Ehud Olmert continued his election campaign today by (1) traveling to the West Bank settlement of Ariel and telling its residents they would be included inside the news borders he plans to draw for Israel, and (2) sending the IOF’s tanks and bulldozers in aganst the PA prison in Jericho holding PFLP leader Ahmed Saadat.
I suppose that on the scale of aggressive actions taken by Israeli PMs during election campaigns– oh ain’t Israeli “democracy” wonderful!– this was not as bad as Shimon Peres’s infamous 1996 invasion of South Lebanon.
On this occasion, the British seem clearly to have connived in the Israeli action. Since 2002, the British had been keeping three of their own monitors (and intermittently, supervising monitors from other countries, too) in the Jericho Prison… That was part of an international deal whereby Ahmed Saadat, who was wanted by the Israelis for his role in the killing of Tourism Minister Rahavam Ze’evi but had taken refuge with Arafat in the Muqata during the long siege of spring 2002, was allowed to leave the Muqata. A PA security court gave Saadat and some colleagues a quick trial for the killing of Ze’evi, and sentenced him to a lengthy prison sentence, which was served in Jericho with the British monitors specially deployed there to check on the adequacy of his confinement…
As this well-written piece by the Guardian’s Chris McGreal spells out, the local Israeli commander was just waiting this morning for the British monitors to leave before they stormed the prison compound. How amazing! Do the Brits expect anyone to believe the story that they had not colluded with the Israelis at all in this? After all, Col. Ronnie Belkin, interviewed by McGreal there, would most certainly not have had his assault force sitting there around the pirson for many days just “on the off-chance” that the British monitors might all take it into their heads to leave the site together at some point…
Of course, if the British had stayed there, it is very unlikely that the Israelis would have dared storm the prison by force.
I believe that two Palestinians were killed in the assault. BBC t.v. had some very strong images of IOF bulldozers smashing into the prison building while, presumably, there were still people inside. And of course there are also the images of Saadat and his collagues being led away from the prison by the Israeli soldiers, dazed, after holding out there for some ten hours– and also of a big group of prisoners (or prison guards?) who were forced to strip down to their underpants and stand around in public in them, at the orders of the IOF assault force.
Britain is of course represented in the Quartet through its membership in both the EU and the UN. Given Britain’s defiant dereliction of its contracted duty to the PA under the 2002 agreement, PA President Mahmoud Abbas is quite right to have protested very strongly. But actually, the PA is to a large extent the dependent ward of the international community. So why should any powerful member of the international community, like Britain, feel it needs to listen to Abbas, anyway?
In the absence of their quasi-state authority having any power to protect even its own institutions from the assault of the occupying forces and the perfidy of London, angry Palestinians later smashed up various British installations, and kidnaped a number of westerners in the occupied territories. Not at all a constructive way to make their grievances known, I realise. But in the Palestinians’ present state of almost complete powerlessness, I guess it was what they felt they had left to them.
Author: Helena
Bushite meddling in Iran– backfiring?
Today’s WaPo had a very interesting article by Karl Vick and David Finkel, that was datelined Teheran and titled U.S. Push for Democracy Could Backfire Inside Iran.
The lead is this:
- Prominent activists inside Iran say President Bush’s plan to spend tens of millions of dollars to promote democracy here is the kind of help they don’t need, warning that mere announcement of the U.S. program endangers human rights advocates by tainting them as American agents.
In a case that advocates fear is directly linked to Bush’s announcement, the government has jailed two Iranians who traveled outside the country to attend what was billed as a series of workshops on human rights. Two others who attended were interrogated for three days.
The workshops, conducted by groups based in the United States, were held last April, but Iranian investigators did not summon the participants until last month, about the time the Bush administration announced plans to spend $85 million “to support the cause of freedom in Iran this year.”
“We are under pressure here both from hard-liners in the judiciary and that stupid George Bush,” human rights activist Emad Baghi said as he waited anxiously for his wife and daughter to emerge from interrogation last week. “When he says he wants to promote democracy in Iran, he gives money to these outside groups and we’re in here suffering.”
