@@ Memo to Senate Foreign Relations @@
Arash
April 12, 2005
The Real Threat From John Bolton
By Jude Wanniski
Memo to: Chairman Richard Lugar, Senate Foreign Relations
(http://lugar.senate.gov)
cc: Senator Joseph Biden, ranking Democrat (http://biden.senate.gov)
Re: The Plan to Scrap the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT)
You have obviously told the White House that you will hold your nose and try
to get John Bolton through the committee this week and confirmed by the
Senate ASAP. It's no secret that when the neocons who run foreign policy in
this administration via control of Vice President Cheney tried to get Bolton
the No. 2 slot at State under Condi Rice, you balked and said he could not
be confirmed for that job.
My guess, Senator, is that you figure he could not do as much damage at
Turtle Bay as he could at Foggy Bottom. There is no way he could dismantle
the United Nations, and in the hearings today before your committee he made
all kinds of sweet sounds about wanting the "strengthen the UN"
(http://www.stopbolton.org).
His real mission, though, is nothing less than to undermine the Nuclear
Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), and once he is installed, he will be in a
position to take his orders from the Perle Cabal to do so
(http://freemasonrywatch.org/wolfowitz_cabal.html).
In case you had forgotten, countries that are party to the Treaty will
gather in New York City next month for the 1970 treaty's Seventh Review
Conference. The members, practically every nation on earth, meet every five
years to assess how things are going.
Actually, things have been going very well, as evidenced by the fact that
the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has been proven correct in its
assessment that Saddam Hussein had no nuke program and would be incapable of
building one – an assessment made before the president decided we had to go
to war anyway, just to make sure.
Yes, there are problems with Iran and North Korea that will be discussed at
the Review Conference, but you should know that there would be no problems
with either country if it were not for the mess Bolton made in the first
Bush term in wrecking the diplomatic efforts Secretary of State Colin Powell
was trying to pursue.
What is already happening is that Jackie Wolcott Sanders
(http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/biog/27684.htm), the U.S. special
representative for nuclear nonproliferation and a Bolton underling while he
held the top nonproliferation post at State, has given every indication that
the United States will be asking the conference to "fix" the treaty on the
grounds that it has become outmoded.
You can check this out at the State Department's home page
(http://usinfo.state.gov/journals/itps/0305/ijpe/ijpe0305.htm), where Ms.
Sanders' statement on NPT policy immediately precedes your statement on
legislative perspectives on nukes. Also note the president's statement of
NPT support on that same page: "Parties to the Treaty on the
Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons must take strong action to confront the
threat of noncompliance with the NPT in order to preserve and strengthen the
treaty's nonproliferation undertakings".
The reason the treaty is outmoded, she says repeatedly, is because it has
become too easy for NPT members to violate the terms of the treaty and get
away with it. As Dr. Gordon Prather (http://www.antiwar.com/prather), whom I
believe you know, put it in an e-mail last week: "She has – as Bolton did
before her – deliberately confused 'failure to fully comply with an IAEA
Safeguards Agreement' with 'violations' of the NPT. … So far as the IAEA has
been able to determine, no country subject to the NPT-IAEA-Safeguards regime
[except Iraq, of course] has 'violated' the NPT. It is outrageous that
Bolton and Sanders deliberately obfuscate the difference between 'failure to
fully comply with an IAEA Agreement' with 'violations of the NPT' or of the
even more deliberate obfuscation 'failure to comply with its NPT
obligations' ".
What Dr. Prather is saying is that many countries (including the United
States), have not fully complied with the Safeguards regime, which actually
preceded the NPT, and which simply means that they were have found to have
done something that they were obliged to report to the IAEA and failed to do
so, for example moving material from Building A to Building B.
Most recently, both Egypt and South Korea were found to have "not fully
complied" with Safeguard, but there is no evidence that they (or Iran, or
North Korea) ever violated the terms of the NPT.
Iraq did, but what Bolton and Sanders hate to point out is that the NPT was
strengthened when that clandestine effort was discovered after the Persian
Gulf War. The new protocols, to which Iran has agreed, permit intrusive,
perpetual inspections, not by IAEA snoops coming in now and then, but with
on-site cameras and sensing devices that would permit Director General
Mohammed el-Baradei's team in Vienna to monitor Iran's program night and
day.
The real intent of the neocons who cooked up the war in Iraq is to smoke
another one past you and the Foreign Relations Committee and ultimately
against the president. They will surely propose an amendment "strengthening"
the treaty that will remove the "inalienable right" of NPT members to enrich
uranium for peaceful purposes (under perpetual monitoring).
North Korea was quite prepared to do this several years ago, until it
observed Iraq – a fellow "rogue state" according to the president – in full
compliance with the NPT and getting bombed and occupied anyway.
There is probably no way the NPT Conference would agree to amending the
treaty, as it would have to be agreed to by Russian and China, who clearly
see what's going on here: One of the moves in the neocon chess game is to
bring about "regime change" in Tehran, by hook or by crook, in order to
satisfy the Likudniks in Tel Aviv that only Israel will have nukes in the
Middle East (http://www.uregina.ca/arts/CRC).
Dr. Prather points out that every schoolkid knows Israel has a nuclear
arsenal, yet each year the American president certifies in his request for
financial aid to Israel that he has no evidence of Israeli nukes!!!
Well, okay, but Iran is not going to sit still if push comes to shove on
this issue and the U.S. threatens military action, i.e., the bombing of
sites that might someday be converted into nuke sites.
What worries Dr. Prather, and frankly me, is that Iran would respond with
conventional sea power in the Persian Gulf and with modern sea-skimmers
(http://www.aio.ir/missiles.htm) it has acquired from China
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silkworm_missile) blow up a bunch of U.S.
warships and oil tankers. Pretty soon things could get serious. Don't you
think?
Anyway, if you have a chance, Senator, you might look into all this. Even if
you only have a chance to clear up this fuzziness between the Safeguard
Regime and the NPT. This is the kind of cloudiness over intelligence that
got us in the soup in Iraq. It would be far soupier if we found ourselves on
a slippery slope with Tehran. Don't you think?
* Jude Wanniski, founder and chairman of Polyconomics, Inc., is a
world-renowned political economist whose 1978 book The Way the World Works
(http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0895263440) was named one of the 100
most influential books of the 20th Century by the editors of the National
Review. He was an economic advisor to Ronald Reagan from 1978 to 1981.
http://www.wanniski.com