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Can
we avoid an Iranian bomb?
By
Jonathan
Power
September 26, 2003
ISTANBUL - No country prevaricates so much unless
it has something to hide. The more the Iranians dodge and
weave the clearer it becomes that an important faction in
its divided ruling class wants to keep open the option to
build a nuclear weapon. Yet at the same time it is also
apparent that another powerful faction regards this as a
mistaken policy that will set back all the enormous
effort that has gone into mending fences with both Europe
and America.
It takes no great effort to understand that Iran has
reasons for wanting nuclear weapons. Not least because
Israel has them. It is not so much that Iran believes it
could engage in nuclear brinkmanship to force Israel out
of Palestine. Nor does it believe it could use its own
nuclear armory to neutralize Israel's and then seek to
engage it with conventional forces. All these would be
too risky strategies. It is more a simple question of
international standing. It is to be able to claim that it
is the one who most faithfully supports Palestinian
Muslims. It is the one that dares goes nose to nose, at
least theatrically, with the regional "bully" Israel.
Then there is Iraq. If Iraq had nuclear weapons during
its war with Iran, 1980-88, it may well have used them.
After all it did use chemical weapons and at the time
hardly anybody protested.
The arguments against further proliferation are
immensely strong yet there has always been something
unpersuasive in the stick being waived by an America that
continues to develop the sophistication, if not the
numbers, of its immense nuclear arsenal. Moreover, it is
joined in its Iranian quest by a Europe which has two
nuclear weapons states, both of which have great
intellectual difficulty in explaining why in a post Cold
War world they hang on to their armouries.
Over the decades western policy towards proliferators
has been ambivalent, indecisive and inconsistent, none
more so than towards Pakistan whose nuclear weapons
arsenal is now accepted (as long as the government keeps
it out of the hands of Taliban sympathizers). But in
April, 1979, the attitude in Washington was almost as
harsh as it now is towards Iran. The Carter
administration, convinced that Pakistan was secretly
building a nuclear weapon, suspended military aid in a
move mandated by Congress's Symington amendment. However,
when Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan in December of
that year, the Administration persuaded Congress to
overrule the amendment and a large arms aid program was
started up again. For the next decade, in return for
Pakistan's help in building up the anti-Soviet mujahidin
fighters in Afghanistan, who later went to work for Osama
bin Laden, Washington turned a blind eye to Pakistan's
nuclear bomb efforts. Only in 1990 with the Soviets
driven out of Afghanistan did President George Bush
senior decide to cut off military assistance. Once again
this was reversed under his son, President George W.
Bush, as America wooed Pakistan for help in defeating the
Taliban and hunting down Al Qaeda members. Not only is
the bomb tolerated, not much fuss was made last year when
the U.S. discovered that Pakistan was acquiring missiles
from North Korea.
Likewise, Washington's long refusal to acknowledge
what it knew since the early 1960s about Israel's secret
nuclear reactor and weapons plant in the Negev desert has
cost it dear. Israel with the U.S. behind it has never
lacked an adequate conventional defense. Its nuclear
weapons program has been as much an unnecessary
provocation as its settlements policy.
Credibility and consistency are necessary and
important allies in the war against nuclear
proliferation. But the same solemn international
agreement that the U.S. and Europe are now waiving at
Iran, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, is the very
one in which the nuclear-haves solemnly promised to make
rapid progress in getting rid of their nuclear weapons in
return for most of the rest of world remaining
signatories. All this dissembling and double
talking lowers the bargaining strength of the West at
this critical moment.
Yet the last thing the world needs is an Iranian bomb
or Iran to be within a screwdriver turn of having one.
One more accidental launch or opportunity for nuclear
theft waiting to happen have to be avoided.
The U.S. and Europe need to rethink their increasingly
strident stand. Offer Iran all the civilian nuclear
cooperation it can swallow in return for open books and
regular intrusive inspections. Offer to end all political
and economic estrangement (a policy turnaround long
overdue). And, not least, set a better example in their
own nuclear disarmament programs. There is no good reason
why if the West played its cards well it couldn't help
Iran become another Turkey, democratic, pro Western,
militarily strong if it so wants, but bomb free.
I can be reached by phone +44
7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2003 By
JONATHAN POWER
Follow this
link to read about - and order - Jonathan Power's book
written for the
40th Anniversary of
Amnesty International
"Like
Water on Stone - The Story of Amnesty
International"
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