The reporters also quote Abdolfattah Soltani, a human rights lawyer who co-founded a human rights defense group with Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, as saying of the Bushies’ announcement of the new “pro-democracy” funding for Iranian oppositionists, that
- “Unfortunately, I’ve got to say it has a negative effect, not a positive one… This is something we all know, that a way of dealing with human rights activists is to claim they have secret relations with foreign powers… This very much limits our actions. It is very dangerous to our society.”
One other aspect of this story that concerns me is that the workshops that Emad Baghi’s wife and daughter (and two other individuals associated with him) had attended were conducted– in fairly shady-seeming circumstances, in Dubai– by something called the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict.
If indeed this “center” has become entangled in pushing forward the Bush administration’s agenda of regime change in Iran, then it seems to me it is dragging the whole name and concept of nonviolent social action into the mud.
Of course, one tip-off there is the name. Few good Gandhians– that is, people struggling nonviolently for a more egalitarian and just world– would proudly put the word “conflict” into the title of their organization.
The ICNC is a US-based organization. The US– my country– is the country that on a daily and continuing basis perpetrates the most violence of any country in the world. Since the invasion of Iraq that it so arrogantly launched in March 2003, scores of thousands of Iraqis have been killed, some at the hands of US forces and others because of the social chaos that the callous US military occupation of Iraq has engendered. In Abu Ghraib and other prisons in Iraq, in Guantanamo, Bagram, and other locations around the world, US interrogators and jailers are inscribing their violence onto the bodies of thousands of detainees held in contravention of the laws of war.
Surely, therefore, any individual or organization that is based in the US and that espouses the cause of nonviolence has a primary responsibility to struggle first and foremost for the changing of the policies of our government? The ICNC website says nothing about this at all. Instead, the organization seems to be exploiting the name of “nonviolence” and using a distortion of the principles of that great anti-colonial struggler Mahatma Gandhi merely to further Washington’s imperial agenda.
Oh well, the Bushites shamelessly exploit all the principles of religion. Why should they treat the principles of nonviolence any differently?
Salon.com article on Hamas women
Here is my second piece for Salon.com, up on their site today. Once again, if you’re not a subscriber you’ll have to sit through a small ad before you can read it.
Shoot, I forgot to remind them to put something about JWN into the tagline.
My body meanwhile is a little in crazysville. I flew back to Boston Saturday, a seven-hour time difference from Jerusalem. Sunday I did a quick revision of the Salon piece (which I wrote the first draft of, Thursday and Friday). Sunday I also gave a talk for the Cape Ann Forum between 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. It was on the theme of “The Perfect Storm” of challenges to the US in the Middle East. I chose the theme long ago– and only when I got there to Gloucester, Massachusetts did I realize that the movie of that name was both set and shot there!
I managed to stay awake, on my feet, and relatively coherent till 9 p.m.
Yesterday I flew back to Virginia and started writing a CSM column to deadline. But my brain stopped working around 7 p.m. so I got up this morning at 5 a.m. to finish it. Since then I’ve taken my first run for three weeks, done laundry, been lying around.
But it’s nice to see the piece up on Salon.
Milosevic’s death
I find two aspects of Milosevic’s death in UN custody yesterday quite interesting. The first is what his death actually tells us about the value of using criminal prosecutions to do a “truth establishment” exercise (and the linked question of the reactions to his death in different political spheres.) The second is the continuing tale of the toxicological aspects of his death.
Regarding the value of criminal trials in “establishing a historical record” about past atrocities– which is one of the main goals people are seeking when they support such trials– Milosevic’s death, and the suicide in UN custody earlier this week of the “lesser” defendant Milan Babic, have underlined the problems with the fact that criminal trials always revolve centrally around the actions and culpability of named individuals.
