Toulouse: The Nightmare is not over

The horrific chain of 7 murders in Toulouse, France that have stunned this country, could have been lifted directly from a television thriller. In fact, this whole terrible affair has been a nightmare scenario that, for decades, has haunted authorities in France, Europe—and the United States. 

And the nightmare is far from over.

Mohammed Merah, a 24 year-old French man of Algerian origin, a few years ago gets involved with a Salafist network in France. According to the little that is known so far, Merah then heads off to Afghanistan where he links up with al Qaeda. In 2007, he is arrested for planting bombs and jailed for three years by the Afghans, but he  escapes in a Taliban-led breakout. He is later picked up by Pakistan authorities in 2010 and released.

Mohammed returns to Toulouse where his family lives and bides his time. Then last week with the most deadly aplomb, he kills three French soldiers and four days later rides his stolen motorcycle to the entrance of a Jewish school near his home and methodically shoots down a rabbi and three Jewish students.

And, in the age of You Tube and the Internet, to ensure that his gruesome act will some day be witnessed by all, around his neck he wears a video camera.

Islamic leaders in France have made clear how horrified they are that anyone—including Merah himself –would attempt to link his vicious acts with Islam. French President Sarkozy is calling for national solidarity. The leader of the Jewish community in Toulouse has declared himself “immensely relieved” by the news that the killer has been caught.

But the crisis highlighted by Merah is far from over.

The problem, of course is that Mohammed Merah is just one of between five to six million French, most of Muslim descent living in France. A large number reside in shabby, banlieues of the country’s major cities, where housing is dilapidated, unemployment high, and bitterness rampant.  

Meanwhile, the current political storm--about public street prayer, permitting new mosques, banning burkas, and controlling hallal butchers--that has roiled this country has ensured that many Muslims feel even more marginalized.

There is also a considerable burden of history. Incredibly, last night—around the same time as police were planning how to apprehend Mohammed Merah in Toulouse—my wife and I were watching a gripping movie on French TV depicting the courageous attempts of a young Algerian girl brutally tortured by French troops in Algeria as her country fought a bloody struggle for independence. (Was Merah watching the same flick? )

But what counts far more than colonial history to young French Muslims, is the fact that France chose to join Nato and the United States in invading Afghanistan. Thus, Mohammed Merah’s calculated targeting last week of four French soldiers. Ironically, three of them were also of North African origin, but, in his Salafist eyes, that probably made their “treachery” even more condemnable.

The ghastly, methodical slaughter of the rabbi and three Jewish school children four days later were—Mohammed Merah has already told the French police —revenge for the young Palestinian children killed by the Israeli army in Gaza.

(Did he realize that, in fact, the four people he murdered at the Jewish school were all Israelis?)

The bottom line is that there is no way that, knowing these facts, anyone can credibly write off these events as another despicable case of anti-Semitism: the same kind of deeply embedded racial hatred that has come down through the ages; the virulence that fueled the Holocaust and the dispatch with which French police rounded up Jews for the Nazis during World War II.

Mohammed Merah’s anti-Semitism was probably not driven as much by ancient loathing —but more by the actions of Israel over the past few decades--the expulsion of the Palestinians, the rampant expansion of West Bank settlements, the invasions of Lebanon, the massive attacks on Gaza, take your pick.

To prove the point, the various upsurges of anti-Semitic attacks in France have corresponded precisely with each upsurge in the bloody conflicts between Israel and the Palestinians.

Whether Israel’s defenders feel the country’s actions are justified or not is almost bedside the point: those actions are regarded as outrageous in the eyes of millions of European Muslims, who watch the graphic coverage on TV and the Internet of all these grisly events—including the regular statements of Jewish leaders in France and elsewhere that they fully support Israel’s actions.

As outspoken Israeli commentator, Uri Avnery, one of the most acerbic critics of his country’s policies, has pointed the irony that Israel, created as a haven from anti-Semitism for Jews around the world, has instead, by its actions, become the greatest promoter of anti-Semitism around the world.

