Thursday, August 30, 2012
Wednesday, August 29, 2012
NAM: A Coup against the West??
Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya: The NAM Summit, Iran, and Syria: A Coup against the West?
Can the NAM Summit bridge the Iran-Egypt Gap?
by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya
The upcoming summit of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) will be held in Tehran from August 26 to 31, 2012. The NAM and its summit are mostly ignored in the Atlanticist world of the United States and NATO, but this year’s gathering has gotten the attention of the Atlanticists and their press. The reason is that the NAM summit’s venue has upset the political establishment in Washington, DC.
The US government has got its feathers ruffled and even gone out of its way to berate NAM leaders for gathering in Iran. US State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland – the spouse of neo-con Project for the New American Century (PNAC) co-founder and arch-imperialist Robert Kagan – has asked Egypt’s new president, Mohamed Morsi, and even UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Washington’s own steward at the UN, not to travel to Tehran. Nuland and the US State Department have bitterly declared that Iran is not deserving of such “high-level presences.” The US, however, is forced to grin and bear the gathering of world leaders in Tehran.
What will take place is an international extravaganza, minus NATO and its key de facto members – Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea – in the Asia-Pacific and Israel. African, Asian, Caribbean, and Latin America officials will be there in full strength. The Chinese, which have the status of observers in the NAM, will be there. The Russians, which are not part of the NAM, have been invited as Iran’s special guests and will be represented by Konstantin Shuvalov, Russian ambassador-at-large and Vladimir Putin’s envoy. Even non-NAM member Turkey has been given an invitation from Tehran. To help the Palestinians, Hamas will also be given a special seat at the table under an invitation sent from Iran to Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh to participate at the summit alongside the US-Israeli puppet Mahmoud Abbas. Alongside the Russian Federation, most the members of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) will be attending as either full members or observers. Aside from the Chinese and Russians, the other three members of the BRICS grouping – Brazil, India, and South Africa – that is becoming the new engine shaping the world will also be in attendance.
The NAM Summit, Iran, and Syria: A Coup against the West?
The gathering of NAM leaders will doubtlessly be an important event for Iran’s international prestige and status. For almost a week Tehran will be a key center of the world alongside the offices of the UN in New York City and Geneva. Not only will Iran be the venue for one of the largest international get-togethers of world leaders, but it will also be handed over the organization’s chairmanship from Arab powerhouse Egypt. Iran will retain this position as the leader of the NAM for the next few years and will be able to speak on behalf of the international organization. Up to a certain degree this position will allow Tehran to have more influence in world affairs. At least this is the view in Tehran where none of the significance of the NAM summit has been lost on Iranian politicians and officials who one after another are pointing out the importance of the NAM summit for their country.
The NAM is the second largest international organization and body in the world after the United Nations. With 120 full members and 17 observer members it includes most the countries and governments of the world. About two-thirds of the UN’s member states are full NAM members. The African Union (AU), Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization, Commonwealth of Nations, Hostosian National Independence Movement, Kanak Socialist National Liberation Front, Arab League, Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), South Center, United Nations, and World Peace Council are all observers too.
The US and NATO which very generously and misleadingly throw around the term “international community” when they are referring to themselves are really a global minority that pale in comparison to the international grouping formed by the NAM. Any agreements or consensuses drilled out by the NAM represent not only the bulk of the international community, but also the non-imperialist international majority or those countries that have traditionally been viewed as the “have-nots.” Unlike at the UN, the “silent majority” will have its voice heard with little adulteration and perversion from the confederates of NATOistan.
The NAM gathering in Tehran signifies an important event. It demonstrates that Iran is genuinely not internationally isolated like the images that the United States and major European Union powers, such as the UK and France, like to continuously project. Atlanticist media are scrambling to explain this situation and the Israelis are clearly upset.
Undoubtedly, Iran will use the international gathering to its advantage and make use of the NAM to garnish support for its international positions and to help try to end the crisis in Syria. The US-supported siege of Syria will be denounced at the NAM conference and diplomatic blows will be dealt against the US and its clients and satellites. Already the hurried ministerial conference about the fighting in Syria organized by the Iranian Foreign Ministry in Tehran before the emergency summit held by the OIC in Mecca was a prelude to the diplomatic support that Iran will give the Syrian Arab Republic at the 2012 NAM summit.
Despite Algerian and Iranian opposition, Syria was expelled from the OIC at the behest of Saudi Arabia and the petro-monarchies. While the OIC emergency summit in Mecca may have been a political and diplomatic blow to Damascus, the situation is expected to be much different at the NAM summit in Tehran. The Syrians will also be present in Tehran and able to face their Arab antagonists from the petro-monarchies of the Persian Gulf.
The Genesis of the Non-Aligned Movement and Third World
The Non-Aligned Movement and concept of a “Third World” have their roots in the period of de-colonization after the Second World War when the empires of Western Europe began to crumble and formally end. This superficially represented an end to the domination of the weak by the strong. In reality, colonialism was merely substituted with foreign aid and loans by the declining empires. In this context, the British would offer aid to their former colonies while the French and Dutch would do the same with their former colonies to maintain control over them. Thus, the exploitation never truly ended and the world was maintained in a state of disequilibrium. The United Nations was also hostage to the big powers and ignored many important issues concerning places like Africa and Latin America.