Then, if key indicted individuals should somehow “escape” from the control of the court– whether through a death, a suicide, or through becoming in some other way “unfit to be tried”– the trial stops right in its tracks. And not only the issue of the guilt or innocence of the accused individual is left hanging– indeed, given the presumption of innocence, he has to continue to be presumed innocent after his death– but also the whole broader “truth establishment” venture stops dead in its tracks.
Recognizing this fact, tribunal spokesperson Christian Chartier is quoted here as saying: “This is tragic for the truth… This is tragic for the victims.”
I note that truth commissions don’t suffer from this extreme vulnerability to the physical status of a small number of individuals.
The reactions to Milosevic’s death have been interesting in this regard. (See my discussion of this issue, too, in my comment to this post over at Transitional Justice Forum.)
The BBC’s Jon Silverman (whom I met once, in Rwanda) has a piece on their website titled simply, Worst outcome for Milosevic tribunal.
Silverman writes that M’s death:
Kissinger and Haig on Iraq/Vietnam
At a forum here in Boston yesterday, former Nixon advisor Al Haig said that the Bushies are repeating a mistake made in Vietnam by not applying the full force of the military to “win” the war in Iraq:
- “Every asset of the nation must be applied to the conflict to bring about a quick and successful outcome, or don’t do it,” Haig said
Actually, it’s not totally clear to me that Haig was saying there that the US still should be trying toi “apply the full force of the military”– or was the quoted statement perhaps meant as a critique of the Bushies’ past actions? Well, I wasn’t there, so I’ll have to trust the reporting of that AP reporter as to what Haig meant.
Either way, though– what an incredibly stupid, irresponsible, and I would say even borderline criminal statement!
Has Haig forgotten that back in March-April 2003, the US did win a decisive military victory in Iraq? Fat lot of good it did them! This is not now and never has been a war that could be won solely on the battlefield. The application of more forces, even of “every asset of the nation”, whether back in March 2003 or now in 2006, could not have “won” the war if there wasn’t a vision for how to translate that military victory into a political victory.
If Haig was indeed urging that now, in 2006, the US should be applying “every asset of the nation” to the war in Iraq– just exactly what military targets does he advocate that they target? And how, once they’ve achieved that, do they intend to transform that new military situation into a political victory?
At the same event, which was a forum on the Vietnam war held at the Kennedy Library, the ageing Henry Kissinger was also on the platform.
Here’s some of his interaction with questioners from the audience:
- He refused to directly respond to a question, submitted by the audience and read by a moderator, that asked if he wanted to apologize for policies that led to so many deaths in Vietnam.
“This is not the occasion,” Kissinger said. “We have to start from the assumption that serious people were making serious decisions. So that’s the sort of question that’s highly inappropriate.”
In another audience question, Kissinger was asked whether he agreed that the U.S. bombing of Cambodia led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge, and, if so, was he responsible for the 2 million people the Khmer Rouge killed?
“The premise that the bombing of a 5-mile strip led to the rise of Khmer Rouge and the murder of two million people is an example of masochism that is really inexcusable,” he said.
These responses are interesting. Wth regard to the first one, why is his assumption that a suggestion that he apologise for the Vietnam-era deaths is not “serious”? An apology could be an extremely serious political act– as when, for example, President Clinton apologized to the Rwandans for the US’s failure to act to stop the 1994 genocide.
His response to the second question is simply an example of out-and-out evasion of any responsibility.
What a sad, sad old guy.
Here’s what he said about the US invasion of Iraq:
- Kissinger also spoke about the war in Iraq, saying he supported the invasion.
“We have a jihadist radical situation,” he said. “If the U.S. fails in Iraq, then the consequences will be that it motivates more to move toward the radical side. This is the challenge.”
What a jumbled argument. In 2002-early 2003, there was no “jihadist radical situation” in Iraq. (Even today, that is not the main thing that’s going on there.) Yes, since April 2003, some very serious “jihadist radical” elements have emerged in Iraq. But that emergence cannot be used, ex post facto, to justify the invasion. And nor can it be used to justify the continued US military occupation of the country– especially since it is precisely under the circumstances of that occupation that the “jihadist radical” elements have emerged.
