Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: Don't Israel's nuclear weapons count?

Netanyahu has what he wants to keep up the idea of his plucky, vulnerable little state

Influential Europeans - including many Muslims - recently debated freedom of expression with the Danish editor who commissioned the cartoons of Prophet Mohammed which led to riots. Held in Berlin, it was a good, at times blazing, debate.

Freedom of expression, we were given to understand, is one of the valves in Europe's heart that must remain open to keep our continent alive and healthy. In good faith I exercise that freedom in this column. Let us see if readers and interest groups will support my right to write what follows even if they violently disagree with my observations.

From past experience I bet many will find that impossibly hard. They will denounce me as an enemy within, a rule-breaker of unspoken rules, bringing up stuff that must be left buried in the name of peace and justice. I see no reason to comply. This week shows us how such doublethink and doublespeak pulls the world towards Armageddon.

Leaders of the rich nations have turned their fire on Iran, quite rightly. On Friday came news that the Islamic Republic had been building a secret uranium enrichment plant near Qom. Then the junta fired test missiles, to prove that the bearded ones have really big willies. Unlike Iraq under Saddam, there are, in Iran, nuclear developments that could lead to weapons of mass destruction. It is not an immediate but a future danger, say credible intelligence experts and indeed Barack Obama himself.

Suddenly the president has got uncharacteristically belligerent, instructing Iran to open up all its nuclear facilities for inspection if it wants to avoid "a path that is going to lead us to confrontation". In May, Obama stood in Washington with the hawkish Benjamin Netanyahu, who we were told was there to seek assurances that there would be no shift from the conventional US position of total and unconditional support for Israel's policies right or wrong, known and clandestine.

On Thursday the US, China, Britain, France, Russia and Germany meet in Geneva and, by that time, Iran will be expected to submit to international scrutiny. As a supporter of the now crushed and broken reformers in Iran, I back the ultimatum to the fanatic and bellicose Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But what about that camel in the room? The one we all see but can't point out? What about the only power in the Middle East, also fanatic and aggressive, which has a vast stockpile of weapons enough to obliterate the region? Listen people, we need to talk about Israel. And soon. Like now.

I have been in contact with a young Iranian woman who wore a green scarf and lipstick on the streets of Tehran, whose uncle is currently being tortured in prison there for demonstrating against the results of the election. Somehow she escaped from the country and is in Britain briefly before going on to the US to make a new life. Let us call her M.

Nobody could hate Ahmadinejad more than M; she hates the whole regime, the treacherous leaders who betrayed the people. When she speaks she often gets asthmatic. But yet, but yet, she finds her passions rising for her country this week because of fears of military strikes by Israel and the manifestly unfair way that Israel is indulged. "I will go back if they attack my country, even if they put me to jail," M says. "That is my duty. Israel is the enemy of peace and America gives them money to get more arms. I don't want Iran to have these terrible weapons, but Israel must also be stopped."

The big powers are moving tentatively towards global de-nuclearisation, taking small but significant steps to show they do want everyone to pitch in. Obama's decision to shelve the European defence missile programme shows serious intent, so too Gordon Brown's announcement that Britain would cut down from four to three its Trident missile-carrying submarines. There was a moment this spring, albeit fleeting, when Rose Gottemoeller, an assistant secretary of state and Washington's chief nuclear arms negotiator, asked Israel to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, thus breaking the 40-year-old silence and US complicity in its accumulated, un-inspected arsenal. Her reasonable appeal provoked apoplexy in a nation that assumes special, indeed exceptional, treatment.

In the 1960s, Israel successfully hid its weapons from US inspectors. In 1986, Israeli nuclear technical assistant Mordechai Vanunu revealed information about the concealed stockpiles and has been punished ever since. Hubristic Israel no longer cares to deny that it has hundreds of atom and hydrogen bombs and devastating biological "tools". Netanyahu has been warning he will destroy the Iranian sites if his country feels the danger is real. Now he has just what he wanted - another crisis in the Middle East, to keep up the idea of plucky, vulnerable, endangered little Israel.

Alarmingly, even the liberal Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz is on side. History has made too many Israelis fear all humanity in perpetuity and that fear brings out the worst in that nation. It has predictably rejected the long, sober, unbiased UN report on the last assault on Gaza chaired by Richard Goldstone. He accused Hamas of crimes against Jewish civilians and charged Israel with grave crimes, the breaking of the Geneva convention, punishing and terrorising unarmed civilians.

I have some images of these victims sent to me by a Jewish pro-Palestinian activist. Children turned to ash, blistered mothers weeping, and on and on. There still is no respite for the hungry and dying in Gaza. If Israel can mete out such treatment and not be called to account, just think what the state feels entitled to do to Iran.

