@@ Israel guns for Iran - Why? @@
Arash
April 23, 2005
Israel Guns for Iran
By Jude Wanniski
When Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon visited President George Bush at the White House
on 11-12 April, the news coming out of the meetings should have been dominated by the
president's displeasure with Sharon permitting the expansion of settlements in the West
Bank.
Instead, the "New York Times" headline on April 13, 2005 was Sharon Asks U.S. to Pressure
Iran on Nuclear Arms
(http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FA0812FC385A0C708DDDAD0894DD404482).
In other words, the best defense is a good offense.
Sharon, of course, knew his decision to permit expansion of a West Bank settlement near
Jerusalem by 3500 units would be seen in Washington as a contravention of the road map in
the peace process.
Washington diplomats were stunned, seeing it as a move practically calculated to undermine
the authority of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who is trying as hard as he can to
believe that Sharon is acting in good faith.
That issue will remain alive as Washington waits to see if Sharon goes ahead with the
expansion despite expressions of disapproval from Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice.
Aerial photographs
Meanwhile, the artful Sharon succeeded in changing the subject by spreading out aerial
photographs purported to show secret Iranian installations, where he alleges nuclear
weapons are being developed.
In briefing the press, the White House made it clear there was "nothing startling or new"
in the aerial photos.
It could have been pointed out, though, that Tehran not only has agreed with the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that it will permit inspections of sites
suspected of housing weapons programs, but also that the sites shown in Sharon's photos
have already been visited by IAEA inspectors, with nothing found.
Israel waves aside the "repeated" findings of Iranian "compliance" with the terms of the
1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) by Mohamed ElBaradei, the IAEA's director.
Sharon's assertion is that, as long as Iran is permitted to enrich uranium for the nuclear
power plants it is building and plans to build in the future, it can acquire the
capability of producing highly enriched uranium (HEU).
Iraq bombing
This was the same rationale Israel used in 1981 when it bombed the almost-complete Osiraq
nuclear power plant outside Baghdad.
Israeli officials acknowledged at the time that IAEA inspectors would have control of the
fissile material at Osiraq and that there was no evidence Iraq had a weapons program in
violation of the NPT. But it insisted, as Sharon does now regarding Iran, that it could
not be permitted to develop the technical ability to do so.
What now worries observers is not that Israel will conduct preemptive bombing attacks
against the sites in the aerial photographs and the Bushehr power plant that has been
under construction for decades and is now being completed by Russian contractors.
The Israeli Air Force does not have the capability of delivering bombs big enough to
destroy the installations because they are limited in how far they can fly.
The pressure on the United States by Sharon is not to persuade President Bush to bomb Iran
for Israel's security, as he knows this would never happen.
Neocon conspiracy
The plan of the neoconservatives in the Bush administration, who work closely with Sharon,
instead, aim at changing the terms of the NPT when the countries that are party to the
treaty will gather in New York City in May 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 IAEA has
been proven correct in its assessment that Saddam Hussein had no nuclear program and would
be incapable of building one. Its assessment was made before the president decided we had
to go to war anyway, just to make sure.
The neocons, who essentially control Vice President Dick Cheney and his office, have
already made great strides in persuading the president that the NPT is outmoded and must
be modernized. His statements in support of the NPT say that he likes it so much he wishes
it to be strengthened.
How? By removing from its provisions the "inalienable" right of signatory nations to
enrich uranium to the 4% potency required for power plants, but not the 90% required for
nuclear weapons. To accomplish this, the president has named John Bolton
(http://www.stopbolton.org) to be UN ambassador.
In his position at the State Department in the first Bush term, Bolton has been open in
his disdain for the IAEA's ElBaradei and has done everything he can to have him removed.
Deliberate confusion
The reason the treaty is outmoded, Bolton and his underlings insist, is because it has
become too easy for NPT members to violate the terms of the treaty and get away with it.
An American expert in nuclear weapons, Dr. James Gordon Prather
(http://www.antiwar.com/prather), says Bolton has 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 deliberately obfuscates 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 U.S., have not fully
complied with the safeguards regime, which actually preceded the NPT and which simply
means that they were 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 hates 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 ElBaradei's team in Vienna to monitor Iran's program day and night.
Sharon's ploy
The great danger in this neocon game plan is that when the members refuse to alter the NPT
at its meeting in New York in May – as they surely will – the argument will be made that
the U.S. can no longer support the NPT and will abandon it as a mechanism for preventing
non-proliferation.
It is conceivable to experts like Dr. Prather, who was the U.S. army's chief scientist
during the president Ronald Reagan administration, that further argument will be made that
action against Tehran must be taken to force it to abandon any effort to enrich uranium.
What happens then would, of course, increase tensions, not only between Washington and
Tehran, but also between Washington and the rest of the world, most especially China and
Russia.
At the very least, it would be a perfect time for Sharon to announce that Israel will
permit the expansion of the settlement in question, probably "in order to strengthen" the
road map to peace.
* 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 U.S. president Ronald Reagan from 1978 to 1981.
http://www.wanniski.com
http://www.antiwar.com/wanniski