Double standard policy

From END Info 24 | May/June 2021 DOWNLOAD HERE

Tom Unterrainer

“I swear I believe Armageddon is near.”1

So wrote US President Ronald Reagan in his diary on the evening on June 7, 1981. What prompted this private proclamation of doom? Earlier that day, fourteen US-built F-16 aircraft flew from their base in the Negev dessert. These Israeli military jets made their way at low level across Jordanian and Saudi Arabian airspace, before reaching their target: the Osirak nuclear reactor, located just 10 kilometres southwest of the Iraqi capital, Baghdad. The jets dropped bombs which destroyed Iraq’s fledgling nuclear energy programme.

In conformity with diplomatic protocol, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin informed the US President through his Ambassador to Israel, Samuel Lewis. Some accounts hold that Lewis was stunned at the news, which was conveyed to Reagan via the text of this rather bland cable:

‘At 1940 local (1740 ZULU) Prime Minister Begin contacted me and asked me to convey the following message to you as quickly as possible. Commence text. Today our air force carried out a raid on the atomic reactor near Baghdad. According to the reports of our pilots the target was completely destroyed. All our planes returned safely. End text.’2

At the time of the attack, Iraq – unlike Israel – was a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The nuclear materials at the Osirak reactor were under the supervision and safeguard of the International Atomic Energy Agency and, with the exception of a short period following the outbreak of the Iraq-Iran war, had been regularly inspected.3 The volume and status of the materials at the site were such that the prospect of Iraq developing nuclear weapons from them in the short-term was close to zero. Why, then, did Israel attack the Osirak reactor at this point? Why attack when Iraq was fully signed up to international arms control and monitoring arrangements? Why attack when there was little or no prospect of Iraq developing weapons from the small quantity of nuclear materials at the site?

Israeli elections were due to take place on June 30, 1981. Begin’s Likud party and government coalition partners were thought to have only a narrow lead in the run-up to the polls. Likud and company had been behind in the polls prior to the outbreak of tensions around the placing of Syrian missiles in Southern Lebanon – itself a response to building Israeli aggression. Israel had planned to attack these missile installations, first in April and then May but was thwarted by poor weather conditions and other factors. “Was the timing of the raid on Iraq an election-month substitute for the destruction of the Syrian missiles?”, asked Anthony Fainstein in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

“It is difficult for me to avoid this conclusion; the same thoughts have occurred to the Israeli opposition. The raid did provide psychological points against Iraq, but did little else for Israel beyond helping Begin’s re-election bid.” 4

Neither did the raid prevent Israel from unleashing an attack on PLO and other targets in Lebanon just ten days later, on June 17.

What prompted President Reagan’s stark reaction? Was the attack a surprise? Not according to archival record which contains multiple warnings from Ambassador Lewis.5 Was the US opposed – in principle – to an Israeli attack on Iraq’s nuclear reactor? Almost certainly not. The reaction from the White House was about something else, as was the chorus of opposition that culminated in United Nations Security Council Resolution 487, which condemned:

“the danger to international peace and security created by the premeditated Israeli air attack on Iraqi nuclear installations … [and] strongly condemns the attack by Israel in clear violation of the Charter of the United Nations and the norms of international conduct.”6

The main factor at play in the response was not outright opposition to Israel’s action but a concern about timing. Begin worked according to his own timetable – determined by the upcoming elections – and imperatives (more on which later), but the rest of the world – and the new US President in particular – feared a slide into widespread regional conflict that would jeopardise a clear settlement of power and influence in the region.

The Iran-Iraq war, which commenced in September 1980, was in part an attempt by the Iraqi regime to replace Iran as the preeminent regional power following the Iranian revolution. It was not until 1982 that the US officially ‘normalised’ relations with Iraq and – together with Saudi Arabia and others – started to pump money and arms into the country. The point here is that regional power and influence, beyond the role played by Israel in US regional concerns, was a key factor in the initial response to the Osirak bombing. Israel’s actions had potentially jeopardized the power settlement but in the event, the much-feared chain of events that could have led to full-scale regional conflict failed to materialise.

If timing was a factor for both Begin and Reagan in this instance, it was a marginal one in the overall dynamic. As far as Israel is concerned, its external priorities in relation to nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction is wholly determined by the fact that Israel is itself a nuclear power. As such, the attitudes of neighbouring states towards the acquisition of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction is conditioned by a nuclear-armed Israel. This is one leg of the ‘double standard policy’ that operates in the Middle East, whereby whilst Israel insists on maintaining and developing its own nuclear arsenal to ensure the ‘ultimate deterrence’, it cannot countenance any other regional power taking the same course. Official Israeli nuclear policy – insofar as it can be determined from under the veil of deliberate opacity – seems blind to the fact that Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons cannot but induce other regional states to develop their own nuclear programmes alongside the development of other weapons of mass destruction.