The Israeli human rights activist Gideon Spiro bravely asks that his country be subject to the same rules as Iran and all others in the Middle East: "Rein in Israel, compel it to accept a regime of nuclear disarmament and oblige it to open all nuclear, biological and chemical facilities and missile sites to international inspection." The US has leverage because it maintains and funds Israel. If Obama shies away from this, there can be no moral justification to go for Iran or North Korea or any other rogue state. And the leader whose election and dreams gave hope to millions thereby hastens the end of the world.

y.alibhaibrown@independent.co.uk [y.alibhaibrown@independent.co.uk]

You have a point but I also agree on the get tough policy with Iran, as you can see with todays article in the NY Times. Even though Iran is historically famous for breaking agreements and duplicity.

Iran Agrees to Send Enriched Uranium to Russia

By STEVEN ERLANGER and MARK LANDLER
Published: October 1, 2009
GENEVA — Iran agreed on Thursday in talks with the United States and other major powers to open its newly revealed uranium enrichment plant near Qum to international inspection in the next two weeks and to send most of its openly declared enriched uranium outside Iran to be turned into fuel for a small reactor that produces medical isotopes, senior American and other Western officials said.

Caren Firouz/Reuters
Iran’s top nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, said in Tehran that he was heading for talks in Geneva with a “positive approach.”
Iran’s agreement in principle to export most of its enriched uranium for processing — if it happens — would represent a major accomplishment for the West, reducing Iran’s ability to make a nuclear weapon quickly and buying more time for negotiations to bear fruit.

If Iran has secret stockpiles of enriched uranium, however, the accomplishment would be hollow, a senior American official conceded.

The officials described the long day of talks here with Iran, the first such discussions in which the United States has participated fully, as a modest success on a long and complicated road. Iran had at least finally engaged with the big powers on its nuclear program after more than a year and had agreed to some tangible, confidence-building steps before another meeting with the same participants before the end of this month.

But despite the relatively promising outcome, the Obama administration was at pains to strike a cautious tone, given Iran’s history of duplicity, its crackdown on its own people after the tainted June presidential elections and President Obama’s concern about being perceived as naïve or susceptible to a policy of Iranian delays.

Mr. Obama, speaking in Washington, called the talks “constructive,” but warned Tehran that he was prepared to move quickly to more stringent sanctions if negotiations over Iran’s nuclear ambitions dragged on.

“We’re not interested in talking for the sake of talking,” Mr. Obama told reporters in the White House Diplomatic Reception Room. “If Iran does not take steps in the near future to live up to its obligations, then the United States will not continue to negotiate indefinitely.”

France and Britain have spoken of December as an informal deadline for Iran to negotiate seriously about stopping enrichment and cooperate fully with the International Atomic Energy Agency. American officials say that timeline is “about right,” but Iran continues to insist that it has the right to enrich uranium for what it calls a purely civilian program.

Mr. Obama said Tehran must allow international inspectors into the site near Qum within the next two weeks, a timeline Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, agreed to here.

The atomic energy agency’s director general, Mohamed ElBaradei, will travel to Tehran this weekend to discuss the details and timing of the inspections, officials said. But the Americans also want Iran to cooperate with the inspectors and make personnel and documents about the site near Qum available.

Besides the scheduling of another meeting, the main practical accomplishment on Thursday was Iran’s agreement in principle — to be worked out by experts later this month in Vienna — to ship what American officials called “most” of its declared stockpile of lightly enriched uranium to Russia and France to be turned into nuclear fuel.

While American officials refused to specify the amount, other Western officials said it could be 1,200 kilograms, or more than 2,600 pounds, of enriched uranium, which could be as much as 75 percent of Iran’s declared stockpile. While there may be hidden stocks of enriched uranium, such a transfer, if it occurs, “buys some time” for further negotiations, a senior American official said.

Given the assessment that Iran has made enough low-enriched uranium to produce at least one nuclear weapon at some time in the future, a sharp reduction in its stockpile would be “a confidence-building measure to alleviate tensions and buy us some diplomatic space,” the official said.

Israel, the nation most concerned about a nuclear-armed Iran, has been informed of the discussions, another American official said.

Iran’s uranium is enriched to about 3.5 to 5 percent, the officials said; the Tehran reactor for making medical isotopes, last powered by Argentine-made fuel in 1993, needs uranium enriched to 19.75 percent, still far below weapons grade. And that uranium must then be fabricated into metal rods for the reactor.

Iran had told the International Atomic Energy Agency that it needed fuel for the Tehran reactor before December 2010. Washington, with its allies, pushed the agency to offer Iran the fuel, but made from Iran’s own enriched uranium as a feedstock. Mr. Jalili agreed to that in principle on Thursday.

The talks were between Iran and the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council — the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France — as well as Germany, and led by the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Javier Solana.