What brought the formation of the NAM about was firstly the rejection of domination and interference by the countries of the “Global North” – a term that will be defined shortly – and the concept of co-existence that India and China carved out in 1954 when New Delhi recognized Tibet as a part of China.
The NAM started as an Asian initiative, which sought to address the tense relations between China and the US on one hand and China’s relations with other Asian powers on the other hand. The newly independent Asian states wanted to avoid any ratcheting up of the Cold War in their continent, especially after the disastrous US-led military intervention in Korea, or the manipulation of India and Indonesia as buffer states against the People’s Republic of China. This Asian initiative quickly broadened and gained the support of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Egypt, and the various leaders of the nationalist independence movements in Africa that were fighting for their liberation against NATO countries like Britain, France, and Portugal.
Yugoslavian President Josip Broz Tito, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, and Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser were the three main forces behind the organization’s creation. Kwame Nkrumah, the Marxist pan-African leader of Ghana, and Ahmed Sukarno, the leader of Indonesia, would also put their weight behind the NAM and join Tito, Nehru, and Nasser. These leaders and their countries did not view the Cold War as an ideological struggle. This was a smokescreen. The Cold War was a power struggle from their perspectives and ideology was merely used as a justification.
The Different Worlds of the Cold War
The word “non-alignment” was first used on the world stage by Vengalil Krishnan Krishna Menon, India’s ambassador to the United Nations, while the term “Third World” was first used by the French scholar Alfred Sauvy. Third World is a debated political term and some find it both deregulatory and ethnocentric. To the point of confusion the phrase Third World is inextricably intertwined with the concept of non-alignment and the NAM.
Both the NAM and, especially, Third World are wrongly and carelessly used as synonyms for the Developing and Under-developing Worlds or as economic indicators. Most Third World countries were underprivileged former colonies or less affluent states in places like Africa and Latin America that were the victims of imperialism and exploitation. This has led to the general identification or misidentification of the NAM countries and the Third World with concepts of poverty. This is wrong and not what either of the terms means.
Third World was a concept that developed during the Cold War period to distinguish those countries that were not formally a part of the First World that was formed by the Western Bloc and either the Eastern/Soviet Bloc and Communist World that formed the Second World. In theory most these Third Worlders were neutral and joining the NAM was a formal expression of this position of non-alignment.
Aside from being considered Second Worlders, communist states like the People’s Republic of China and Cuba have widely been classified as parts of the Third World and have considered themselves as parts of the third global force. Chairman Mao’s views defined through his concept of Three Worlds also supported the classification of communist states like Angola, China, Cuba, and Mozambique as Third Worlders, because they did not belong to the Soviet Bloc like Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland.
In the most orthodox of interpretations of the political meaning of Third World, the communist state of Yugoslavia was a part of the Third World. In the same context, Iran due to its ties to NATO and its membership in the US-controlled Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) was politically a part of the First World until the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Thus, reference to Yugoslavia as a Second World country and Iran as a Third World country prior to 1979 are incorrect.
The term Third World has also given rise to the phrase “Global South.” This name is based on the geographically southward situation of the Third World on the map as opposed to the geographically northward situation of the First and Second Worlds, which both began to collectively be called the “Global North.” The names Global North and Global South came to slowly replace the terms First, Second, and Third World, especially since the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union collapsed.
Bandung, Belgrade, and Non-Aligned Institution Building
The NAM formed when the Third Worlders who were caught between the Atlanticists and the Soviets during the Cold War tried to formalize their third way or force. The NAM would be born after the Bandung Conference in 1955, which infuriated the US and Western Bloc who saw it as a sin against their global interests.
Contrarily to Western Bloc views, the Soviet Union was much more predisposed to accepting the NAM. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev even proposed in 1960 that the UN be managed by a “troika” composed of the First, Second, and Third Worlds instead of its Western-influenced secretariat in New York City that was colluding with the US to remove Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba from power in the Democratic Republic of Congo, as well as other independent world leaders.
Fidel Castro and Cuba, which hosted the NAM’s summit in 1979 when Iran joined as its eighty-eighth member, would actually argue that the Second World and communist movements were the “natural allies” of the Third World and the NAM. The favorable attitudes of Nasser and Nehru towards the Soviet Union and the Soviet Bloc’s support for various national liberation movements also lends credence towards the Cuban argument about the Second and Third World alliance against the capitalist exploitation and imperialist policies of the First World.
The first NAM summit would be held in the Yugoslavian capital of Belgrade in 1961 under the chairmanship of Marshall Tito. The summit in Belgrade would call for an end to all empires and colonization. Tito, Nehru, Nasser, Nkrumah, Sukarno and other NAM leaders would demand that Western Europeans end their colonial roles in Africa and let African peoples decide their own fates.