Why did anyone ever take this sorry old guy’s “intellect” seriously at all? He strikes me as just a muddled, highly irresponsible, imperialistic old bully.
Ted Meron and the Israeli settlements
Israeli researcher Gershom Gorenberg has an important new book coming out about the first decade of Israel’s pursuit of its settlement policy in the occupied territories, 1967-77. This recent piece in HaAretz tells us some of the important things in the book, which is titled “The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977.”
The HaAretz piece quotes Gorenberg as saying, “The title means that the Labor movement leaders had no organized plan to keep the territories, but even without a plan, they each made major decisions that when taken in aggregate, accidentally created the Israeli empire in the territories.”
The HaAretz piece indicates the degree to which the US administrations of those years underestimated the seriousness and intent of the Israeli settlement project.
In an article of his ownin Friday’s New York Times, Gorenberg focuses on one particular aspect of the early years of the settlement venture: the degree to which the Israeli governments of those years understood that the settlements were a violation of international law, but proceeded with building them anyway.
He writes:
- In early September 1967, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol was considering granting the first approval for settlements in the West Bank and Golan Heights, conquered three months earlier in the Six-Day War. An Arab summit meeting in Khartoum had rejected peacemaking. The prime minister believed that the Golan and the strip of land along the Jordan River would make Israel more defensible. He also wanted to re-establish the kibbutz of Kfar Etzion near Bethlehem, which had been lost in Israel’s 1948 war of independence.
The legal counsel of the Foreign Ministry, Theodor Meron, was asked whether international law allowed settlement in the newly conquered land. In a memo marked “Top Secret,” Mr. Meron wrote unequivocally, “My conclusion is that civilian settlement in the administered territories contravenes the explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention.”
In the detailed opinion that accompanied that note, Mr. Meron explained that the Convention — to which Israel was a signatory — forbade an occupying power from moving part of its population to occupied territory. The Golan, taken from Syria, was “undoubtedly ‘occupied territory,’ ” he wrote.
Mr. Meron took note of Israel’s diplomatic argument that the West Bank was not “normal” occupied territory, because the land’s status was uncertain. The prewar border with Jordan had been a mere armistice line, and Jordan had annexed the West Bank unilaterally.
But he rejected that argument for two reasons. The first was diplomatic: the international community would not accept it and would regard settlement as showing “intent to annex the West Bank to Israel.” The second was legal, he wrote: “In truth, certain Israeli actions are inconsistent with the claim that the West Bank is not occupied territory.” For instance, he noted, a military decree issued on the third day of the war in June said that military courts must apply the Geneva Conventions in the West Bank.
There is a subtext here. In treating the West Bank as occupied, Israel may simply have been recognizing legal reality. But doing so had practical import: if the land was occupied, the Arabs who lived there did not have to be integrated into the Israeli polity — in contrast to Arabs within Israel, who were citizens.
This is very interesting. I guess I never knew that Theodor Meron– a Holocaust survivor who went on to become a professor at New York University law school, then the president of the International Criminal Tibunal for Yugoslavia– had been the legal counsel to the Israeli Foreign Ministry in that critical period.
Gorenberg writes:
- Today a quarter-million Israelis live in the West Bank. Legal arguments cannot undo 38 years of settlement-building.
Well, yes and no. But neither can 38 years of Israel’s completely unilateral pursuit of its settlement-building project undo the whole body of international humanitarian law.
I think it’s excellent that Gorenberg has given new life to that judgment that Meron reached 39 years ago. It would of course have been great if Meron, today a very respected international jurist, had spoken out some more about this question throughout the intervening years, to reinforce the crux of what he wrote in that memo. I don’t recall hearing of him ever speaking out about it. I’ve read a number of his books on international humanitarian law, and don’t recall him ever dealing with the question of the status of the occupied territories as occupied territories or the illegality of building civilian settlements therein.
