Reaction in the Middle East to North Korea’s testing of another nuclear weapon may well be muted. There will be those who say it is worrying but that there are other compelling issues that require international action, most importantly the Palestinian one. Others will say that if the US, Russia, China and others, not least the Israelis, can have nuclear weapons without international furor, then why not North Korea or Iran?
Such views are misplaced. First, North Korea is a militaristic dictatorship which is not to be trusted. It openly admits to a weapons program, although no country has any intention of attacking it. Moreover, it spends fortunes on it while its people starve. That alone is moral reason for being revolted by its pursuit of nuclear weaponry.
The depravity of North Korea is further demonstrated in its use of the program to blackmail South Korea, Japan and the US into supplying it with fuel, funds and food. It is the ultimate Mafia state. No sane and civilized observer can regard it with anything other than revulsion. Moreover, it has threatened South Korea with obliteration.
So the test matters to this part of the world as anywhere else. We share one world. We cannot sit back and view, with minimal concern, a monster in the making that could bring nuclear devastation to the Far East.
But there is another reason, closer to home, for concern. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has just given the green light to expanding settlements on the West Bank despite being told by President Barack Obama last week that all settlement construction must end. Obama was quite clear: No new settlements and no expansion of existing ones.
Netanyahu has openly defied him. So what is he going to do about it? The danger is that the North Korean test threatens to divert Obama’s attention just when he needs to act tough with the Israelis. Public opinion in the US, guided and influenced by pro-Israeli elements and the media, may well ask if this is the time to be concentrating on the Palestinians when there is real danger in the Far East.
North Korea’s test thus affects the Middle East in a very practical way. The question, however, remains: What is President Obama going to do about Netanyahu’s rejection of his demand for an end to settlement activity? He has to respond. Failure to do so will wipe out, in an instant, the good will toward him in the Arab and Muslim worlds. He will be seen as just another Israeli-serving president, no different to George W. Bush or all the other previous US presidents who put Israel’s interests above all moral considerations. Resentment will be bitter.
The political necessity, therefore, which Washington had best understand, is that North Korea will not be accepted as an excuse for inaction (or even delay) on the Palestinian front.
The dangers of overfishing
Man’s uncontrolled exploitation of the seas has gone on for 1,000 years, but now threatens the collapse of the entire marine ecosystem, said The Times in an editorial yesterday. Excerpts:
How often do we read of the seas teeming with fish, of porpoises gambolling in the harbor in olden days, and glistening blue whales gliding past England’s coastline? We admire the romantic notion, indulge the poetic exaggeration and reflect wryly on the cold, gray, lifeless oceans of today. But it was no exaggeration. The seas were indeed once more plentiful than we could ever now imagine. Shoals of fish darkened the waters. Sharks, whales and dolphins could be numbered in their thousands, even close to the shore. It is man’s predatory overfishing that has emptied the seas, a relentless destruction that has gathered pace in the past century and brought much marine life to the brink of extinction. A conference that opens in Vancouver tomorrow will present a Census of Marine Life, which has reconstructed from old ship logs, tax accounts, legal documents and even mounted trophies the vast populations of fish and marine mammals that once populated the oceans of the world. Before 1800, the sea between Australia and New Zealand supported around 27,000 right whales — roughly 30 times the population of today. But rampant whaling so decimated the population that by 1925 only an estimated 25 were left. The population has now rebounded to more than 1,000 whales. But ocean scientists have found the same dreadful story almost everywhere: Man’s uncontrolled exploitation of the seas has gone on for 1,000 years, but now threatens the collapse of the entire marine ecosystem.
It some places, the damage is irreversible. The once huge stocks of North Atlantic cod off the Canadian coast were fished to extinction, and despite a ban on fishing and attempts at restocking they have never recovered. In the North Sea the herring fisheries almost collapsed a century ago. They recovered briefly during the two world wars, largely because no fleet could put to sea. But by the 1970s too many fishing boats, with modern sensor technology, again threatened extinction. It was only the Europewide moratorium of 1977 that prevented disaster.