A preparatory conference was also held a few months earlier in Cairo by Gamal Abdel Nasser. At the preparatory meetings non-alignment was defined by five points:
(1) Non-aligned countries must follow an independent policy of co-existence of nations with varied political and social systems;
(2) Non-aligned countries must be consistent in their support for national independence;
(3) Non-aligned countries must not belong to a multilateral alliance concluded in the context of superpower or big power politics;
(4) If non-aligned countries have bilateral agreement with big powers or belonged to a regional defense pact, these agreements should not have been concluded in context of the Cold War;
(5) If non-aligned states cede military bases to a big power, these bases should not be granted in the context of the Cold War.
All the NAM conferences to follow would cover vital issues in the years to come that ranged from the inclusion of the People’s Republic of China in the UN, the fighting in the Democratic Republic of Congo, African wars of independence against Western European countries, opposition to apartheid and racism, and nuclear disarmament. Furthermore, the NAM has traditionally been hostile to Zionism and condemned the occupation of Palestinian, Lebanese, Syrian, and Egyptian territories by Israel, which has earned it the seamlessly never-ending aversion of Tel Aviv.
Making NAM Relevant Again Many people ask what relevance the Non-Aligned Movement has today. Since the end of the Cold War the NAM’s strength has been eroded as the US, neoliberal economic reforms, the IMF, and the World Bank have gained more and more control over NAM members. In many cases NAM members have reverted back to de facto colonies in all but name. Many members of NAM, such as Belarus, Colombia, Ethiopia, and Saudi Arabia, are actually fully aligned states.
There is no question about it that Iran wants to make NAM relevant again to use it to fight off the expansionist Atlanticist World. So do the Russians and the Chinese. The NAM after all has provided Iran important diplomatic support in its politicized nuclear dispute with the Atlanticists. The NAM is also the closest alternative to the Atlanticist-infiltrated and perverted United Nations.
The NAM summit will be capitalized on by Iran and its allies to try and develop some sort of strategy to fight and circumvent the unilateral US and European Union sanctions against the Iranian economy and to show the Atlanticists in the US and the EU that their powers in the world are limited and declining. One small step in this direction is that Iran will begin negotiations with 60 NAM countries to drop bilateral visa requirements with Iran. A universal statement may also be released asking for the anti-Iranian sanctions to be dropped or modified. Other steps would include proposals for a new and alternative financial global structure, which would evade the Atlanticist chokehold on international financial transactions.
An important event at the NAM summit will be the arrival of Morsi in Tehran as a sign of warming relations. Ties between Cairo and Tehran will not be restored overnight either, because there are restrictions on Morsi. Whatever happens between Egypt and Iran at the NAM summit in Tehran will be just steps in an unrushed process. The Egyptians are taking pains not to antagonize their Western and Arab paymasters and the Iranians have opted to be patient. Morsi’s presence in Iran, however, is still symbolically very important. Tehran indeed has reason to be very optimistic as all its stars are aligning at its NAM gala.
Diplomatic circles are looking at Egypt on the eve of the NAM summit. Before it was announced that Morsi would go to Iran, it was expected that Egyptian Vice-President Mahmoud Mekki would represent Egypt at the NAM summit as a demonstration of Egypt’s estrangement from Iran. Cairo’s relationship with Tehran and what develops from Morsi’s trip to Iran is what all Arabdom, Israel, and the US will be watching carefully.
Some analysts are asserting that Egypt’s stance could “make or break” the project to isolate Iran, especially in sectarian terms involving a Shiite-Sunni divide. This is actually wrong, because there is nothing specifically significant that Egypt can do to break or isolate Iran. After all, Cairo and Tehran have essentially had no ties since 1980 and Mubarak was a staunch ally of the US who put Egypt to work with Saudi Arabia and Israel to curve Iranian influence.
In the worst case scenario the relationship between the two countries will stay as it was during the Mubarak era. This is not a losing situation for Iran, albeit the situation in Syria has catalyzed the Iranian desire for faster rapprochement. Egyptian-Iranian relations have nowhere to go except upward.
The Tahrir (Liberation) Square protests that dethroned Mubarak and helped bring about the elections that brought the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood into power are part of what Iranian officials call an “Islamic Awakening” in contrast to an “Arab Spring.” Iran did not hide its belief either that Egypt and it could eventually form a new regional axis after dictator-for-life Mubarak was booted out from power. If there is any man that can make the leap from the conception of an Arab Spring to an Islamic Awakening, at least publicly, it is President Morsi through an alliance with Iran.
On August 8, Iran sent Hamid Baqaei to deliver Morsi’s invitation to attend the NAM summit in Tehran. Along the way the international press and pundits gave higher attribution to Baqaei’s governmental rank, because they failed to realize or mention that he was the most senior of eleven junior or assistant vice-presidents and essentially the cabinet minister responsible for the Iranian presidency’s executive affairs.