How can you "get tough" with Iran when Isreal is has been doing for some time what Iran is now being accused of, and succesfully for Isreal does have nuclear warheads! Do you know that the US by law is not to give any aid, monetary or otherwise, to nations engaging in producing or that have in their possession WMDs that were acquired outside of international norms? Why then, do we support Isreal to the tune of some 3 Billion annually? We can have standards and that would be good and dandy but what about DOUBLE standards?

You are forgetting that Israel is a staunch US ally and some say that is the un-official US state in the middle east. Also Israel has had nuclear weapons as part of their "Samson Option" since the 60's and never used them.Israeli national security strategy is founded on the premise that Israel cannot afford to lose a single war. Because the best way to avoid losing a war is to not fight it in the first place, Israeli strategy begins with the maintenance of a credible deterrent posture, which includes the willingness to carry out preemptive strikes. Should deterrence fail, Israel would seek to prevent escalation, and determine the outcome of war quickly and decisively. Since it lacks strategic depth, Israel must prevent the enemy from entering its territory, and must try to quickly transfer the battle to enemy territory.

Israel applies its nuclear weapons to all levels of this formula. The total Israeli nuclear stockpile consists of several hundred weapons of various types, including boosted fission and enhanced radiation weapons ("neutron bombs", as well as nuclear artillery shells. Strategically, Israel uses its long-range missiles and nuclear-capable aircraft (and, some say, submarines with nuclear-armed cruise missiles) to deter both conventional and unconventional attacks, or to launch "the Samson Option", an all-out attack against an adversary should defenses fail and population centers be threatened. In addition, despite Israel's insistence that it "will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East," these systems represent an effective preemptive strike force. At the same time, Israel deploys tactical systems designed to rapidly reduce an invading force. Following the 1973 war, Israel fielded at least three batteries of atomic-capable self-propelled 175mm cannons equipped with a total of no less than 108 warheads, and placed atomic land mines in the Golan Heights during the early 1980s.

Nuclear weapons need not be detonated to be used as weapons. Early in the 1973 war, Israel went on a nuclear alert, partly in the knowledge that it would be detected by the United States and the Soviet Union. The Soviets, Israel assumed, would restrain their Arab allies while the Americans would speed up resupply efforts. While the USSR did inform Egypt that Israel had armed three nuclear weapons, the extent to which Israel's nuclear alert affected the timing of Washington's subsequent decision to rearm Israel is not clear.

Israel does not have an overt nuclear doctrine beyond its insistence that it will not introduce nuclear weapons into the region. Instead, it follows a policy of what Avner Cohen calls "nuclear opacity" - visibly possessing nuclear weapons while denying their existence. This has allowed Israel to enjoy the benefits of being a nuclear weapons state in terms of deterrence without having to suffer the international repercussions of acknowledging their arsenal. Israel also has a strong commitment to preventing its potential adversaries in the region from becoming declared nuclear weapon states, as evidenced by Israel's 1981 raid on Iraq's Osirak nuclear installation.

But...Isreal developed those weapons outside of international law and has stockpiled an immense arsenal of them, never mind the one or few bombs Iran might ot might not be trying to make (and unlike Iran Isreal does indeed have the technology to deliver said weapons). So are you telling me that because it is a "staunch US ally" Isreal can blatantly ignore international law and go about its business with regards to the development of WMDs? Actually, you don't have to state as much for that is indeed the situation. Let me ask you another question instead: You seem to feel that Isreal has a RIGHT to a nuclear deterrent because, after all, they "cannot afford to lose a single war" (I know of very few countries that can but whatever). Do no other countries on the face of the earth have a right to a "nuclear deterrent" as well or do you have to be a member of some specific "club" or grouping of nations before it becomes palpatable?

Iran is a loose cannon and supporter of terrorist organizations and instigating world chaos and Muslim fundamentalist supremacy.
Israel is a democratic state founded on democratic principles, if Iran were to take over the world we would not be having this conversation and your sister, mother and wife would have few rights as a fellow human.
I have to depart now, but topic is interesting and I can continue next week.

Hmmm...Isreal is a democratic state founded on democratic principles? Really? Isreal was founded as a JEWISH STATE, a state for a specific religion so automatically the whole "founded on democratic principles" goes right out the window. It's a theocracy with democratic trappings and nothing more. As for your other point: Do you think that Orthodox Jewish women have the same rights within there society that their men do or most western women for that matter?? I would posit that they are as subservient in their society as most Muslim women are. Ahhh, you're laboring under false assumptions freind.

Cibby posting again from the outskirts of the grassy knoll and the left side of the grassy knoll any way here is the Patton Doctrine on what should be done http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3WnpUZFEyA

Ad hominems but nothing actually challenging any particular point I made...very wise of you.

cibby you did not watch the Patton doctrine shame shame