SPEAKING
FREELY Nukes
and double standards By Deborah
Campbell
Speaking Freely is an Asia
Times Online feature that allows guest writers to
have their say. Please click hereif you are interested in
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An acquaintance of
mine, an Israeli physicist in his 30s, likes to
joke about his annual mandatory military service.
It involves guarding "the nuclear weapons Israel
doesn't have", he tells me, at the site of
Israel's undeclared nuclear arsenal in Dimona. The
code name for the Dimona reactor is "the chocolate
factory" - another "secret" that everyone seems to
know.
The "don't ask, don't tell" policy
toward Israel's nuclear-weapons
program emerged from
negotiations between US president Richard Nixon
and Israeli prime minister Golda Meir - the same
prime minister who also denied the existence of
the Palestinian people. John F Kennedy was the
only US president to demand greater accountability
of Israel, a nation that has consistently refused
to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
(NPT), which would subject the country to
inspections by the International Atomic Energy
Agency.
Talk to average Iranians these
days and they are full of such facts. Why, they
want to know, is Iran being singled out by the
United States when they are surrounded by far
worse offenders whom no one confronts? Iran is,
after all, a signatory to the NPT, which permits
member states to pursue peaceful uses of nuclear
technology, as Iran's government claims it's
doing.
At a time when Iran's foray into
nuclear-power development has come under the
international microscope, with the assumption that
the "mad mullahs" are busying themselves to get
the bomb, Pakistan has thus far avoided such
scrutiny, despite the fact that it's an unstable
military regime that could easily turn from a
nuclear-armed US ally to a nuclear-armed enemy in
the time it takes to say "coup d'etat". And what
about India? Like Pakistan and Israel, it has a
nuclear arsenal and refuses to sign on to the NPT.
Yet India is being rewarded for this behavior by
US assistance with its civilian nuclear program,
an act that is undermining non-proliferation
efforts and the treaty itself.
All but
forgotten are the provisions of the NPT that
require current nuclear states to begin
dismantling and liquidating their own weapons
system. Instead, the US has begun developing
new-generation nukes, violating the very treaty it
claims to be defending and potentially setting the
stage for another nuclear arms race.
In
the case of Iran, the stark double standards of US
foreign policy have become more pronounced than
usual, and potentially more dangerous to global
security. Since 2002 - long before the election of
Iran's current president whose scruffy beard,
sunken cheeks and provocative outbursts against
Israel have all the hallmarks of a villain
straight from central casting - Iran was already
marked as a member of the "axis of evil". This was
at a time when its president was the gentle
reformist-philosopher Mohammad Khatami, who
pressed for an international "dialogue of
civilizations" in hopes that it might melt the
long-standing Iran-US cold war and mitigate rising
tensions between Islamic nations and the West.
Khatami's overtures were largely ignored.
As the elected president of Iran, he was portrayed
in the West as a mere figurehead who lacked any
real power over the direction of the nation. It's
a view that seems more contradictory than ever as
the new president, Mahmud Ahmadinejad, is being
portrayed as the all-powerful leader of Iran, when
in fact he is subject to the same limitations as
his predecessor. The same political system, two
opposing interpretations from the White House.
A similar about-face can be observed in
the case of Iran's original attempts to develop
its nuclear capacity in the late 1970s. Iran was
then led by Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the
dictator whom the US had placed in power after its
Central Intelligence Agency overthrew Iran's
democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad
Mossadegh, who had moved to nationalize Iran's
oil.
At the time the shah began pursuing
his nuclear ambitions, Richard Cheney, Paul
Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld held key
national-security portfolios within the
administration of president Gerald Ford. Though
Iran's argument for seeking nuclear energy was the
same then as it is now (Iran argues that it
requires nuclear energy to meet the demands of a
growing population), the Ford administration
approved the sale of nuclear enrichment and
reprocessing technology despite intelligence
reports indicating that the shah intended to
develop nuclear weapons. The deal would have
allowed Iran to complete a full nuclear-fuel cycle
- the same capability the Bush administration,
with many of the same figures in power, is
opposing today.
As tensions between the
United States and Iran escalate and reports that
the US is preparing a military strike on Iran
continue to surface, it's helpful to reflect on
the lessons of Iraq. When the US, with the
cooperation of Britain, invaded in 2003, it was
with the stated aim of seeking to contain the
development of nuclear weapons that, as everyone
now knows, Iraq didn't have.