This point was comprehensively made by Matti Peled, onetime military commander of Gaza and Major General in the Israeli Defence Forces, turned peace activist and Knesset member. On 25 November 1987, during a speech on behalf of the Progressive List for Peace on a vote of no confidence in the Israeli Parliament, Peled stated:

“The Israel government deludes itself that being the leading Middle East state in the field of nuclear power bestows upon Israel immunity from weapons of mass destruction. This is one of the most dangerous illusions in the sphere of strategic thinking. There may be found some people, however, sticking to the argument that Israel is mainly concerned to prevent any Arab state from developing nuclear weapons … The Israeli government’s assumption that it can succeed in preventing the development of nuclear weapons by Arab states by a series of bombardments of nuclear reactors, is thoroughly unrealistic. This is another dangerous illusion distorting the strategic thinking of Israel.”7

Peled’s point being that the mere existence of an Israeli nuclear arsenal is no protection and, moreover, itself presents a threat to Israel’s security. Nonetheless, this approach to regional actors endures with hostility towards Iran the starkest illustration.

Another leg in the ‘double standard policy’ relates to what Commander Robert Green refers to as a “distinct version of the concept of existential nuclear deterrence”8 whereby:

“a deliberately opaque and contradictory posture of refusal to acknowledge possession, let alone deployment, of a nuclear arsenal. Understanding the evolution of this particular, perverse notion is essential because it poses a grave danger to Israel, the Middle East and the United States.”

Green continues, quoting from the 1993 edition of Seymour Hersh’s work on Israeli nuclear doctrine, The Samson Option:

“For more than three decades, successive American administrations of both parties, the bureaucracy, and the diplomatic service have ignored the existence of the Israeli nuclear arsenal … The current official position of the United States and its allies is, astonishingly, that there is no evidence that Israel is, in fact, in possession of nuclear arms.”9

Israel’s “distinct” formulation of nuclear deterrence and the continuing American disinclination to publicly recognising it, is all the more peculiar given the widespread acknowledgement and understanding that such a nuclear arsenal exists. Hersch is not the only writer to cover the story of Israel’s nuclear programme and policies. Anver Cohen’s important work, Israel and the Bomb,10 traces the development of Israeli nuclear strategy through stages of secrecy, denial, opacity and its current phase: ambiguity, whereby deliberate obfuscation and concealment are deployed.

In the last two of these phases, Israel has had a willing accomplice and enabler: the United States. Even when the US government has been presented with undeniable evidence, such as proof of joint nuclear tests between Israel and Apartheid South Africa or the materials presented by Mordechai Vanunu, no acknowledgement was forthcoming. Ken Coates presented an explanation for this state of affairs:

“Conventional theories of deterrence are deeply flawed, and nowhere more than in their standard presumption of a bipolar model of nuclear confrontation. In a crude way, several thousand warheads may, when confronted by several thousand other warheads, determine a certain kind of behaviour. No such determination may be presumed, however, once proliferation has extended to the ‘pariah’ states. In the hotspots which include and surround these states, there is sufficient turbulence to encourage the insane idea that nuclear weapons can be useful as a means of actual warfare. What elsewhere would be normal restraints of public opinion are here conspicuously absent. We have more than a little evidence that neither domestic nor international law controls the potential responses of such governments.

In small things, the Israeli government kidnaps its opponents, and visits exemplary repression on them. In large things, it misleads the United Nations and extends the threat of nuclear destruction to two of the most dangerous areas in the contemporary world.”11

Ken Coates did not have a crystal ball and could not have foreseen the coming of the Trump Administration in the US and its cooperation with the Netanyahu government in Israel. He could not have anticipated the degree to which the “normal restraints of public opinion” have degraded. However, he and other analysts were supremely alert to the trajectories of US policy in the Middle East and the terms by which the ‘double standard policy’ operated.

Notes

1. Reagan, Ronald (2007) The Reagan Diaries, Harper Collins

2. Evans, Alexandra (2017) ‘A Lesson from the 1981 Raid on Osirak’, The Wilson Centre,

3. Fainberg, Anthony (1981) ‘Osirak and international security’, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, October 1981

4. Ibid

5. Evans, Alexandra (2017) ‘A Lesson from the 1981 Raid on Osirak’, The Wilson Centre

6. United Nations Security Council Resolution 487,

7. Peled, Matti (1988) ‘Denuclearising the Middle East’ in Coates, Ken (ed) Israel’s Bomb: The First Victim – The Case of Mordechai Vanunu, Spokesman Books, Nottingham

8. Green, Robert (2018) Security without Nuclear Deterrence, Spokesman Books, Nottingham

9. Hersh, Seymour (1993) The Samson Option, quoted from Green, Robert (2018) Security without Nuclear Deterrence pp 123

10. Cohen, Anver (1998) Israel and the Bomb, Columbia University Press, New York

11. Coates, Ken (1988) ‘Israel’s Bomb: The First Victim’ in Coates, Ken (ed) Israel’s Bomb: The First Victim – The Case of Mordechai Vanunu, Spokesman Books, Nottingham