First Vice-President Mohammed-Reza Rahimi, the former governor of the Iranian province of Kurdistan and himself a former junior vice-president, is Iran’s senior vice-president. Regardless, Baqaei’s visit to Cairo as both a presidential envoy and a close presidential aide was important. Iran could have delivered the invitation letter through its interest section in the Swiss Embassy to Egypt or other diplomatic channels, but made a significant gesture by sending Baqaei directly to Egypt. The move made all the countries conspiring against Iran and Syria very anxious. For these anxious countries the NAM get-together in Tehran will be all about Egypt, Iran, and Syria.
Are Saudi, Qatari, and IMF moves in Egypt tied to the NAM Summit in Tehran?
Both Saudi Arabia and Qatar have offered Egypt their financial aid before Morsi’s visits to Beijing, where he is expected to ask for Chinese help. Aside from the use of Saudi and Qatari aid to shape the way that the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood interacts with Iran, the offers of aid from the petro-despots of Doha and Riyadh are part of the Arab competition over influence in Cairo.
Morsi is widely seen as Qatar’s man and relations between Riyadh and Cairo have been uneasy for some time. The Saudi Embassy in Cairo was even temporarily closed after Egyptian protests against Saudi Arabia flared up. More importantly, the House of Saud opposed Morsi in support of longstanding Mubarak henchman Ahmed Shafik during the Egyptian presidential elections. In addition, the House of Saud has propped up its own political clients inside Egypt against the Muslim Brotherhood. The House of Saud’s Egyptian clients, the Nour Party and the their parliamentary coalition called the Alliance for Egypt (Islamic Bloc), trailed in second place behind the Muslim Brotherhood’s parliamentary coalition, the Democratic Alliance.
Despite the fact that Doha and Riyadh are both serving US interests, the two sheikhdoms have a rivalry with one another. This Qatari-Saudi rivalry picked up again after a brief pause that saw both sides invade the island-kingdom of Bahrain to support the Khalifa regime and to work together against the governments of Libya and Syria. The Saud and Al-Thani rivalry has seen both sides supporting different armed groups in Libya and competing anti-government forces during the so-called Arab Spring (or Islamic Awakening in Tehran). The elections in Egypt, where Doha and Riyadh supported different sides, just added fuel to the Qatari-Saudi fire.
Qatar’s Emir Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani has made it a point to support the Muslim Brotherhood almost wherever they are as a means of expanding Qatari influence. Just days after the ousting of Mubarak, Qatar’s Al Jazeera showed great foresight when it launched Al Jazeera Mubasher Misr, a news channel dedicated exclusively to Egypt. While Qatar and its media have put their weight behind the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Saudi Arabia and its media have not.
This has also been the reason that the Saudi-controlled media, like Al Arabiya, has continued to level criticisms against President Morsi even after the elections in Egypt. To alleviate the House of Saud’s tensions with Egypt, Morsi made his first foreign trip as president to Saudi Arabia.
Aside from favorable news coverage, it is also widely believed that Qatar helped finance the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt during elections. In addition, Qatari investments in Egypt grew by 74% according to figures released by the Egyptian Central Bank in July 2012. On August 11, Emir Al-Thani and a Qatari delegation also travelled to Egypt for a one-day visit with Morsi. The next day, on August 12, Morsi politely dismissed or “retired” Field Marshal Tantawi, the head of the Egyptian Armed Forces, and Sami Anan, the Egyptian Armed Forces chief of staff and Tantawi’s number two. After Al-Thani’s visit, rumors also began to circulate in Egypt that the Muslim Brotherhood was planning to lease the Suez Canal to Emir Al-Thani, which was denied by Morsi and his presidential staff. An outcome of Emir Al-Thani’s Egyptian visit was that it was announced that Qatar gave Cairo two billion dollars (US). In reality, the Qataris only gave Egypt 500 million dollars (US) and said that the remainder will be given in installments, which will start after the NAM summit in Tehran. Does the payment schedule say anything?
The timing of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) visit to Cairo to negotiate a loan on the eve of the NAM summit in Tehran is also suspicious. After a year of uncertainty and begging, Qatar and the IMF have opened their pockets to the Egyptians (although Qatar sent some money earlier). The Libyan Transitional Council government has even offered to pitch in financially, even when its own coffers are in disarray as a result of the NATO war on Libya and the looting of Libya’s treasury and assets by the Atlanticists with the help of US neoliberal economist turned Libyan “minister of oil and finance” Ali Tarhouni. As for the House of Saud everyone understands that their terms for financial aid to Egypt include the continuation of anti-Iranian policies in Cairo.
Everyone will be Watching Morsi in Tehran
Readings on Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, which govern under the banner of the Freedom and Justice Party, vary. On the one hand the Egyptian government has maintained the closure of the borders with the Palestinians in Gaza. It has also pledged to honor its international treaties, a sly reference to its peace treaty with Israel that seeks to avoid mentioning Israel and prevent a media fuss. On the other hand, Morsi made positive gestures to Tehran at Mecca’s emergency Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) summit about forming an Ankara-Cairo-Riyadh-Tehran contact group to discuss the Syrian crisis and has said he wants amendments to be made to the Egyptian peace treaty with Israel.
