[NYTr] The Middle East has had a secretive nuclear power in its midst for years

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by tsimonds -activ-l

The Guardian - Nov 20, 2007
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2213814,00.html

The Middle East has had a secretive nuclear power in its midst for years

When will the US and the UK tell the truth about Israeli weapons? Iran
isn't starting an atomic arms race, it's joining one

by George Monbiot

George Bush and Gordon Brown are right: there should be no nuclear
weapons in the Middle East. The risk of a nuclear conflagration could
be greater there than anywhere else. Any nation developing them should
expect a firm diplomatic response. So when will they impose sanctions
on Israel?

Like them, I believe that Iran is trying to acquire the bomb. I also
believe it should be discouraged, by a combination of economic pressure
and bribery, from doing so (a military response would, of course, be
disastrous). I believe that Bush and Brown - who maintain their nuclear
arsenals in defiance of the non-proliferation treaty - are in no
position to lecture anyone else. But if, as Bush claims, the
proliferation of such weapons "would be a dangerous threat to world
peace", why does neither man mention the fact that Israel, according to
a secret briefing by the US Defence Intelligence Agency, possesses
between 60 and 80 of them?

Officially, the Israeli government maintains a position of "nuclear
ambiguity": neither confirming nor denying its possession of nuclear
weapons. But everyone who has studied the issue knows that this is a
formula with a simple purpose: to give the United States an excuse to
keep breaking its own laws, which forbid it to grant aid to a country
with unauthorised weapons of mass destruction. The fiction of ambiguity
is fiercely guarded. In 1986, when the nuclear technician Mordechai
Vanunu handed photographs of Israel's bomb factory to the Sunday Times,
he was lured from Britain to Rome, drugged and kidnapped by Mossad
agents, tried in secret, and sentenced to 18 years in prison. He served
12 of them in solitary confinement and was banged up again - for six
months - soon after he was released.

However, in December last year, the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert,
accidentally let slip that Israel, like "America, France and Russia",
had nuclear weapons. Opposition politicians were furious. They attacked
Olmert for "a lack of caution bordering on irresponsibility". But US aid
continues to flow without impediment.

As the fascinating papers released last year by the National Security
Archive show, the US government was aware in 1968 that Israel was
developing a nuclear device (what it didn't know is that the first one
had already been built by then). The contrast to the efforts now being
made to prevent Iran from acquiring the bomb could scarcely be starker.

At first, US diplomats urged Washington to make its sale of 50 F4
Phantom jets conditional on Israel's abandonment of its nuclear
programme. As a note sent from the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs to
the secretary of state in October 1968 reveals, the order would make
the US "the principal supplier of Israel's military needs" for the
first time. In return, it should require "commitments that would make
it more difficult for Israel to take the critical decision to go
nuclear". Such pressure, the memo suggested, was urgently required:
France had just delivered the first of a consignment of medium range
missiles, and Israel intended to equip them with nuclear warheads.

Twenty days later, on November 4 1968, when the assistant defence
secretary met Yitzhak Rabin (then the Israeli ambassador to Washington),
Rabin "did not dispute in any way our information on Israel's nuclear or
missile capability". He simply refused to discuss it. Four days after
that, Rabin announced that the proposal was "completely unacceptable to
us". On November 27, Lyndon Johnson's administration accepted Israel's
assurance that "it will not be the first power in the Middle East to
introduce nuclear weapons".

As the memos show, US officials knew that this assurance had been broken
even before it was made. A record of a phone conversation between Henry
Kissinger and another official in July 1969 reveals that Richard Nixon
was "very leery of cutting off the Phantoms", despite Israel's blatant
disregard of the agreement. The deal went ahead, and from then on the US
administration sought to bamboozle its own officials in order to defend
Israel's lie. In August 1969, US officials were sent to "inspect"
Israel's Dimona nuclear plant. But a memo from the state department
reveals that "the US government is not prepared to support a 'real'
inspection effort in which the team members can feel authorised to ask
directly pertinent questions and/or insist on being allowed to look at
records, logs, materials and the like. The team has in many subtle ways
been cautioned to avoid controversy, 'be gentlemen' and not take issue
with the obvious will of the hosts".

Nixon refused to pass the minutes of the conversation he'd had with the
Israeli prime minister, Golda Meir, to the US ambassador to Israel,
Wally Barbour. Meir and Nixon appear to have agreed that the Israeli
programme could go ahead, as long as it was kept secret.

The US government has continued to protect it. Every six months, the
intelligence agencies provide Congress with a report on technology
acquired by foreign states that's "useful for the development or
production of weapons of mass destruction". These reports discuss the
programmes in India, Pakistan, North Korea, Iran and other nations, but
not in Israel. Whenever other states have tried to press Israel to join
the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, the US and European governments
have blocked them. Israel has also exempted itself from the biological
and chemical weapons conventions.

By refusing to sign these treaties, Israel ensures it needs never be
inspected. While the International Atomic Energy Agency's inspectors
crawl round Iran's factories, put seals on its uranium tanks and blow
the whistle when it fails to cooperate, they have no legal authority to
inspect facilities in Israel. So when the Israeli government complains,
as it did last week, that the head of the IAEA is "sticking his head in
the sand over Iran's nuclear programme", you can only gape at its
chutzpah. Israel is constantly racking up the pressure for action
against Iran, aware that no powerful state will press for action
against Israel.

Yes, Iran under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a dangerous and unpredictable
state involved in acts of terror abroad. The president is a Holocaust
denier opposed to the existence of Israel. During the Iran-Iraq war,
Iran responded to Saddam Hussein's toxic bombardments with chemical
weapons of its own. But Israel under Olmert is also a dangerous and
unpredictable state involved in acts of terror abroad. Two months ago
it bombed a site in Syria (whose function is fiercely disputed). Last
year, it launched a war of aggression against Lebanon. It remains in
occupation of Palestinian lands. In February 2001, according to the
BBC, it used chemical weapons in Gaza: 180 people were admitted to
hospital with severe convulsions. Nuclear weapons in Israel's hands are
surely just as dangerous as nuclear weapons in Iran's.

So when will our governments speak up? When will they acknowledge that
there is already a nuclear power in the Middle East, and that it
presents an existential threat to its neighbours? When will they admit
that Iran is not starting a nuclear arms race, but joining one? When
will they demand that the rules they impose on Iran should also apply
to Israel?