If one side in a conflict goes nuclear, the other is bound to follow
suit
The Iranian crisis can only be understood as the inevitable result of
Israel's US-backed WMD monopoly in the region
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1746295,00.html
This article linked from: antiwar.com
(as are many posts seen in this NG)
David Hirst
Tuesday April 4, 2006
The Guardian
There is widespread international agreement that Iran's acquisition of
nuclear weapons is an alarming prospect, but very little attention is
paid to the most obvious, immediate reason why: that there is already
a Middle Eastern nuclear power, Israel, insistent on preserving its
monopoly.
So the crisis has been foreseeable for decades; it would be
automatically triggered by the emergence of a second nuclear power,
friendly or unfriendly to the west. Iran is the unfriendliest
possible, encouraging the widespread assumption that it alone is
responsible for creating the crisis - and settling it. But is it?
It certainly isn't blameless. First, its nuclear arming would deal a
major blow to an already fraying international non-proliferation
regime. Second, it would involve a huge deceit. Third, the US divides
actual or potential nuclear powers into responsible and irresponsible
ones. Iran would be irresponsible, being already the worst of "rogue
states".
Typically, a "rogue state", as well as being oppressive, ideologically
repugnant and anti-American, unites an aggressive nature with
disproportionate military strength, thereby posing a constant,
exceptional threat to an established regional order. What could now
more emphatically consign Iran to such company than its new president,
with his calls to "wipe Israel off the map"?
Yet, in nuclear terms in the Middle East, Israel is the original
sinner. Non- proliferation must be universal: if, in any zone of
potential conflict, one party goes nuclear, its adversaries can't be
expected not to. No matter how long ago it was, by violating that
principle Israel would always bear a responsibility for whatever
happened later. Second, its deceit was no less than Iran's, though,
there being no non-proliferation treaty at the time, it was only the
US it deceived. Mindful of what Israel's mendacity portended, the CIA
warned in 1963 that, by enhancing its sense of security, nuclear
capacity would make Israel less, not more, conciliatory to the Arabs;
it would exploit its new "psychological advantages" to "intimidate"
them.
Which, thirdly, points to the irresponsible use Israel has indeed made
of it. Sure, it always justified it as its "Samson option", its last
recourse against neighbours bent on destroying it. There is no such
threat now; but if there was once, or will be again, the question is
why.
A major part of the answer is that on most counts except hostility to
the US Israel has always behaved like a "rogue state". It came into
being as a massive disrupter of the established Middle East order,
through violence and ethnic cleansing. Such a settler-state could only
achieve true legitimacy, true integration into a still-to-be-completed
new order, by restoring the Palestinian rights it violated in its
creation and growth.
That, at bottom, is what the everlasting "peace process" is about. The
world has a broad definition of the settlement lying at the end of it.
It doesn't involve the full emancipation of an indigenous people that
has been the norm in European decolonisation; only a compromise vastly
more onerous for the defeated Palestinians than the Israelis.
But settlement never comes, because Israel resists even that
compromise. Its nuclear power, on top of its already overwhelming
conventional superiority, ensures that. Such irresponsible use of it
is what Shimon Peres was alluding to when he said that "acquiring a
superior weapons system would mean the possibility of using it for
compellent purposes - that is, forcing the other side to accept
Israeli political demands". Or what Moshe Sneh, a leading Israeli
strategist, meant when he said: "I don't want the Israeli-Palestinian
negotiations to be held under the shadow of an Iranian nuclear bomb."
As if the Arabs haven't had to negotiate under the shadow of an
Israeli bomb these past four decades.
There are three ways the crisis can go. The first is that Israel
insists on, and achieves, the unchallenged perpetuation of its
"original sin". For it isn't so much "the world", as President Bush
keeps saying, that finds a nuclear Iran so intolerable, but the world
on Israel's behalf; not the risk that Iran will attack Israel that
makes the crisis so dangerous, but that Israel will attack Iran - or
that the US will take on the job itself. In effect, Israel's nuclear
arsenal, or the protection of it, has become a diplomatic instrument
against its benefactor.
It is a legacy of America's own "original sin", that first, reluctant
acquiescence in a nuclear Israel, subsequently turned into uninhibited
endorsement of it by seemingly ever more pro-Israeli administrations.
So here is a superpower, wrote the US strategic analyst Mark Gaffney,
so "blind and stupid" as to let "another state, ie Israel, control its
foreign policy". And, in a brilliant study, he warned that a US
assault on Iran could end in a catastrophe comparable to the massacre
of Roman legions at Cannae by Hannibal's much inferior army. For in
one field of military technology, anti-ship missiles, Russia is
streets ahead of the US. And Iran's possession of the fearsome 3M-82
Moskit could turn the Persian Gulf into a death trap for the US fleet.
And sure enough, from the Bush administration itself, the first hints
have been coming that, given the regional havoc Iran could indeed
wreak, there may be nothing the US can do to stop it going nuclear.
This points to a second way the crisis could go - with Israel obliged
to renounce its monopoly and the Middle East entering a cold-war-style
"balance of terror". It could be a stable one. Clearly, like Israel,
the mullahs would make irresponsible, political use of their nukes.
But, like Israel's, Iran's nuclear quest is essentially defensive,
even if not in quite the same fundamentally "existential" sense.
Nothing could have more convinced it of the need for an unconventional
deterrent than the fate of that other "rogue state", Saddam's Iraq,
which the US had no qualms about attacking because it didn't have one.
The third way - Iran's abandonment of its nuclear ambitions - would
stand its best chance of being accomplished if Israel were induced to
do likewise; not just because reciprocity is the essence of
disarmament, but because it would signify a fundamental change in
America's whole approach to the region.
And that might have positive effects beyond the nuclear. "There is
only one way," said the Israeli military analyst Ze'ev Schiff, "to
avoid a nuclear balance of terror: to use the time left, while we
still have a monopoly in this field, to make peace ... In the
framework of peace, a nuclear-free zone can be established." But that
is the wrong way round.
To make peace, as the CIA foresaw, Israel doesn't need the
intransigence that absolute security brings, but the spirit of
compromise that a judicious dose of insecurity might. A utopian notion
perhaps, with the world now so focused on the villainy of Iran - yet
better than a US onslaught that would add so thick a layer to an
already mountainous deposit of anti-western feeling that Israel could
barely hope ever to win acceptance in the region.
· David Hirst reported from the Middle East for the Guardian from 1963
to 2001
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1746295,00.html
This article linked from: antiwar.com
(as are many posts seen in this NG)
.
|