Like most politicians, Morsi has watered-down his election promises. He has had to walk a fine line surrounded by enemies and competitors alike while he has worked to slowly accumulate power. When he was elected there was a delay in announcing the outcome of the Egyptian election. Field Marshal Tantawi and the Egyptian military junta were taking their time to think over on deciding whether to keep Morsi as a president or to impose a new round of martial law while forcibly installing their fellow general Ahmed Shafik as the country’s civilian president.
Morsi is at odds with Egypt’s military commanders who are the longstanding allies of Israel and the US, as well as allies of the House of Saud. Aside from retiring the two most important members of the Egyptian military junta, Morsi has also reversed the Egyptian military’s decisions to subordinate his presidency and amend the post-Mubarak constitution of Egypt. This power play has been widely described as a pre-emptive counter-coup against the Egyptian military junta. Doha may have supported the move to make sure that its Muslim Brotherhood racehorse stays in power, as opposed to the Saudi’s Egyptian military and Nour Party racehorses. Whether the counter-coup was a move made in the context of Qatari-Saudi rivalries or strictly a move to attain political freedom for Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood is a ten million Qatari riyal question.
Looking East Policy Shift in Cairo?
Where Morsi’s foreign policy is going after the NAM conference in Tehran is the other important question. Where he stands will begin to crystallize from the NAM meeting onwards. The fear of rapprochement between Iran and Egypt certainly keeps a lot of people up at night in Riyadh, Tel Aviv, London, and Washington, DC. Everyone is waiting to see what Cairo and Tehran will do and for many the expectations of rapprochement are running high, but the leverage and restrictions that exist over Morsi should not be forgotten either.
Although there is far less fanfare and attention being paid to Morsi’s trip to China, what he does there will also be very important. Some say he plans on slowly shifting Cairo’s foreign policy away from the Atlanticist camp, with Washington as its capital, towards the Eurasianist camp that includes China and Iran. Certainly Chinese foreign aid will reduce Egyptian dependency on the Atlanticists and their Arab petro-monarch partners. What we are dealing with here is an intricate web of multiple relations between different groups who are interacting with one another in different ways and through changing relationships.
Addendum – August 25, 2012
The unelected Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas threatened to boycott the NAM summit after the Iranian media and Hamas both announced that Prime Minister Haniyeh, the democratically-elected representative of the Palestinians, was going to attend the NAM summit. Subsequently the Iranian Foreign Ministry released a statement saying that Haniyeh was never invited to Tehran.
An award-winning author and geopolitical analyst, Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya is the author of The Globalization of NATO (Clarity Press) and a forthcoming book The War on Libya and the Re-Colonization of Africa. He has also contributed to several other books ranging from cultural critique to international relations. He is a Sociologist and Research Associate at the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), a contributor at the Strategic Culture Foundation (SCF), Moscow, and a member of the Scientific Committee of Geopolitica, Italy. He has also addressed the Middle East and international relations issues on various news networks including Al Jazeera, teleSUR, and Russia Today. His writings have been translated into more than twenty languages. In 2011 he was awarded the First National Prize of the Mexican Press Club for his work in international journalism. The above article is from his Press TV column.
Israel’s Nukes Derail U.S. Nonproliferation Goals
Victor Kattan: Israel’s Nukes Derail U.S. Nonproliferation Goals
Overview
United States President Barack Obama swept into office with a powerful commitment to the cause of nuclear nonproliferation. However, the escalating U.S. sanctions and covert actions against Iran’s alleged quest for a nuclear weapon as well as its increased military presence in the Gulf – all the while ignoring Israel’s arsenal – push that goal well out of reach. In this policy brief, Al-Shabaka Program Director Victor Kattan explains why this is the case, and argues that if the U.S. is really serious about nuclear nonproliferation it must also and as part of its nonproliferation strategy tackle Israel’s longstanding nuclear weapons program.How Israel Torpedoes Nonproliferation
Strengthening the international nonproliferation regime is one of President Obama’s key foreign policy goals. During a speech in Prague, in April 2009, he announced his “intention to seek a world free from the threat of nuclear weapons.” He argued that because the US was the “only power to have used a nuclear weapon” he and his fellow countrymen had a “moral responsibility to act” by leading the disarmament agenda.The US Government’s failure to seriously address Israel’s clandestine nuclear weapons program and its stockpile of hundreds of such weapons, which include thermonuclear weapons in the megaton range, makes the Administration’s policy towards nuclear nonproliferation elsewhere, look two-faced. Calling for more intrusive inspections of Iran’s alleged nuclear facilities is particularly incongruous in light of Israel’s refusal to accede to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and its refusal to allow weapons inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to inspect its nuclear facilities – about which the whole world has known for some time.
