What's good for the goose...

by Jonathan Power

To persuade Iran to forgo nuclear weapons is a laudable objective. The more nuclear matches are lying around, the more the chances of them being used either through political ineptitude in a crisis or, more likely, by accident, by being stolen or sold to the black market. But for the US, Britain and France to insist on it is, to say the least, hypocritical.

Iran is situated in the heart of one of the world's most dangerous neighbourhoods. Why shouldn't it have a deterrent too, since these Western powers have argued so convincingly, for decades, that nuclear deterrence keeps the peace and themselves maintain nuclear armories long after the cold war has ended? Double standards never got anyone anywhere.

And where is the source of the threat that makes Iran, a country that has never started a war in 200 years, feel so nervous that it must now take the nuclear road? If Saddam Hussein's Iraq with its nuclear ambitions used to be one reason, the other is certainly Israel, the country that hardliners in the US are encouraging to launch a preemptive strike against Iran's nuclear industry before bombs are made.

The US refuses to acknowledge formally that Israel has nuclear weapons, even though top officials will tell you privately it has 200. Until this issue is openly acknowledged, the US, Britain and France are probably wasting their time trying to persuade Iran to forgo nuclear weapons development. The sauce that is good for the goose is good for the gander.

The supposition is that Israel lives in an even more dangerous neighbourhood than Iran. It is a beleaguered nation under constant threat of being eliminated by the combined muscle of its Arab opponents. But this argument simply doesn't stand up. There is no evidence that the Arab states have invested the financial and human resources necessary to fight a war that would be catastrophic for Israel. And the corollary of that is that there is not one bit of evidence that Israel's nuclear weapons have deterred the Arabs from more limited wars or from the Palestinian Intifadas and suicide bombers. Nor have they influenced Arab attitudes towards making peace. In fact, both in the 1973 Arab war against Israel and in the 1991 Gulf War, Israel's nuclear weapons clearly failed in their supposed deterrence effect. The Arabs knew, as the North Vietnamese knew during the Vietnam war, that their opponent would not dare to use its nuclear weapons.

Israel pro-bomb propaganda always raises the argument of the need to be nuclear armed in case one day an opportunistic Egypt and Syria, sensing Israel's guard is down, revert to their old stance of total hostility and participate in a joint Arab attack against Israel. But, as Professor Zeev Maoz has argued in Harvard University's "International Security", these countries keep to their treaty obligations. Egypt did not violate its peace treaty with Israel when the latter launched an unprovoked attack on Syria and Lebanon in 1982. Syria did not violate the May 1974 disengagement agreement with Israel even when its forces were under Israeli attack. Nor did Egypt, Jordan and Syria violate their treaty commitments when Al Aqsa Intifada broke out in September 2000.

Since its 1979 peace treaty with Israel, Egypt has reduced its defence spending from 22 per cent of its GNP in 1974 to a mere 2.75 per cent in 2002. Syria has fallen from 26 per cent to 6.7 per cent. The combined defence expenditures of Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon amount to only 58 per cent of Israel's. Indeed, the shoe is on the other foot - it is the Arabs who should be worried by Israel's might.

Israel's nuclear weapons are both politically unusable and militarily irrelevant, given the real threats it could face. But they have been very effective in allowing countries as diverse as India, Pakistan, Libya, South Africa, Brazil, Argentina, North Korea and now Iran to think they too have good reason to build a nuclear deterrent.

However, the very fact that four of these countries have now dismantled their nuclear weapons factories means that nuclear policies are not cast in stone. The way to go with Iran is to prove to its leadership that nuclear weapons will add nothing to its security, just as they don't to Israel's. This may require a grand bargain, which would mean the US offering a mutual non-aggression pact, ending its embargo over access to the International Monetary Fund and allowing American investment in Iran, particularly in its petroleum sector. It would mean, too, the US coming clean about Israel's nuclear armoury and engaging in a vigorous effort to persuade Israel to forgo its nuclear deterrent.

If the Western powers want to grasp the nettle of nuclear proliferation, they need to take hold of the whole plant, not just one leaf.

This article was published in the Friday-Saturday, September 24-25, 2004 edition of the Jordan Times. It is used here with permission.