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Daily Star
March 21, 2006
By David Hirst
There is widespread international agreement that Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons is an alarming prospect. But very little attention is paid to the most obvious reason why: There already is a Middle Eastern nuclear power, Israel, insistent on preserving its monopoly. So the crisis has been foreseeable for decades; it would be automatically triggered by the emergence of a second nuclear power, friendly or unfriendly to the West. Iran is the unfriendliest possible, encouraging a widespread assumption that it alone is responsible for creating the crisis - and settling it. But is it?
It certainly isn't blameless. First, its nuclear arming would deal a major blow to an already fraying international non-proliferation regime. Second, it would involve a huge deceit. Third, the United States broadly divides actual or potential nuclear powers into responsible and irresponsible ones. Iran would be irresponsible par excellence, being already the worst of "rogue states." Typically, a rogue state, as well as being domestically oppressive, ideologically repugnant and anti-American, unites an aggressive nature with disproportionate military strength, thereby posing a constant, exceptional threat to an established regional order. What could now more emphatically consign Iran to such company than President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, with his calls to "wipe Israel off the map?"
Yet, in nuclear terms, Israel is the original sinner in the Middle East. Non-proliferation must be universal; if, in a zone of potential conflict, one party goes nuclear, its adversaries can't be expected not to either. No matter how long ago it was, by violating that principle, Israel must bear a heavy responsibility for what has since happened. Second, its deceit was no less than Iran's, though, there being no nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty at the time, it was only America it deceived. Mindful of what Israel's mendacity portended, the Central Intelligence Agency warned in 1963 that, by greatly enhancing its sense of security, nuclear capacity would make Israel less, not more, conciliatory toward the Arabs; it would exploit its new "psychological advantages" to "intimidate" them.
Which - thirdly - points to the irresponsible use Israel has indeed made of its nuclear capability. Sure, it always justified it as its "Samson option," its last recourse against neighbors bent on destroying it. There is no such threat now; but if there was once, or will be again, the question is why.
A major part of the answer is that on most counts, except hostility to the U.S., Israel has always behaved like a rogue state. It came into being as a massive disrupter of the established Middle East order, through violence and ethnic cleansing. Such a settler-state could only achieve true legitimacy, true integration into a still-to-be-completed new order, by restoring the Palestinian rights it violated in its creation and growth.
That, at bottom, is what the everlasting "peace process" is about. The world has a broad definition of the settlement lying at the end of it. It doesn't involve that full emancipation of an indigenous people that had been the norm in European decolonization; only a compromise vastly more onerous for the defeated Palestinians than the victorious Israelis.
But the settlement never comes, because Israel resists even that degree of compromise. For it runs no ultimate risk in doing so. Its nuclear power, on top of its already overwhelming conventional superiority, ensures that. Such irresponsible use of it is what Shimon Peres, the father of Israel's nuclearization, was alluding to when he said that "acquiring a superior weapons system would mean the possibility of using it for compellent purposes - that is forcing the other side to accept Israeli political demands." Or what Moshe Sneh, a leading Israeli strategist, meant when he said: "I don't want the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations to be held under the shadow of an Iranian nuclear bomb." As if the Arabs haven't had to negotiate under the shadow of an Israeli bomb these past four decades There are three ways the crisis can go. The first is that Israel insists on, and achieves, the unchallenged perpetuation of its "original sin." For it isn't so much "the world," as President George W. Bush keeps saying, that finds a nuclear Iran so intolerable, but the world on Israel's behalf; not the risk that Iran will attack Israel that makes the crisis so dangerous, but that Israel will attack Iran - or that the U.S. will take on the job itself. In effect, Israel's nukes, or the protection of them, have become a diplomatic instrument against its benefactor. It is legacy of America's own reluctant acquiescence in a nuclear Israel, which subsequently turned into uninhibited endorsement by ever more pro-Israeli administrations.
So here is a superpower, wrote American strategic analyst Mark Gaffney, so "blind and stupid" as to let "another state, Israel, control its foreign policy." And, in a brilliant study, he warned that a U.S. assault on Iran could end in a catastrophe comparable to the massacre of Roman legions at Cannae in 216 BC, by Hannibal's much inferior army. For in one field of military technology, anti-ship missiles, Russia is streets ahead of the U.S. And Iran's possession of the fearsome 3M-82 Moskit could turn the Persian Gulf into a death trap for the American fleet. And sure enough, from the Bush administration itself have been coming the first hints that, given the regional havoc Iran could indeed wreak, there may be nothing the U.S. can realistically do to stop it from going nuclear.
This points to a second way the crisis then could go, where Israel would be obliged to renounce its nuclear monopoly and the Middle East would enter into a Cold War-style balance of terror. It could be a stable one. Clearly, like Israel, Iran would make irresponsible, political use of its nukes. But, like Israel's too, Iran's nuclear quest is essentially defensive, even if not in quite the same "existential" sense. Nothing could have more convinced it of the need for an unconventional deterrent than the fate of Saddam Hussein's Iraq, which the U.S. had no qualms about attacking because it didn't have one. But surely even the mullahs wouldn't be mad enough to make first-strike use of their deterrent against an Israel that could unleash such overwhelming second-strike capability against them The third way - Iran's abandonment of its nuclear ambitions - would stand its best chance of being accomplished if Israel were induced to do likewise; not just because reciprocity is the essence of disarmament, but because it would signify a fundamental change in the U.S. approach to the region.
And that might have beneficent effects way beyond the merely nuclear. Wrote veteran Israeli military analyst Zeev Schiff, "There is only one way to avoid a nuclear balance of terror: to use the time left, while we still have a monopoly in this field, to make peace. In the framework of peace, a nuclear-free zone can be established."
But that is the wrong way round. For making peace, as the CIA memo foresaw, Israel doesn't need the intransigence that absolute security brings, but the spirit of compromise a judicious dose of insecurity might bring. A utopian notion perhaps, with the world now so focused on the villainy of Iran - yet better than a U.S. onslaught which would add so thick a layer to an already mountainous deposit of anti-Western feeling, that Israel could barely even hope ever to win acceptance in the region.
David Hirst was for a long time Middle East correspondent for London's The Guardian. He wrote this commentary for the Daily Star.
Copyright (c) 2006 The Daily Star
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