Knowledge of the existence of Israel’s nuclear weapons program, which began in earnest in the 1950s, and became critical in the 1960s, has contributed to an arms race for nuclear weapons in the Middle East. Past attempts by Libya, Iraq, and Syria to acquire such weapons, and Iran’s alleged attempts to acquire a nuclear weapon today, can only be understood as a reaction to the West’s refusal to put pressure on Israel to sign up to the NPT and allow IAEA weapons inspectors to inspect Israel’s nuclear program with a view to establishing the Middle East as a Nuclear-Free Zone.
In September 2009, the IAEA expressed concern about Israel’s “nuclear capabilities” and called on it “to accede to the NPT and place all its nuclear facilities under comprehensive IAEA safeguards…” And in April 2010, President Obama urged all countries, including Israel, to sign the NPT. He added: “That’s been a consistent position of the United States government, even prior to my administration”.
However, this is as far as the U.S. has gone towards Israel, in sharp contrast to the way it is dealing with Iran. If the Obama administration is serious about nuclear nonproliferation then it needs to radically overhaul its posture vis-à-vis Israel’s nuclear weapons program and treat all countries equally. Otherwise, some state somewhere, will always try to obtain the bomb to redress the power imbalance in the Middle East.
Until Israel either abandons its nuclear weapons, as South Africa did in 1994, or allows its facilities to be inspected by the IAEA, the effort to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons and eventually complete nuclear disarmament will not succeed. Indeed, Israel’s refusal to accede to the NPT is the principal stumbling block to Obama’s policy. As former Israeli foreign minister Silvan Shalom, told Army Radio when former premier Ehud Olmert inadvertently let the nuclear cat out of the bag: “We always face the same question which our enemies ask: ‘Why is Israel allowed to [have a bomb] and not Iran?’”
Some serious analysts have argued that Iran should have the bomb because it leads to stability. That was Kenneth Waltz’s argument in the august establishment journal Foreign Affairs, which was provocatively entitled “Why Iran Should Get the Bomb.” However, as the international law expert Richard Falk pointed out in Guernica, this is a very dangerous line of argument to take. The only way to truly provide safety and stability for this planet is to fully – and at long last – implement the NPT.
Revisiting the NPT
It will be recalled that the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), which entered into force in 1970, required the original five nuclear weapon states – the US, Britain, Russia, France and China – to reduce and eliminate their nuclear arsenals. In exchange, all other signatory states agreed not to acquire such weapons although they were allowed the peaceful use of atomic energy.In addition each state is required to accept safeguards to be negotiated and concluded with the IAEA “with a view to preventing diversion of nuclear energy from peaceful uses to nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices”. Three countries remained outside the NPT: India and Pakistan, which declared their nuclear status, and Israel, which did not confirm or deny it. North Korea was a party to the treaty but announced its withdrawal on 10 January 2003.
The five nuclear states never met their obligations to liquidate their nuclear stockpiles but still insisted that the remaining treaty provisions be upheld, a hypocritical stance that has promoted proliferation. Of course, the problem with the NPT is, as Immanuel Wallerstein has pointed out, that in order to ensure the peaceful uses of atomic energy the NPT allows a country to achieve levels of technical competence that makes it very easy to go one step further and build a nuclear bomb. Japan, for example, is widely believed to have that nuclear capability.
The development of such a nuclear capability is what Iran is alleged to be doing. As will be discussed below, the jury is still out as to whether Iran is building a nuclear weapon, according to the best U.S. intelligence. And yet, the very states that helped Israel get the bomb are leading the charge against Iran. Given the lengths to which those states are going to stop Iran from enjoying its rights under the NPT, it is worth quickly reviewing the history of just how Israel got the bomb.
Helping Israel Get the Bomb
Although the U.S. is now Israel’s closest ally, it was not one of the early enablers of Israel’s nuclear weapons program, which began in the 1950s. The first country to do that was France, which promised to give Israel a nuclear reactor to be built near Dimona in the Negev desert as well as a supply of uranium fuel in exchange for Israeli support of France and Britain during the 1956 Suez War. Britain also agreed to help Israel although it remains unclear whether this was due to Israel’s support for the invasion of the Suez – an act of aggression that was condemned by the US.According to several declassified top-secret British documents available online at the National Archives, Britain made hundreds of secret shipments of restricted materials to Israel in the 1950s and 1960s. These included specialist chemicals for reprocessing and samples of fissile material – uranium-235 in 1959, and plutonium in 1966, as well as highly enriched lithium-6, which is used to boost fission bombs and fuel hydrogen bombs. Britain also shipped 20 tons of heavy water directly to Israel in 1959 and 1960 to start up the Dimona reactor. The transaction was made through a Norwegian front company called Noratom, which took a 2 per cent commission.
These deals were all done clandestinely by British civil servants behind the backs of their ministers. According to Tony Benn, Minister of Technology in 1966 while the plutonium deal was going through, the nuclear industry was part of his “white heat of technology” brief but no one told him that Britain was exporting atomic energy materials to Israel. “I’m not only surprised, I’m shocked,” he told the BBC, adding that neither he nor his predecessor Frank Cousins agreed to the sales. “It never occurred to me they would authorize something so totally against the policy of the [British] government.”