Maybe I should go and ask him about these things the next time I’m in The Hague…
RIP Tom Fox
My heart is so heavy I don’t know what to write… about the discovery of Tom Fox’s dead body.
Go the CPT’s website today and you can read the agonized statement they’ve put out about his loss. You can also see a picture of him at one of the recent anti-Wall demonstrations in Palestine.
I never met Tom personally but many of my Quaker friends know him, some quite well.
I hope he didn’t suffer too much.
I hope Jim, Harmeet, and Norman aren’t suffering too much, now. Also Jill Carroll. Also, all people illegally deprived of their liberty in Iraq. I’m praying for them all.
I flew back to the States today, so I’m still feeling a little disoriented and out of it. I’m doing a speaking gig north of Boston tomorrow evening– Gloucester Town Hall, 7 p.m., I think.
The CPT statement starts:
- In grief we tremble before God who wraps us with compassion…
I’m thinking of a God who can wrap us all in mercy and compassion. Bismillahi rrahmani rrahim.
Bil’in Friday
I decided to go down to Bil’in today, to the weekly anti-Wall demonstration that the villagers have been running there for more than a year now. I went with a great group of women from Ramallah, who included Neta Golan, an Israeli activist who is married to a Palestinian and lives in Ramallah with him and their two kids, and Anne X., a nAmerican woman of almost 70 years of age who also lives in Ramallah.
We had made the stunningly beautifully drive from Ramallah through the steep hills west to Bil’in in two cars, with some other people, so I didn’t meet Anne till we got to the village. The moment I met her she handed me a keffiyeh and said, “Here, quick put it on, the tear-gas is coming our way.” And it was.
We were a little late for the main event, which had been a procession from the village mosque down to the place where the line of Wall cuts right across an access road the villagers had always used to get to their lands that are now being taken from them by the line of the Wall. It was kind of hard to see what was happening, as the lines of Israeli soldiers and of demonstrators kept dissolving and reforming in different clumps. There were probably about 30-40 soldiers there, that I saw, and maybe 50-60 demonstrators. The demonstrators seemed to be, just over half of them, Palestinians, most of the rest Israeli peace activists, and a smattering of “internationals.” There were quite a few press people there, too, and a Palestinian Red Crescent ambulance.
I talked a little with Rateb Abu Rahmeh, a man from the village who teaches social work in the Al Quds Open University. He explained that he’s a member of the village’s Popular Committee which has been maintaining this action as a creative, nonviolent protest for all this time. (The villagers who are owners of some of the land cut off by the Wall here are also maintaining a challenge to its location in the Israeli courts. Akiva Eldar wrote about that in HaAretz earlier this week.)
Rateb told me that every week the Friday anti-Wall demonstration has a different theme. This week, they had made a large model of a graveyard, 30 meters by 10 meters, to commemorate the nine local people who have been killed in connection with anti-Wall protests. And they carried that to the Wall as their protest. “The Israelis broke up the model graveyard. They also broke my wrist,” he said, showing me the bandaged hand he was shielding inside his jacket.
Rateb seemed like a very interesting person and I’d like to write more about him. But the only other thing I have time to note here is the very easy, friendly relations I saw between the Israeli anti-Wall protesters and their Palestinian colleagues. In fact, the Israeli protesters seemed great: very active and dedicated and committed to the discipline of nonviolence. Also, they played a special role in reproaching the young soldiers there in their own language.
Actually, many of the men in the village speak Hebrew. Bil’in is so close to the Green Line that until the latest intifada most of the village men would go to work in Israel– and, one of them told me, some of them still do.
As the demonstration came to an end, everyone drifted back to the main part of the village. Some of the Israeli “Border” Guards came after the departing demonstrators, and there were a few skirmishes between them and some youngsters who started throwing stones as the soldiers approached. The soldiers lobbed few canisters of tear gas and we heard some much sharper bullet shots ring out, too. But the Israeli demonstrators– most of whom were, it seemed, self-described anarchists– seemed very at ease with the villagers, some of whom invited them into their homes for tea, and sat and chatted at length with them in Hebrew.