The
consequences, not only for the people of Iraq but
in terms of the human and financial costs to the
United States, have been enormous. A report
written by Joseph Stiglitz, a professor at
Columbia University and winner of the Nobel Prize
for economics, and Linda Bilmes, a Harvard budget
expert, estimates the total financial cost of the
war at US$1 trillion to $2 trillion. Dr Stiglitz
told The Guardian, "Our estimates are very
conservative, and it could be that the final costs
will be much higher. And it should be noted they
do not include the costs of the conflict to either
Iraq or the UK." The estimates also don't include
the cost in terms of international goodwill or the
new crop of enemies the war has inspired, the
final tally of which is impossible to calculate.
The war in Iraq would suggest that careful
consideration be given before embarking on another
costly adventure, particularly one that relies on
the same premise that was so discredited in Iraq,
namely confronting weapons of mass destruction.
Particularly when the US intelligence community
admits it knows almost nothing about Iran, and
when some estimates state that Iran is 10 years or
more away from being able to produce weapons-grade
fissile material, should that be the aim (and it
may well be, given the advantage that has
conferred on fellow "axis of evil" member North
Korea). And particularly when the new object of US
firepower is a country that has three times the
population and land mass of Iraq, and has not been
"softened up", as Iraq was, through more than a
decade of international sanctions.
Indeed,
Iran has been the country to benefit most from the
war in Iraq. Today it is awash in petrodollars
thanks to skyrocketing oil prices that are another
side-effect of the Iraq war. (One can only imagine
the massive amounts of fuel the war effort itself
has consumed, irrespective of the ongoing damage
to oil pipelines by insurgents, for everything
from Humvees, tanks and aircraft to the
never-ending supply lines transporting meals,
water, soldiers, ammo and absolutely everything
else into the country). And Iran has been able to
sit back and watch its two arch-enemies - the
Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq
- be defeated by the United States.
Yet
the situation is not exactly comforting for Iran.
Today it is surrounded by a nuclear-armed
Pakistan, US-occupied Afghanistan and Iraq, and a
nuclear-armed Israel that did not hesitate to bomb
Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981, despite
subsequent condemnation from the United Nations.
(It was the lesson of Osirak that led Iran to
distribute its nuclear program at various points
around the country, in many cases burying it deep
underground, so as not to provide an easy target
should history repeat itself.) And Iran's
leadership understands that the main issue in the
minds of US military planners and their Israeli
counterparts is not nuclear proliferation, but
regime change. To back down or show weakness, they
believe, is political suicide.
Stopping
nuclear proliferation is a noble goal, one the
international community should support. But the
double standards applied to Iran only make it more
difficult to contain those who wish to join the
nuclear club. They can't fail to notice that what
distinguishes the white hats from the black ones
is not the actions of a nation. Pakistan, Israel
and India can do as they please not because there
is inherently less risk in their nuclear-weapons
programs, but because of their relationship to
power.
It is commonly said of Middle
Eastern political arrangements that the enemy of
my enemy is my friend. The same is true of
politics in general. Yet changing times and
circumstances indicate that friends can swiftly
turn into enemies and enemies back into friends.
The best way to deal with such eventualities, when
it comes to issues as fundamental to human
survival as nuclear weaponry, is to ensure that
everybody plays by the same rule book. What is
good for Iran is good for Israel and the US and
every aspiring member of the nuclear club.
The sheer financial costs of the current
path to war should be enough to signal that a new
approach is essential. Given the trillion-dollar
price tag of the war in Iraq, opening a new front
in Iran would be financially disastrous, perhaps
even spelling the end of US hegemony and opening
new rifts in the relationships with China and
Russia, who oppose the use of military force
against Iran.
When millions of Americans
still have no medical insurance, when millions
more make less than a living wage, when tuition
costs make higher education off-limits to so many
qualified students, the tradeoff in terms of
priorities means the casualties of war are not
only in a hot, dry country halfway across the
world.
Deborah Campbell is the
author of This Heated Place, a journey
inside the Israel-Palestine conflict. Her writing
has appeared in The Guardian, Utne, Modern
Painters, the Chinese edition of The Crisis in
Economics (Higher Education Books), and
Adbusters, where she covers international affairs
and the Middle East. She can be reached at
www.deborahcampbell.ca.
(Copyright
2006 Deborah Campbell.)
Speaking
Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows
guest writers to have their say. Please click hereif you are interested in
contributing.