So, what to do?

Beef up anti-terrorism efforts even further? It turns out that Mohammed Merah was already on a “watch list” in the Toulouse region of some 600 people, from Islamic radicals to right-wing bigots. Which is how the police, through some keen detective work, finally managed to run him down. He was on that list because Pakistani police had notified French authorities after spotting the young man in 2010.   

We can be assured that anti-Terrorist units in France and across Europe have infiltrated Salafist groups and have their own watch-lists.  So why not take action?

Because if there were indeed 600 names in Toulouse, then across France and Europe, we’re talking thousands—perhaps tens of thousands --of such people. There is no way to keep them all under round-the-clock surveillance.

Then expel them all.  French citizens?  

Arrest them.

On what grounds? On whose evidence? 

Of course, anything is possible as we’ve seen in the U.S. since 9/11, and we can be sure in the current super-heated political climate in France, we’ll hear the most extreme demands.

You can also be sure that that any massive crackdown will only further increase the alienation of young Muslims. 

And, in the end, there will almost certainly be plenty of bloody-minded young men and women who will slip through the net.

How about dealing with the root problem? Launch massive programs to really integrate deprived Muslim communities in France and throughout Europe: housing, schools, jobs, etc. In fact, President Sarkozy has been making an important effort to provide better housing, but a few years of effort can not overcome decades of  prejudice and neglect.

In my view, a much more immediate way of at least alleviating the issue would be for France to pull out of Afghanistan. The adventure has cost the country hundreds of millions of dollars, and some eighty-four dead soldiers, including four recently murdered by an Afghan soldier they were supposedly training. The Afghan campaign has been a disaster for all concerned.  The U.S. is headed for the doors, seeking only a seemly way to exit.  The French could show the way.

You can be sure, however, that there will be many who will cite the Toulouse killings to argue just the opposite: that the fact that Mohammed Merah may have received some terrorist training in Afghanistan is proof of the threat that jihadis operating there still pose to Europe. Thus, the imperative need to persevere until the Taliban and their allies and defeated, the threat totally liquidated.

But the problem is that, as the past decade has brutally demonstrated,  despite a huge investment in treasure and blood by the U.S. and its allies, such a military victory is not in the cards. The only way out is some kind of deal with the Taliban and their allies—a deal whereby they take a share of power, with the understanding that any attempt to turn their country again into a training ground for terrorists targeting Europe or the U.S. will be dealt with by drones and special forces, not massive troops interventions. 

Indeed, there is a strong argument that the American and Nato presence in the Muslim world have done more to ignite the outrage of young Muslims elsewhere than any ragtag training camps. Why would Mohammed Merah have gone to Afghanistan if it were not for the presence of French troops in that Muslim country?

Which brings us to Israel and Iran.

Some militant Israelis—and their backers in the U.S.—will use the Toulouse attacks to bolster the case for bombing Iran. The argument: just imagine if that Al Qaeda killer in Toulouse and others like him throughout Europe and the U.S., just imagine if they had access not just to a 45 pistol and a Kalashnikov, but to a nuclear weapon, furnished by Iran.

One would hope however, that the Toulouse attack would give Israeli hawks pause. In assessing the risks of bombing Iran, Israeli intelligence analysts have been speculating about the kind of retaliation their country might face.

It’s clear now that not just Israeli citizens would be at risk.  

In fact, compared with the 191 people killed and 1,800 wounded when al-Qaeda inspired terrorists bombed the railway in Madrid in 2004, and the 52 people killed and 700 injured in coordinated suicide attacks on the London Underground in July 2005, France so far has had it easy.

Imagine the incredible mayhem if, one day, terrorists like Mohammed Merah decided to target The Chunnel linking Paris and London?

Toulouse Killings-When do we download the video?

The cold-blooded killing of a rabbi and three students at a Jewish school in Toulouse, France yesterday have left the French shocked—and dismayed. What was driving the killer? No one knows. What is clear is that he went about his grisly work with the cold-blooded aplomb of an executioner, or someone who had once been professional military.

