly, his next removal was not at the hands of a progressive secularist but the religious fundamentalists, led by the Ayatollah Khomeini.

As Denis Healey wrote: "By involving the Shah in an alliance against the Soviet Union, by supporting his secular dictatorship against the mullahs and by organising the overthrow of Mosadeq in 1953, Britain and the US made it inevitable that anti-Western Muslim Fundamentalists would ultimately take over in Iran".

He covers the rise of the Ayatollahs and how the US and Britain backed Saddam Hussain against them, the split-personality of Iran when Khatami was president - a theocracy with a free press and creative cinema - and the rise of the current boogeyman Ahmadinejad.

His last three paragraphs speak my own thoughts exactly as I wish I could write them:

These people - and there are a lot of them - are not our natural enemies. Half of Iran's 70 million population are aged under 25. The idea that anyone, even in the maddest corner of the Pentagon, is talking about bombing them, or even, in the really extreme closets, nuking their installations, frightens me a great deal more than the wild rhetoric and noisy claims that are emanating from President Ahmadinejad. If his unsubstantiated boasts about nuclear capacity are meant to wind up Washington and rally his own people in response to bellicose threats, he seems to be succeeding admirably.

Jack Straw has described a military attack on Iran as "inconceivable" and I hope he holds firmly to that line. I am under no illusions about the unpleasantness of the Iranian regime or its deep complicity in exporting terrorism to Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq and anywhere else it sees an opportunity. Constraining these activities is an entirely legitimate objective and one that should be pursued through international diplomacy. Countries such as China and Russia have at least as big a stake in Iran's stability as we do.

But Iran is also a country with its own internal political and demographic dynamic. Just as its form of government has changed dramatically in the past, so it will in the future. The idea that the United States can or should dictate the pace and nature of that change, particularly through the use of military force, is as futile as it is abhorrent. And anyone who doubts that should consult the disastrous history of post-war meddling in a country that might otherwise have been stable, secular - and possibly even friendly.

Or indeed the disasterous bungling - inspired by a sense of divine right - which has characterised every other Bush administration action from Iraq and Katrina to healthcare and domestic spying.

In the media frenzy, you could have been forgiven for missing three important facts.

The IAEA has found no hard evidence for the Busheviks' accusations against Iran.

Nor was there ever a UN imposed deadline of any kind - certainly not a 30 day deadline to suspend enrichment activities.

The NPT and the IAEA Statute and the Iranian Safeguards Agreement all guarantee Iran's "inalienable" right to conduct research into – and to enjoy all the benefits of the peaceful use of – nuclear energy.

Yet right now, Condi Rice is telling the world that if the UN doesn't do exactly as America wants then the UN will be sidelined, ignored, and the Bush administration will do exactly as it wants anyway. John Bolten is talking loudly about the UN being irrelevant if it won't give permission for sanctions and military action. It is international blackmail on an epic scale that makes the Bush administration the biggest rogue state of all yet here in the U.S. it is being largely accepted as if it is America's God-given mandate to dictate to the UN and the world in this way.

What is going on here? Has America lost its collective mind?