Hamas lawmaker on Islam and society
This is an interesting and significant short public exposition, in English, of the views of a Hamas legislator on how he sees the role of Islam in society. (And actually, on a bit more than that, too.)
It’s from the online publication Bitterlemons-international, which is a joint project of the Israeli analyst Yossi Alpher and the (outgoing) PA Minister of Planning, Ghassan Khatib.Until now, Hamas has refused to participate in any of the joint Palestinian-Israeli “people to people” type projects that have proliferated since about 1990. I imagine that reluctance will continue. But it’s interesting that Yehya Mousa contibuted this to BLI.
Pathetic threats from Bolton
What a contrast between the bellicose rhetoric and actions that the Bush administration deployed against Saddam Hussein’s regime three years ago and the pathetic bleats it is issuing against Iran today. Back in 2002-2003, the Bushies were threatening (and preparing to use) a concerted military attack in order to meet the strong “concerns” it had voiced about Saddam’s WMD program. Today, the worst threat that hawkish ambassador to the UN John Bolton can muster is to suggest that,
- if the Security Council doesn’t take tough action, the United States might look elsewhere to punish Iran — possibly by rallying its allies to impose targeted sanctions.
Many things have happened in the interim, of course. Firstly, the US military has become majorly bogged down in Iraq, where 130,000 US troops are deployed in positions extremely vulnerable to attack– especially by any forces sympathetic to Teheran, of which there are many inside Iraq. So Washington has zero possibility of mounting any credible threat of a major military intervention against Teheran. Bolton and Co. have ramped up the rhetoric against Iran a lot in recent months. But it is all hot air. Its major effect has been to stiffen Iranian defiance in response.
Second, of course nobody this time round, after what happened in Iraq, would take seriously any amount of questionable “information” the Bushies might claim they had that would point to an Iranian breakout from the NPT. And let’s remember that Iran still has not broken out of the NPT.
(AP reported Thursday that Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on state television that, “We don’t want to be the ones to remind [everyone] who was right and who was not in Iraq, although the answer is obvious,”)
Third, the Bushies themselves have taken major steps to shred the NPT, culminating in last week’s decision to give India a completely free pass on its defiance of the whole NPT approach to cooperative, multilateral nonproliferation efforts.
My base-line on nuclear nonproliferation is firstly that I am strongly committed to creating a world without any nuclear weapons (or other WMDs), and secondly I believe that using a cooperative multilateral path is by far the best path to get to that goal. From this point of view, the NPT regime has its flaws– primarily, because it privileges those five countries that were deemed to be “nuclear weapons states” back at the time the treaty was concluded in 1968. But the NPT has some strong advantages, too. It aspires toward becoming a single, universal franework from nuclear non- and de-proliferation. (So it’s a pity the US never expended any real energy trying to get proven proliferators like Israel, Pakistan, and India to join it– back in the past time when such pressure might have made a real difference.) And Article Six commits all states including the nuclear-weapons states to participating in good faith in negotiations for a complete and general disarmament.
Certainly, the NPT is a much stronger and more egalitarian framework for nonproliferation efforts than the Bushies’ preferred approach of building selective alliances on a purely political basis around the world– an approach that surely, as with Israel and India (and the countries that have acted in response to those two), has merely spurred the further proliferation of nuclear weapons.
So far, the Iranians have been at pains to say that their aim is to develop a peaceful nuclear energy capability. Though who honestly knows what their longterm intentions are? But developing peaceful nuclear capacity is precisely what is allowed– or even, supposed to be facilitated– by the NPT. (It is probably quite unwise on longterm environmental grounds… but that’s another issue.) President Ahmedinejad has meanwhile done very well politically, at home, by portraying the US campaign against the plan as an attempt to deny Iran’s access to peaceful nuclear technology that is of real value to the country’s longterm development. He, and many other Iranian leaders, seems in general very happy to portray Iran as “standing up to Washington’s bullying.” (And some degree of support for this position can be felt far beyond Iran’s own borders.)