Apparently, he also carried a video camera around his neck. Will we shortly see his victims terrified faces posted on You Tube, in the pages of Paris Match--or on one of the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of sites that regularly spew racial venom across the Internet. More on that to come.

But first, what brand of venom?

Many commentators have already decided the killer was driven by the same brand of rabid anti-Semitism that fueled the Holocaust. One Italian journalist, a regular columnist for an Israeli newspaper, citing the rising number of anti-Semitic incidents in France and much of Europe, spoke apocalyptically of a new Shoah, warning all Jews to flee not just France but all of Europe for safety in Israel before it is too late. 

The problem with the theory that the killer was solely driven by anti-Semitism is that, in two other previous attacks last week, apparently the same assassin shot to death three French paratroopers and seriously wounded another. The soldiers were all Arab or black, and appeared to have been targeted specifically, witnesses said.

In other words, judging by his victims--Jews, Arabs, blacks--peoples of other racial origin, who the French right have traditionally regarded as not being truly French, no matter how many generations their families may have lived in this country. It is this sentiment that drove the French police to do much of the dirty work for the Nazi’s deportation of Jews in France during World War II.

It is this spirit, unfortunately, that also underlies the mounting resentment in France and across Europe of the continent’s growing Islamic population. That resentment is further fueled of course by the fear that, as their inroads on traditional culture increase, they will actually take over Europe.

Indeed, over the past years, violent attacks on Muslim targets in France—assaults,  insults, destruction of mosques and cemeteries,  have also seen an alarming increase-up 31% just last year. “France for the French” and “Arabs Out” were slogans recently sprayed across gravestones of Muslim soldiers who had fought for France in World War I.

Such racist sentiments are widespread among all classes in France, as messages approvingly forwarded to myself and my wife by educated, middle-class friends and acquaintances make clear.

Unfortunately, Nicholas Sarkozy himself has played a shameful role in fueling French xenophobia: the view of us and them.

This despite the fact that, he immediately rushed to the site of the slaughter in Toulouse, and spoke movingly of how the slain children were “our children, they are not just your children.”

There is no reason to think Sarkozy ( son of a Hungarian father and Greek half- Jewish mother ) is not sincere.  But since taking office, and increasingly over the past few months, as elections approach, the President has been pandering to the right and virulent anti-immigrant feelings.

He has threatened to suspend France’s participation in Europe’s 25-country open border agreement, unless other states do more to block illegal immigrants and refugees from entering Europe. He has also, however, attacked legal immigration.

That’s for starters. Rather than concentrating on basic issues like providing more jobs for the French, Sarkozy has lately taken on the thorny question of the way French meat is slaughtered.

As the New York Times editorialized just a couple of days before the Toulouse massacre, “In a particularly vile gambit from a man who already brags about banning the burqa in public, Mr. Sarkozy now pledges to protect consumers from unknowingly eating halal meat. He called for legislation requiring meat labels to note the slaughtering methods used. This proposal originally came from Marine Le Pen, presidential candidate of the xenophobic National Front. Mr. Sarkozy first called it frivolous. Then adopted it.

“Five million to six million Muslims now live in France, almost a tenth of the total population. It is cruel to keep family members from joining them and cruel and destructive to subject their religion to mockery. Ms. Le Pen is currently running third in the polls. Regrettably, Mr. Sarkozy has no problem being frivolous or cruel if it means he can peel away some of her voters.

Meanwhile, in Israel while the country’s leaders clarion the evils of anti-Semitism, many of their own right-wing supporters are the most rabid of Islamophobes.

For example, as the New Yorker pointed out a couple of weeks ago,

Dov Lior, one of the most important rabbis in the West Bank, extolled Baruch Goldstein—who, in 1994, machine-gunned twenty-nine Palestinians at the Cave of Patriarchis in Hebron—as “holier than all the martyrs of the Holocaust.”

Lior also endorsed a book that discussed when it is right and proper to murder an Arab, and he and a group of kindred rabbis issued a proclamation proscribing Jews from selling or renting lands to non-Jews. 

