Iran's nuclear ambitions are doubtless of concern to everyone but should not be viewed in a vacuum, especially when Israel is allowed to go its own sweet way threatening the region with impunity.

On Sunday, the leaders of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) stated they have nothing to fear from Iran in this respect provided its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes and have urged the United Nations Security Council to force Israel to open its nuclear plants to international inspectors.

Other regional voices, including Iran, have been long calling for a nuclear-free Middle East.

The fact is Iran is perfectly within its legal rights to produce nuclear power for energy purposes under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), while the Treaty’s guarantor powers have an obligation to assist Iran in pursuing that aim.

On the other hand, Israel has neither signed up to the NPT nor even officially admitted that it has nuclear weapons.

The attitude of Western powers today towards Iran is riddled with bias and should not be tolerated by those countries that still believe in international law, rules and norms. There should no longer be one rule for Israel and another for other countries in the region.

US leaders are fond of saying that the world has changed since Sept. 11 and the British Prime Minister Tony Blair has said “the rules of the game have changed”. But these statements have been translated into a Western assault on the entire region — except for Israel — resulting in secret gulags, ghost flights, and renditions of mainly Muslims to countries known to practice torture.

While it is true to say that the anti-Israel rhetoric emanating from the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is threatening, Israel’s diatribes against Iran and the leaks that it plans to take out that country’s reactors are even more so. But not only does the US and Britain stay silent when it comes to Israeli ambitions, their leaders have given tacit approval to those threats.

Yes, indeed, the world has changed since Sept. 11 as a June 15, 1981 UNSC debate held subsequent to the bombing of Iraq’s nuclear plant at Tuwaitha clearly shows. Those were the days when nations, including the US and Britain, adhered to international law and treaties and were outspoken against Israel’s lawless actions.

This document, which I am happy to forward to interested readers, clearly shows that all UNSC members were unequivocal in their condemnation of the Israel attack, especially in light of the fact that Tuwaitha had been given a clean bill of health by the then Director-General of the IAEA Sigvard Eklund.

At the time, Israel claimed its destruction of the Iraqi reactor was an act of self-defense, legal within international law. Yet, as was pointed out during the debate, the “Prime Minister Begin of Israel and the Commander of the Israeli Air Force General Ivri, have both informed the world that the raid was preceded by many months of elaborate planning and rehearsal...circumstances plainly inconsistent with the requirements of self-defense under general international law.

Indeed, “the rule of necessity” recognized in international law is that self-defense is justified only when the necessity of that self-defense is “instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means and no moment for deliberation.”

Therefore, “the claim of self-defense by Israel is, therefore, quite preposterous.”

In this case, both Israel with its bombing of Iraq and the US-led coalition that invaded Iraq on a false pretext are legally out of the loop.

Paragraphs 32 and 33 of the document are particularly pertinent today when viewed in the context of Iran. “By attacking the nuclear research center at Tuwaitha, Israel is seeking to close that horizon of knowledge to Iraq and the Arab world.

“If the Israeli aggression is not condemned and punished by the Council, what guarantee is there that in future some leader facing the pressures of elections will not launch an attack on his neighbor’s nuclear yard just to engage in jingoism and impress the electorate?”

Isn’t this just what Ariel Sharon is doing now?

During the debate, the French ambassador asks, “Where would we end up if a state were to proclaim itself judge of the intentions of another state even though the latter was complying with the rules and disciplines of the international community in so sensitive an area as nuclear energy?

The answer to the ambassador is clear. We have ended up just where we are now with no law except that of the jungle.

The German ambassador said the aggression against Iraq “reaffirms the fact that Israel is unscrupulously using military force to achieve its aggressive goals against the legitimate interests of Arab peoples.”

The British ambassador quotes Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as saying, “A tragedy of this case was that Iraq was a signatory to the agreement (NPT) and had been inspected, but neither of these facts protected her...Just because a country is trying to manufacture energy from nuclear sources, it must not be believed that she is doing anything wrong.”

Again, the US and Israel assumes that Iran is up to no good just as they did with Iraq, erroneously as it turned out.

And this from the Chinese ambassador: “The Israel authorities have tried to exonerate themselves by resorting to utterly absurd excuse...According to this argument, Israel would be free at all times to send war planes to attack any factory or nuclear reactor in any country that Israel imagined to be operating against it. If this out-and-out gangster logic were allowed to run rampant, what then would be left of the code of international conduct? If every country were to behave like this, would not the world be in total chaos?”

The sad fact is that the world 24 years on is in chaos, and a friend of mine who is a respected lawyer summed up this worrying state of affairs beautifully in an email.

“Today, aggressors do not even feel the need, as Israel did in 1981, to argue, however spuriously, that they acted in self-defense...The slow but steady progress towards a more civilized world which began (with American leadership) at the end of World War II — and which is symbolized in its purest form by Article 2 of the United Nations Charter — has now given way to a headlong rush (again with American leadership) in the opposite direction.

“The outlaw behavior which was clearly and indisputably unacceptable in 1981 could, should and must become unacceptable again.”

And so say all of us, or rather those of us who care what kind of world we leave to our children.