This, from AP yesterday:
- “The people of Iran will not accept coercion and unjust decisions by international organizations,” Ahmadinejad said, according to state television. “Enemies cannot force the Iranian people to relinquish their rights.”
“The era of bullying and brutality is over,” he added.
My best judgment at this point is that if either the US or Israel take action against the Iranian nuclear program, the response– and not just from Iran, indeed, perhaps not even from Iran at all– would most likely be broad and highly detrimental to the stability of the present, already very fragile strategic “order” in the Middle East. What’s more, I am sure that the decisionmakers in Washington and Israel all understand this. Hence the bleatiness of Bolton’s rhetoric.
We should not forget, though, that Israel’s raid against Iraq’s Osirak reactor was undertaken in the context of a hard-fought election campaign in Israel, in 1981. Is there any ffear that a besieged Olmert, fighting for his political life at the polls, might seek to launch a repeat performance?
So far, I don’t think so. Hawkish former IDF chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon told a US audience yesterday that Israel could launch an attack on Iran that would set back its nuclear program “by several years”. He hinted that this attack might come from submarine-launched missiles, not just from the air. (But I wonder where the Israeli subs would be located for this? Interesting question.) But according to that same Ha’Aretz report,
- Ya’alon also warned that Iran would clearly hit back hard in the event of such an attack, and cited Tehran’s long-range Shihab missiles, Katyusha rockets that Hezbollah has in its possession, and Qassam rockets that Palestinian militants habitually fire into southern Israel from the Gaza Strip. He added that a rise in oil prices could be further fallout from such an assault.
I also note that retaliatory action could well be launched against the US troops in Iraq, since no-one in the world would imagine that israel would take such an action against Iran without getting at least an orange light, if not a green light, from Washington first.
(Former Israeli Air Force commander Eitan Ben-Eliyahu told HaAretz that speaking publicly about these things in the way Ya’alon had done, could be harmful.)
Also of note from today’s HaAretz on the Iran-nuclear question, this from Reuven Pedhatsur:
- There could not have been a worse timing for the signing of the nuclear pact between the U.S. and India last week. While President Bush is leading the international campaign against the nuclear programs of North Korea and Iran, it legitimized India’s nuclear program, and thus granted India the status of a legitimate nuclear power in every respect.
This happened two years after he announced with great resolve that new nuclear powers should not be added to the list of the five nuclear powers, and eight years after the American administration imposed sanctions on India after it conducted a series of nuclear tests.
Tehran can rub its hands with glee, reading the details of the agreement that Bush signed with Indian Prime Minister Singh.
…When Bush was asked at the joint news conference with the Indian prime minister why the U.S. is rewarding a state that conducted nuclear bomb testing in 1998 and did not sign the NPT, and what message he was sending to other countries, the president responded with “what the agreement says is that things change and times have changed.”
That’s not a particularly successful response, nor does it strengthen the American position as the country that is supposed to lead the campaign to prevent nuclear weapons from reaching other countries.
…[T]he American president has greatly harmed the chances of denying nuclear weapons to Iran. From now on, the U.S. will find it difficult to present a morally authoritative position in its negotiations vis a vis the Iranians. And then there’s the Israeli angle. If India is accepted by the Americans as a legitimate member of the nuclear club, and even wins some nice benefits from it, it is possible that the time has come to start thinking about certain steps along the nuclear path it paved.
Bottom line: We should think of George W. Bush not just as someone who has launched a terrible and quite unnecessary war that has wrecked Iraq, destabilized the Middle East, and given Osama Bin Laden a virtually free pass to roam around the mountains of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border at will– but also as someone who has significantly aided the spread of nuclear weapons around the world while undermining the global mechanism that is best-placed to contain and then reverse the spread of nuclear weapons.
What an extremely dangerous man.