Figures such as Lior are not speaking from the wilderness. They are central to  Benjamin Netanyahu’s continued hold on government.

I’ll bet that, if it hasn’t already happened, that a right-wing Israeli official or editorialist will cite the vicious Toulouse attack as further justification for Israel to bomb Iran. The argument: imagine what would happened if, instead of being armed with a 45 pistol, the anti-Semite had access to a nuclear weapon. We will not wait again for the world to act!

But before Americans start feeling too smug about all this, just this past January, a  prominent New York Shi’ite mosque with a branch in Pakistan and three homes were firebombed.  No one was injured.

Another firebomb exploded inside the Al-lman School in the Imam Al-Khoei Islamic Center in Jamaica, Queens. Approximately 80 people were inside the mosque center when two or three Molotov cocktails, at least one made from a Starbucks bottle, were thrown at the building.

Those attacks came less than a week after the Council for American Islamic Relations (CAIR) said, “We are witnessing an unprecedented increase in rhetorical and physical attacks on the American Muslim community and Islam.”

It said that mosques have been targeted in arson and attacks and by vandals in more than a dozen states, stretching from California to New York, including the Midwest and southern states.

If you have the stomach for it, plunge into the virulent currents of racial hatred that thrive in the Internet. For anti-Semitism, start with the Holocaust Deniers at http://www.ihr.org. For rabid Islamophobes, some of whom, like Pam Geller, are still regular features on U.S. talk shows, check out http://www.jihadwatch.org/.

Or, you might just examine more closely the kinds of “jokes” and emails you half-jokingly exchange with your own more articulate friends.

World Turns Its Back-Again: Tunis 2012-Bermuda 1943

Thousands of largely unarmed people rise up against a brutal regime. In reaction, military commanders are dispatched to ruthlessly crush the revolt. Men, women, and children are cut down in cold blood, houses and apartments destroyed, the streets littered with body parts and piles of the dead. Desperate appeals are made  to the world for help, for arms, for medicines, for rescue. 

The leaders of the world wring their hands and meet to deal with the horrific situation.  Regrettably, there are too many reasons not to act; too many complications, too many subtleties. Sophisticated diplomats and heads of state understand these things. The slaughter continues.

One such meeting just ended in Tunis on February 24^th, called to deal with the uprising in Syria.  The other was held in Bermuda, April 1943, with delegations from the U.S. and Great Britain to discuss the terrible predicament of the millions of Jews trapped in Hitler’s Europe.

Two days into the Bermuda conference, the delegates received word of a transmission from an underground Polish radio operating out of Warsaw. Its desperate message:"The last 35,000 Jews in the Warsaw ghetto are condemned to death. Warsaw is once again deafened with the bursts of gunfire. People are being murdered. Women and children are defending themselves with their bare hands. Save us..." At that point the radio went dead.

Of course, the differences between the Holocaust and the Warsaw Ghetto and the current bloody uprising in Syria are huge.  But the harrowing stories that have come down to us from the Warsaw Ghetto are eerily similar to the horrific accounts emanating from Homs and other Syrian towns over the past few months.

And, in both cases, the leaders of the world were challenged to react.

The Jews who rose up in Warsaw were the remnants of more than 250,000 Jews originally herded into the Ghetto. They finally refused to follow Nazi diktats when they came to realize that they were being deported not to labor camps but to the death camp at Treblinka.

Against German tanks, artillery, and poison gas, the Jews had only a few revolvers, rifles, and Molotov cocktails, some of them smuggled into the Ghetto by sympathetic members of the Polish Underground.  Via underground radio and smuggled written messages, they attempted to alert the world with desperate appeals for arms, for food, medicines, for support of any kind. 

Meanwhile, by coincidence, reluctant American and British delegations –who for months had been under mounting pressure from domestic Jewish organizations--were meeting in Bermuda to deal with the question of what, if anything, they would do to save Europe’s Jews from Hitler, including large numbers of Jews in areas not yet occupied by the Nazis.  