At the time, Israel deliberately sought to hide its Nuclear Weapons program from the U.S. Government so that it could be presented with a fait accompli at the appropriate moment. In one of the top-secret declassified British documents it was revealed that Israel was willing to pay more money to purchase Norwegian rather than American heavy water – even though the latter was much less expensive and they were short of cash: “The purchase of American heavy water would, however, have been likely to involve publicity and strict safeguards; and presumably this is what the Israelis were paying extra money to avoid.”
Israel’s policy of keeping its nuclear weapons secret from the U.S. changed after the June War in 1967. Whether or not Israel’s practice of nuclear opacity was then “codified” between the U.S. Government and Israel or just “tolerated”, as one scholar has suggested, in secret agreements during the Cold War, does not make Israel’s retention of such weapons in a post-Cold War world any less objectionable today. It is clear that Israel’s possession of the bomb is contributing to proliferation in the Middle East: If Iran acquires a weapon, then what will stop Saudi Arabia or the other Gulf Kingdoms from doing so?
What the U.S. Knew and When
In September 1979, the US satellite VELA detected Israel’s tests of a series of nuclear devices in the vicinity of the Prince Edward and Marion Islands in the sub-antarctic Indian Ocean in collaboration with apartheid South Africa. According to documents obtained by Sasha Polakow-Suransky the CIA and nuclear scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico concluded that no natural phenomenon could have caused the VELA incident.1In both the opinion of the experts at Los Alamos and at the CIA it was a nuclear explosion. However, because US President Jimmy Carter was preparing for an election campaign in the midst of the Iranian hostage crisis, his administration decided to bury the reports rather than openly confront Israel and South Africa.
Declassified documents reveal that four years before the VELA Incident, South Africa’s defense minister asked Shimon Peres, then Israel’s defense minister and now its president, for nuclear warheads. Peres responded by offering them “in three sizes”. The two men signed an agreement governing military ties between the two countries that included a clause denying “the very existence of this agreement”.
The US State Department and the CIA suspected that Israel was the chief suspect behind the explosions. In 1979 South Africa had not yet perfected the science that would allow it to independently make its own nuclear weapon, which the Israelis had already mastered but not tested.
According to Polakow-Suransky, South Africa began its relationship with Israel during the heyday of apartheid when it agreed to supply Israel with yellowcake uranium in 1961 – the same year that South Africa was forced to leave the Commonwealth due to international opposition to its policy of apartheid. Between 1961 and 1976, Israel built up a stockpile of about 500 tons of uranium.
In 1976, South Africa lifted the bilateral safeguards that accompanied the sale of yellowcake uranium to Israel. In return for the yellowcake and lifted safeguards, South Africa received from Israel 30 grams of tritium, a radioactive substance that thermonuclear weapons require to increase their explosive power. Thirty grams was enough to boost the yield of several atomic bombs.
In October 1986, Mordechai Vanunu, an Israeli nuclear technician, gave testimony to The Sunday Times of London, checked with leading nuclear experts in the U.S. and in Europe, in which it became evident that Israel was “a major nuclear power.” It was then estimated to rank sixth in the atomic league table, with a stockpile of at least 100 nuclear weapons and with the components and ability to build atomic, neutron or hydrogen bombs.
According to Vanunu, in addition to building weapons made from plutonium, Israel produces tritium. According to The Times, “this is of immense significance, for it means Israel has the potential to produce thermonuclear weapons far more powerful than ordinary atomic bombs”. Two of the pictures that Vanunu supplied to The Times appeared “to show a lithium deuteride hemisphere which could be used in the construction of the most devastating weapon of all – the thermonuclear bomb – a weapon capable of yielding the equivalent explosive force of hundreds of thousands of tons of TNT. In the chilling jargon of the nuclear bomb makers, Israel has moved beyond the ability to produce small ‘suburb-busting’ nuclear bombs to ‘city-busters’”.
A week after Vanunu’s story, The Sunday Times also reported that Professor Francis Perrin, the father of the French bomb, admitted that the French government secretly supplied Israel with the technology to make nuclear bombs in 1957 contradicting 30 years of repeated official denials from Paris and Tel Aviv.
Turning on Iran
The U.S. and the rest of the world have known beyond a shadow of a doubt that Israel has had a 50-year-long clandestine nuclear weapons program. Yet, even though Israel has never opened its facilities to international inspections or signed the NPT, the U.S. is in lockstep with Israel in leading an international campaign against Iran and tightening up sanctions, together with the European Union, Canada, Japan and Australia. The sanctions already implemented include restrictions on Iranian oil sales, a ban on the supply of heavy weaponry and nuclear-related technology, and an asset freeze on certain individuals and organizations.Nevertheless, the Obama Administration is careful in the language it uses. Its repeated threat is to stop Iran making a “nuclear weapon” which leaves open the possibility that the U.S. could live with an Iran that has a nuclear capability. It would therefore seem by implication that the U.S. would be willing to live with an Iran that has the capability to produce a weapon, but does not produce one. According to an analysis by the Carnegie Endowment, Iran could be allowed to enrich uranium so long as the enrichment is below weapons grade (i.e. 93 per cent – Iran is reportedly currently enriching uranium at 20 per cent). In other words, enrichment of uranium above 90 percent is one of Washington’s Red Lines that would be interpreted by the U.S. Government as an actionable indicator that Iran is seeking to develop nuclear weapons. Only then, would the U.S. be willing to consider taking military action against Iran.
