What do the current Pakistani political crisis, Israel's September air strike against Syria, and
Iran's continued pursuit of nuclear enrichment all have in common? All three events reflect the aggressive
policies adopted by the George W. Bush administration to deal with the growing threat of nuclear
proliferation.
As U.S. soft power in the Middle East diminishes and its disdain grows for the transnational bodies
meant to monitor the nuclear threat, the stakes could not be higher.
The nuclear peril, a 62-year-old problem of mutual concern for most of the world, has been couched
as an integral target for the architects of the "war on terror." The Bush administration
carefully outlined the threat—found at the "crossroads of radicalism and technology"—in the
2002 National Security Strategy for the United States, a document that many Washington-Beltway insiders
referred to as the "Bush Doctrine."
As journalist Jonathan Schell convincingly wrote in a recent article in the Nation, the nuclear
threat has become a "mere subcategory, albeit the most important one."
In the post-9/11 universe, the Bush White House divided the world into two camps: those who were "with
us," and those "against us." The first group—led by the United States—consisted of moral "good
guys," democratic countries, many of whom possessed the bomb. The second group consisted of malevolent
dictators with designs on nuclear weapons, rogue regimes that could not be trusted, because they would
presumably sell their technology to the highest-bidding transnational terrorist organization.
As nuclear proliferation specialist Joseph Circione writes in his recent book, Bomb Scare: The
History and Future of Nuclear Weapons, the White House "in effect changed the focus from
'what' to 'who.'"
In addition to advocating for preemptive military strikes against U.S. adversaries and terrorists
possessing weapons of mass destruction, Washington's new approach would disregard multilateral consensus
as a prerequisite for foreign policy and embrace unilateral action to establish security and spread
democracy.
It appears that the Bush camp's antipathy for the United Nations, as well as its nuclear watchdog,
the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), continues to increase because of what the United States
perceives as the agency's failures in addressing the Iranian nuclear program.
"Mr. [Mohamed] ElBaradei has coasted on the IAEA's reputation as the authoritative source of
information on the world's nuclear secrets. Yet this is the same agency that was taken by surprise
by nuclear projects in Libya, North Korea, and Iraq in the 1980s," opined a November editorial
written in the Wall Street Journal. The newspaper's editorial page often takes neoconservative
views of U.S. foreign policy. "All this is reason enough for the United States, Israel, and any
other country serious about stopping nuclear proliferation to refuse Mr. ElBaradei's not-so-good diplomatic
offices."
An IAEA report released November 15—part of a deal brokered by ElBaradei and Iran to avert a possible
military confrontation between Washington and Tehran—said that while Iran had been truthful about key
aspects of its past nuclear activity, knowledge of Tehran's program was "diminishing." In
response, the White House lashed out by saying Iran's continued defiance of the international community
and its failure to halt uranium enrichment justified Washington's push for a third round of sanctions.
This September, Israeli warplanes conducted a mysterious raid in northeast Syria, and there is growing
consensus among U.S. government and independent analysts that the suspicious target was a nuclear facility.
Whether or not it was, the episode—and Israeli, Syrian, and U.S. silence over the issue—raises even
more questions as to the timing of the raid, and what the unilateral action portends for nuclear ambitions
of Israel's regional neighbors.
"The Bush administration's decision NOT to share its intelligence on the Syrian site with the
IAEA, and thereby encourage and support the international agency's aggressive inspection and evaluation
of this alleged threat to peace, was another demonstration of the contempt in which the present U.S.
administration holds the UN organization," wrote former Central Intelligence Agency analyst Ray
Close, in an e-mail to IPS.
"It suggests, in effect, that the United States intends to manage the international nuclear proliferation
issue all by itself, independent of the rest of the international community—except for deputizing Israel
to be the nuclear policeman of the Middle East," he said.
In a crowning irony, Bush's dualistic narrative, and the policy he has implemented to conform to this
narrative, has crumbled under the weight of realities on the ground. U.S. soft power is fading in the
region for many different reasons: the Iraq quagmire, U.S. support for Israel's 2006 aerial bombardment
of Lebanese infrastructure, and the isolation of Gaza following the 2005 election victory of the Islamist
group Hamas.
But the possible meltdown of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf's government has accelerated the
more immediate fear that, in the current environment of instability brought by Musharraf's imposition
of "emergency rule," Islamabad's nuclear arsenal could fall into terrorists' hands.
A New York Times column co-authored by neoconservative Fred
Kagan and liberal interventionist Michael O'Hanlon, entitled "Pakistan's Collapse, Our
Problem," is the latest example of the alarmist tone coming out of Washington, and it suggests
that—in the absence of strong international mediators like the IAEA—the United States will consider
military options.
"We do not intend to be fear mongers," write O'Hanlon and Kagan, before warning that Washington
should "think—now—about our feasible military options in Pakistan." The idea is to act fast
and secure Pakistan's nuclear stockpile before the political situation deteriorates further. Washington
spent nearly $100 million in the past six years on a classified program to help Pakistan secure its
nuclear weapons, the New York Times reported in mid-November.
All conversations about U.S. goals to deter nuclear weapons come back to the issue of Iraq. The Bush
administration learned that Iraq had ended all of its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs between
1991 and 1995, according to a 2004 report by the Iraq Survey Group, a CIA and Pentagon fact-finding
mission sent to post-war Iraq to uncover the evidence to support the White House's claims.
While administration officials tried to discredit UN inspections before the 2003 invasion, it appears
that, in this case, sanctions did deter Saddam Hussein. And while the United States never found any
WMD in Iraq, the U.S. presence there has bolstered the ability of transnational terrorist groups like
al-Qaida to propagandize Iraq as an icon of jihad, thus drawing more potential recruits, and actually
increasing the threat of terrorism.
Khody Akhavi writes for the Inter Press Service.
