The differance is of course that not all societies and civilizations are created equal. Iran has to work out "little" issues like a seperation of church and state and women's sufferage before allowing to have technology of this sort should even be considered. Iran does not generally have a reputation for playing well with others, and like it or not whether there are any immediate plans to nuke Isreal or not it's very attitude about the fundemental existance of a Jewish state says a lot about their maturity as a civilization.
In "Star Trek" it's important to understand that there were apocolyptic wars on earth that nearly decimated humanity, a period which lead to a facist regime that made the nazis look like a troupe of girl scouts taking over the world, with what amounted to a "join is, live our way, or die" followed by mass murder and genocide. This facist regime eventually reformed once it had everyone in line into what became the earth goverment that started The Federation. A case of doing really bad things so you don't have to do them anymore/the ends justify the means at it's finest. A point made by Q in "Encounter At Farpoint" (the first episodes of TNG) where he showed the beginnings of The Federation and how when you get right down to it the morality is hypocritical as the very foundation of their society only occured through the usage of exactly the kind of fascist, mass-murdering, military strong arm tactics that Star Fleet runs around preaching against. This in of itself was in referance to some of Roddenberry's extended writings where I believe he also explained was that the big differance between the TOS "Mirror Universe" and the regular universe was whether Earth changed policies over a period of time or not. The "Terran Empire" fundementally being those guys you saw in "Encounter At Farpoint" in Q's court scene, this is also why they had an eagle emblem very similar to the one used by "The Terran Empire" apparently. I've read some stuff about it... and the point is that Star Trek pretty much makes a bad parallel to real world politics because when you get technical the bottom line is that everyone who is inconveinent to it's somewhat western/liberal/socialist utopian view had been either wiped out due to natural disaster, genetic themed warfare, or by the facist regime that pretty much conquered everyone and forced a single global super culture. Even in current Star Trek, there would be an obligation to disarm a culture like Iraq having technology gained from other, more advanced and enlightened people, that they are not progressively ready for. The fact that The Western World could develop technology and then have barbaric neighbors that have not even established the fundementals of an enlightened civilization (like seperation of church and state, sexual equality, etc...) and the chaos that can ensue is exactly why Star Trek has the "Prime Directive" and seeks to keep things compartmentalized so the planetary equivilent of Iran or Iraq can never obtain things like warp drive or photon torpedos and go on a space jihad, and also takes a fairly aggressive policing stance against cultures that turn out that way and develop the tech on their own (ie keeping them contained, or otherwise refusing to intervene unless they reform while another power like The Klingons come wandering by and enslave them).
All the nerd rambling aside, I've been of the opinion that we should pretty much invade Iran for a while. Unlike this other insanity in Afghanistan and Iraq though, we shouldn't go in there with some big plan of winning the peace and imposing a progressive democracy. We've already learned twice that you can't teach a monkey philsophy, it's a creature that's fundementally unsuited for it, perhaps in thousands of years of evolution it will wind up being able to, but that's not the case right now. Islamic cultures are the societal equivilent of that, you can try and teach them how to be progressive, enlightened civilizations, but at the end of the day if they aren't evolved enough to do it, they aren't evolved enough to do it. The new Iraqi and Afghani constitutions that specified the nations as "Islamic States" and the failure to acehive true women's equality (to the point of visiting women from other countries still needing to cover them) have shown that no matter what they are shown, they just fundementally aren't equipped as a people to get it. The most we can do is break their cultures to the point where they are harmless to the rest of the world while they hopefuly grow up. If they hate us in the meantime, so what, when they grow up getting over it will be part of it as they will understand what we did what we did. Towards this end I think the Iranian "invasion" should basically be a mission with a clear entrance, goal, and exit strategy... cripple Iraq's infrastructure and technology base, and decimate it's military to the point where followup strikes are possible when and where nessicary to prevent them from rebuilding it until they are ready.
It's not nice, but let me be honest. We have issues with Iran getting the missle range to successfully hit Isreal through it's defenses or worse yet fire reliably at other countries. If Iran develops the abillity to place their own Satellites that means they have the abillity to put missles on those satellites, and it's not like they follow existing treaties (being religiously driven), so any kind of agreement like there was between the US and USSR to not do things like this (or greatly limit it) as part of a cold war stand off is kind of moot. What's more MAD doesn't mean much to a people that believe god will literally protect them from the repercussions of their actions.
Whether or not the intent for these programs is for it to be "used peacefully" or even if it is in the short term, the potential exists. When Iran has the abillity to potentially produce nuclear missles, or worse yet put them on orbiting satellites, we're pretty much all F@cked because we're dealing with what amounts to an inherantly irrational theocratic society that routinely calls holy war, being in possesion of the abillity to wipe out entire cities, while themselves feeling that their divine direction makes this right and protects them from the fallout (perhaps literally).
Sorry... no.... them having this is a bad idea.
We could go back and forth about whether Dubbya acted in good faith or not. Truthfully I think he did, the US had dismantled most of it's intelligence assets and we acted mostly on international Intel, among other things trusting Isreal which had it's own motives in the region a little more than we probably should have. Others disagree with me, but that's fine.
The differance here is that Iran itself is saying "hey, we're developing these things, and look we just fired a monkey into space and recovered it!" whether it's true or not they want us to believe it, and have been working in that direction. Heading in there to wreck their tech base at this point isn't based on any declaration of WMDs by shadowy intelligence types and information analysts, it's due to the people on the receiving end dancing around going "hahaha, we have all this stuff, try and stop us!". If we go in there and it turns out Iran never had this stuff, that isn't exactly going to be our fault, and truthfully they will kind of deserve it for having provoked the attack.
I don't think many people here will agree with me, but that's my thoughts on the subject. I just call it like I see it. If I seem bigoted and judgemental about Iran and it's level of development as a culture, hey, it comes from listening to these guys for decades, and looking at the fundemental nature of their society and it's failings to do even the most basic things like seperate church and state and try and institute serious women's sufferage. Those two things are very basic societal developments that I believe need to be met before one can even entertain the question of a culture being progressive, advanced, or enlighented. If your society currently has barbaric policies and customs (even if it was at one time among the more progressive people thousands of years ago) then I'm going to treat you like a barbarian. Without meeting basic fundemental details like that I don't feel you evenhave the right to try and play tit for tat with other countries that have gotten that far (by saying one aspect or other of a society that has gone that far might be "wrong" or "barbaric" compartively... without the basics nothing you say and do as a people matters to me).
