SPOKESMAN BOOKS
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Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation
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Catalogue
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How to Lose a War
The Spokesman, 90
Editorial by Ken Coates
The
crisis of non-proliferation comes to a head in the present scary confrontation
with Iran. The kept press in the United States, but sadly, also in Europe,
monotonously informs us that the Iranians are in the various stages of
preparing to manufacture an arsenal of nuclear weapons. There is no real
evidence of this, although it is freely admitted by the Iranian Government
that it is determined to pursue the development of nuclear power stations.
President
Ahmadinejad, who is not always famous for his temperate statements, has never
wavered in one commitment: that Iran has no use for nuclear bombs, and indeed
that their use is not consonant with the behaviour of a genuine Muslim.
Circumstances
alter cases. Not so long ago, Richard B. Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz,
Today,
the Bush administration claims it to be an axiom of its foreign policy that,
almost at any cost, it needs to prevent Iran from achieving exactly those
capacities which members of the predecessor administration were encouraging
Iran to acquire, thirty years earlier. Of course, the Iran in question was a
trusted ally of the United States, ruled by the Shah and his iron-gripped
SAVAK Secret Police. Today, the Iranian Government is a valued component of
the axis of evil, which should not be allowed to develop as much as a catapult
if only the American administration knew how to limit such technology.
The
hysteria which greets the civil nuclear programme of Iran marks a culminating
moment in the uprooting of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. That Treaty marked a
voluntary commitment to renounce nuclear weapons, when an insane Cold War
competition seemed to rational men and women all around the world to pose a
severe threat to the survival of humanity. Purely voluntarily, nations agreed
to renounce the prospect of the military use of atomic energy. Ultimately,
it was agreed, existing nuclear states would follow the same path,
forswearing, by mutual agreement, the nuclear arsenals of which they already
disposed. This commitment peaked in the year 2000, when the NPT Review process
agreed on steps to accomplish this disarmament of existing nuclear powers.
Notwithstanding
the agreement, nothing whatever was done to bring it to implementation.
Instead, the idea of non-proliferation was subtly replaced by an altogether
more sinister concept of counter-proliferation. This implies action to
disarm proliferators or would-be proliferators. Who will take such action?
Why, of course, an existing nuclear power, who will thus be acknowledged to be
a universal policeman, although no one has ever proposed it for this role,
nominated it to be keeper of the nuclear covenant, or even understood that it
was hungering for the task. The
counter-proliferators are out in force, barking at the heels of Iran.
In
a worthy response to this frenzy, numerous people have raised the question of
the Israeli bomb, about which interesting revelations have been coming out of
the British Foreign Office, which apparently facilitated its development.
According to Mordechai Vanunu, who served many years in prison for revealing
the truth about what had been happening while he worked in the Israeli plant
at Dimona, the Israelis have been developing thermo-nuclear bombs, and have
long held an arsenal of some two hundred ‘normal’ nukes. The Arab League,
and numerous other witnesses, have cogently argued that the West is showing
double standards, in leaving the all-too actual Israeli bomb unchallenged,
whilst energetically pursuing the phantom arsenal of Iran. This is very
clearly a repetition of the celebrated dodgy dossier, which, the reader may
remember, helped take Britain and the United States to war in Iraq, to destroy
numerous non-existent weapons of mass destruction.
There
is still work for the nuclear researchers to do, in uncovering the precise
relationship between Israel and South Africa, in the development of that bomb.
Since the early 1980s, there have been repeated allegations that the
Israelis had been co-operating with South Africa and Taiwan. In a fog of
denials, a number of possible Israeli-South African nuclear explosions were
reported in the world’s press. Test facilities were alleged to exist in the
Kalahari Desert, and three significant explosions were detected in the South
Atlantic in December 1980.
The
ending of apartheid put an end to the South African bomb, or at any rate, that
part of it which did not go home to Israel. But perhaps the South African
connection might help to explain why some British civil servants were so keen
to help to furnish the Israelis with the wherewithal to complete the only
genuine act of nuclear proliferation which has yet unfolded in the Middle
East.
Will
all the foaming at the mouth about the Iranian bomb lead to new invasions, and
new outbreaks of shock and awe? Some Americans appear to think that the
Iranians can, with impunity, be punished at arm’s length with bunker-busters
and so prevented from pursuing the weapons which they say they have never
wanted in the first place. This is a very doubtful prospect. If one thing
could unite a fairly divided, if not pluralistic, public opinion in Iran,
surely it would be visitations from American bombers. There is absolutely no
reason why the Iranians should sit still and allow their tormentors to punish
them at will.
We
already have some of the predictions about the course of this unlikely war:
crude oil at more than one hundred dollars a barrel; the blocking of the
Straits of Hormuz, the famous ‘chokepoint’, which can be squeezed to
disrupt worldwide oil flows; angry Iraqi Shia pursuit of allied forces. All
these and more reprisals are not only feasible, but may be likely if the
madcap scheme for the culminating war is not called off or stopped. Of course,
sane voices in the United States are telling us all the time that the ground
forces do not exist to carry through any new merican offensive. Frantic
efforts are made to embroil troops from Nato, but these are more likely to
backfire than not. It may indeed be Nato itself which is the main victim of
such schemes.
There
is some evidence that the Bush design for the Middle East might be about to
end. Certainly it will end in tears. But what will follow it? Is there no
hopeful prospect for the world, or are we to await a succession of grandiose
onslaughts, as this most extraordinary military power seeks to substitute
bombs for brains. If we could give brains a chance, might it not be possible
also to give peace a chance?
