“Arabs may have the oil but we have the matches” was one of Ariel Sharon’s proud boasts, but next March he apparently plans to use his pyrotechnic armory to illuminate the skies above Iran and take out the country’s nuclear facilities or so suggests Britain’s Sunday Times.
“Israel — and not only Israel — cannot accept a nuclear Iran,” recently said Sharon. “We have the ability to deal with this and we’re making all the necessary preparations to be ready for such a situation.”
However, Israeli government sources have rejected the Times’ assertion despite the clear message from Sharon, while refusing to rule out any future option to deal with Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
In the meantime, the dovish Israeli paper Ha’aretz has polled 1,300 of its readers asking how “Israel should act over Iran’s nuclear development?”
The results are worrisome. Some 45 percent say Israel should attack Iran as soon as possible and 24 percent say diplomacy should be allowed another three months before any such attack.
On the other hand, the firebrand Iranian leader Dr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been merrily raising the anti with his denial that the Holocaust ever took place, and his calls for Israel to be wiped off the map or shifted to somewhere in Europe.
Indeed, the only diplomacy underway to resolve the crisis is on the part of Europe, which jumped into heal the impasse between the US and Iran over the latter’s insistence that it has the right to enrich its own uranium for peaceful purposes.
Thus far, neither the EU nor the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has met with much success, although there are plans to hold further talks on Dec. 21.
In the run up to those discussions, both the EU and the IAEA are making suitable friendly noises.
According to an Iranian news agency, the EU has confirmed Iran’s right to enrich uranium under the provisions of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and at the same time Mohammed ElBaradei, head of the IAEA, told the Norwegian paper Aftenposten that military force should not be used to prevent a country from obtaining nuclear weapons.
ElBaradei has never said a truer word. It’s just a pity that he didn’t have the courage to say this a long time ago when the hawks were circling Iraq and he was asked to give that country a clean bill of health. It seems that his Nobel Prize has loosened his tongue.
ElBaradei knows that if Israel hadn’t attacked Iraq’s nuclear facility at Tuwaitha on June 7, 1981, Saddam Hussein may never have instigated a nuclear weapons program.
Iraq’s Tammuz-1 and Tammuz-2 reactors, dubbed “Osirak” by the media, were built with French cooperation and were never intended for weapons purposes. Further, unlike Israel, Iraq was a signatory to the NPT and its activities were closely monitored — a somewhat similar situation to Iran today.
The Israeli attack caught Iraq by surprise as it was engaged in a war with Iran at the time, but once reality set in Saddam Hussein summoned his chief nuclear scientist Dr. Jafar Dhia Jafar — known as the father of Iraq’s nuclear program — and asked him to make a bomb.
According to Jafar who has authored two books on the subject (one in Norwegian and the other in Arabic) in conjunction with his colleague Dr. Numan Al-Niami, prior to the Israeli strike there were no thoughts of Iraq going down the nuclear weapons route.
Jafar had absolutely no experience of bomb making but nevertheless he was asked to try his best because Iraq now needed a nuclear deterrent to ward off further attacks by Israel.
“The unprovoked Israeli attack on the Tuwaitha reactor that was meant for peaceful purposes had exposed Iraq’s vulnerabilities so there was a strong argument that the country needed a deterrent,” writes Jafar.
“Subsequent to that strike, I felt that Iraq should pull out of the NPT...because the treaty was supposed to guarantee its signatories the right to obtain nuclear technology for civilian purposes in lieu of abandoning any notion of using it for military purposes. But it turned out to be discriminatory.”
Jafar further points out that although the treaty’s guarantors — the US, Russia, Britain, France and China — condemned the Israeli aggression, Iraq never received any compensation for its losses and further lost out when the French government neglected to approve the rebuilding of the damaged reactor.
Is history now repeating itself with Iran? There is a strong probability that the Iranian facilities were, indeed, intended for civilian purposes because even though the country is blessed with vast reserves of oil and gas, they are not going to last forever.
Moreover, the advancement of nuclear technology is perceived as a prestigious development for former Third World countries eager to join the 21st century.
However in light of the vicious rhetoric that the Bush administration and the Israeli government has directed at Iran over recent years even when that country was on the brink of liberalizing and joining the international community, it’s hardly surprising that Iran has now turned inward and developed a siege mentality.
One thing is for sure. There is a dangerous game at play with few sane voices around to douse the embers before they become a mighty conflagration.
Although there are parallels to be drawn between Iraq and Iran, there are serious differences between the two countries.
Unlike Iraq before the 2003 invasion, Iran has powerful friends, in particular Russia and China, which both benefit from oil and gas deals.
Unlike Iraq where Saddam Hussein was generally unpopular, Iranians will likely rally around their leadership and as many are religious ideologues who will undoubtedly view an attack on their country as an attack on Islam.
Unlike Iraq which had only one nuclear facility in 1981, whose location was known, Iran is thought to have as many as 50, located deep underground. Furthermore, Iran’s armory is unknown and it could well retaliate, causing devastation to the region.
Lastly, the international community should ponder on what effect an Israeli or US strike on Iran would have on Iraq’s stability, given that the majority of Iraqis are Shiites with an affinity for Iran and its holy sites. Let’s pray we’ll never get to find out.