The Israeli Government, on the other hand, has always made it clear that it will not live with an Iranian nuclear capability let alone an Iran with a nuclear weapon, and it has threatened to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities as it bombed Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981.
In this regard, it is intriguing that Israel’s claims about Iran’s nuclear intentions are not new. Back in 1992, Binyamin Netanyahu who was then a member of Israel’s Knesset (parliament) predicted that Iran was “3 to 5 years” from having a nuclear weapon. In the same year Israel’s then Foreign Minister Shimon Peres told French TV that Iran would have a nuclear warhead by 1999. In 1995, The New York Times quoted U.S. and Israeli officials saying that Iran would have the bomb by 2000.
And yet the jury is still out as to whether Iran is actually building a weapon. In 2007, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in the US published its National Intelligence Estimate. It assessed “with high confidence” that Iran did have a nuclear weapons program until 2003, but this was discovered and Iran stopped it. Tehran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program in 2007, but the NIE said, “We do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons”.
There are, of course, concerns about the direction in which Iran is presently going, and it may indeed be the case that in light of the threats to its security and the buildup of troops in the Gulf, that Iran is trying to build a bomb. As Kenneth Waltz aptly noted in Foreign Affairs: “If Tehran determines that its security depends on possessing nuclear weapons, sanctions are unlikely to change its mind. In fact, adding still more sanctions now could make Iran feel even more vulnerable, giving it still more reason to seek the protection of the ultimate deterrent”. In November 2011, the IAEA said it had been unable tonon-proliferation “provide credible assurance about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran” and that it continued to have “serious concerns” regarding possible military dimensions to Iran's nuclear program.
And yet, despite these concerns, and despite the fact that Israel has had a nuclear weapons program since the 1950s and maintains a large stockpile of such weapons, no major power has ever suggested imposing sanctions against it. On the contrary, Israel has been “rewarded” and admired for having the audacity to develop its own weapon’s program.
For instance, recently, Germany was reported to have sold Israel advanced attack nuclear submarines fully capable of carrying, storing, and launching nuclear weapons. Armed with such weapons, these submarines send a clear signal to Iran that Israel would not be defenseless in the event of a nuclear attack, but could strike back with far more powerful weapons at a time of its choosing.
This makes it all the more questionable as to whether Iran – assuming that it indeed intends to build the bomb and is successful in so doing – would ever dream of launching a nuclear strike since such an act would likely lead to its own destruction. With such a powerful deterrent, it may be questioned why Israel even needs to prevent other states from having the weapon since they would never want to use it.
Indeed, the sanctions and the hectoring and constant warmongering against Iran is more likely to encourage the Iranian government to build a bomb in order to protect itself from attack with its own deterrent. Having a nuclear weapon is a very good insurance policy. But, of course, it makes a nonsense of any attempts to promote nuclear nonproliferation.
A Uniform Policy for All
Israel’s determination to make Iran the issue has successfully detracted attention from its own arsenal (as well as its rapid colonization of the occupied Palestinian territories) and helped to keep the region tense and unstable, with the constant risk of another war in the background. It is also contributing to proliferation in the Middle East.The objective of nuclear nonproliferation will not succeed until all countries are treated equally. The five nuclear NPT powers will have to play their role in reducing their nuclear arsenals, which the U.S. and Russia have in theory pledged to do. The NPT nuclear powers must also work to coax all countries that are outside the NPT like Israel, Pakistan, India, and North Korea into joining the NPT. If the fight against proliferation is to succeed all states should join the NPT.
President Obama is now caught up in his re-election campaign. If he wins a second term, he should heed the lessons of the past and confront the region’s existing nuclear powers – Israel, India, and Pakistan – to fulfill the dream of a world free from the threat of nuclear weapons and on the path to complete nuclear disarmament.
Footnotes
- 1See Sasha Polakow-Suransky, The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa, New York: Vintage Books, 2010, pp. 136-142.
Victor Kattan is the Program Director of Al-Shabaka. He is the author of From Coexistence to Conquest: International Law and the Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1891-1949 (London: Pluto Books, 2009) and The Palestine Question in International Law (London: British Institute of International and Comparative Law, 2008). Victor was a Teaching Fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London from 2008-2011 where he is presently completing his PhD. Previously Victor worked for the British Institute of International and Comparative Law (2006-2008), Arab Media Watch (2004-2006), and the BADIL Resource Centre for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights as a UNDP TOKTEN consultant (2003-2004).
Source: Al Shabaka
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