WHAT do you do if your country is being accused daily of developing a clandestine nuclear capability, and threatened with sanctions and possible military action? Most rational leaders, when faced with such a scenario, would strengthen their country’s defences, try and obtain diplomatic support, and forge national unity. And what did Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad do? He launched a crackdown on women wearing ‘un-Islamic’ dress.

According to the Guardian of April 20, with immediate effect, police will arrest women “failing to conform to the regime’s definition of Islamic morals by wearing loose-fitting hijab, or headscarves, tight jackets and shortened trousers exposing skin.” Clearly, women who breach the dress code distract those manning Iran’s defences and, therefore, must be locked up.

And if this wasn’t a stern enough warning to western imperialists and the Zionist enemy, President Ahmedinejad has also proposed a bill in parliament to raise the fine for owning a satellite dish antenna from Rs 6,000 to Rs 300,000. Obviously, Iranians cannot be allowed to know what’s happening in the rest of the world.

Just to make sure the dress code is respected, the Iranian authorities are making taxi drivers responsible for ensuring that their passengers are suitably attired. The police has been authorised to impound cabs carrying women not conforming to the law. Leading this campaign for moral purity is Mr Nader Shariatmaderi, a Tehran city councillor and close ally of the president’s. In his view, young people have been too relaxed in their appearance, and these trends were “damaging the Islamic and revolutionary principles... We are looking for a social utopia but in the last couple of months, our attention has wavered... In the present international situation, people must unite under known principles.”

As a final measure to strengthen national unity, the police have been authorised ‘to confront men with outlandish hairstyles and people walking pet dogs’. I’m glad this level of hysteria has not yet reached Pakistan as I confess to having a head of unruly (if thinning) hair, and to walking a pet dog.

When faced with huge problems, politicians in the Third World often take recourse to venting hot air and swatting at flies while the wolf strolls in through the front door. Iran, despite its enormous oil and gas reserves, is suffering from severe unemployment and poverty. The cause is simple and endemic in developing countries: corruption and mismanagement at every level. By all accounts, the mullahs have been fattening their bank accounts while the infrastructure is crumbling.

According to a recent study titled ‘Understanding Iran’ commissioned by a London think-tank called Foreign Policy Centre (FPC), 65 per cent of Iran’s population of 70 million is younger than 25. Nine hundred thousand jobs need to be created every year to absorb the population increase, and prevent the rise in the official unemployment rate of 16 per cent. Unofficially, the number of jobless Iranians is put at 20 per cent.

The authors of the report argue that these statistics carry the seeds of change. Young people are increasingly disenchanted with the theocracy that has held Iran by the jugular since the Khomeni revolution in 1979. Despite official disapproval, they log on to the Internet to bypass the tight censorship, and view smuggled DVDs. The day is long over when governments could control all access to foreign influence.

Given time, there is little doubt that common people will force a change in government. But the one thing that could unite them behind the mullahs is an American-led attack on Iranian nuclear installations. The Iranians are a proud people, and their experience with western powers in the last century has produced an understandable degree of suspicion. But I am sure few Iranians would support their government’s backing for an ongoing drive to recruit suicide bombers.

Ahmedinejad’s unnecessarily provocative pronouncements on Iran’s nuclear programme, and his strident threats directed at Israel have raised the spectre of a unilateral attack against his country. The FPC report makes it clear that such a step would spell disaster for all concerned. Iran would surely retaliate against western forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, and oil prices would shoot up to well over $100 a barrel.

Unfortunately, political and military decisions are not always made on the basis of logic and rational analysis. After 9/11 in particular, the United States has a horror of biological or atomic weapons falling in the hands of terrorists. So when Iran announces that it has embarked on a uranium enrichment programme to generate electricity, nobody takes it at its word. As the country is sitting on 15 per cent of the world’s petroleum reserves, it would be a naive man who believed such claims.

But for Iranians, even those opposed to the mullahs, their right to own atomic weapons is self-evident. After all, it has Pakistan and India to the east as nuclear neighbours, Russia to the north, and Israel to its west. And in Afghanistan and Iraq, it faces the United States. Thus, from Tehran’s perspective, it makes perfect sense to develop a nuclear deterrent.

However, its export of Islamic militancy and its shrill rhetoric makes people very nervous about the possibility of a nuclear Tehran making good on Ahmedinejad’s threat to “erase Israel from the map”. Instead of adopting a low profile, Iran has been throwing its weight around. It has probably calculated that with the mess in Iraq and steadily rising oil prices, the United States will not be foolish enough to launch an attack on Iranian nuclear installations.

However, banking on good sense in Washington these days is like betting on a flood in the Sahara. Bush could well embark on a popular adventure to shore up his sagging popularity and the Republican Party’s electoral prospects in November. If, as seems increasingly likely, it loses control of both houses of Congress, Bush will be the lamest of lame ducks for the rest of his presidency. In this scenario, a series of ‘surgical strikes’ against Iranian nuclear installations before the elections cannot be ruled out. Indeed, the Guardian of April 20 also carries an article by Timothy Garton Ash in which he projects a future American attack in 2009, and the subsequent Iranian retaliation.

Given this possibility, one would imagine that the dictates of prudence and survival would serve to restrain Iran’s firebrand president. But far too often, politicians like the sound of their own voices too much to allow mundane things like reason curb their tongues.

Woody Allen once wrote: “God goes about His ways silently. So why can’t mankind shut up?”