In Bermuda the British and American delegates talked on and on for twelve days. Jewish groups were not allowed to attend—nor were the media. At the end, the delegates issued a few hand-wringing statements, but did nothing. 

In fact, one of their fears was that Hitler might actually open the gates of occupied Europe and allow the Jews to flee. The last thing the Americans and British governments wanted to deal with was a flood of immigrant Jews. Britain was also particularly unwilling to allow Jews to go to Palestine, then under British rule, for fear of offending the Arabs.

The basic reason for British and American inaction was deep-seated anti-Semitism in both England and the United States, particularly pronounced in the British Government and the U.S. State Department—but also in the general population.  Not even Franklin Roosevelt was willing to make saving the Jews of Europe a major issue until 1944.

Back in Warsaw, after three weeks of desperate struggle, on May 16, 1943 the last resistance in the Ghetto was annihilated.  

In solidarity with his fellow Jews, an exile leader living in England, Samuel Zygelboim committed suicide. For months, he had pleaded with the Allies to retaliate against Hitler for the on-going slaughter of Polish Jews.

In a BBC broadcast on December 1942, he had warned, "if Polish Jewry's call for help goes unheeded, Hitler will have achieved one of his war aims-to destroy the Jews of Europe irrespective of the military outcome of the war." 

[Have to admit, that warning sounds like those decrying the failure of the U.N. to take a tougher stand against Assad for the bloodbath in Syria. ]

After the Warsaw Ghetto fell, Samuel Zygelboim left behind a suicide note charging the Germans with the murder of Polish Jews, but he also accused the Allied governments, including the Polish Government-in-Exile, of not having done enough to rescue the Jews from the murderous hands of the Germans. Then he wrote:

By my death I wish to make my final protest against the passivity with which the world has witnessed and permitted the annihilation of the Jewish people.”

One would like to imagine that, the outcome of the Bermuda Conference would have been dramatically different if the Internet had been around at the time. If instead of a lonely plea from an underground radio station, or the dry accounts of a few diplomatic cables, there had been You Tube and Twitter and Facebook, broadcasting to the world the horrors of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Holocaust.  

Imagine for instance, if anyone with the Internet had been able to follow minute-by –bloody minute the massacre of the civilians in the Warsaw Ghetto: the slaughter of men, women and children, the makeshift hospitals, their floors running red with blood. Imagine if the world had seen all that 69 years ago: the scenes we’ve been witnessing every day from Homs.

Of course, the world would have reacted. How could they have not?

Just look at our diplomats discussing Syria in Tunis this past Friday.

Iran and Israel: Obama's blindspot Intact

In the brief interview he gave ABC before the Superbowl, President Obama declared “I’ve been very clear that we’re going to do everything we can to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and creating an arms race, a nuclear arms race, in a volatile region.”

Sounds like a very laudable goal, right. Except for the fact that, as I recently blogged, the nuclear arms race in the Middle East is already under way. It began almost fifty years ago when Israel developed the bomb.

According to a 2007 study by the Federation of American Scientists, “Estimates for Israel's nuclear weapons stockpile range from 70 to 400 warheads. The actual number is probably closer to the lower estimate. Additional weapons could probably be built from inventories of fissile materials.”

In other words, as I wrote, “One of the most uncommented on ironies today is that Israel is threatening military action to prevent Iran from continuing the same clandestine route to nuclear weapons that Israel took; just as Israeli planes destroyed nuclear reactors in Syria and Iraq to prevent those countries from following Israel’s lead”

Indeed, Israel, probably has more nukes today than either India or Pakistan. Speculation is that they could be fired from long-range artillery, dropped as bombs, or delivered as warheads from Israeli submarines or via Israel’s Jehrico 1 and 2 Missiles.   There has also been conjecture about nuclear land mines, suitcase bombs, and missiles fired from Israelis submarines.

A parallel irony, as I pointed out, is the fact that, for the past fifty years, every American President has refused to publicly recognize the fact of Israel’s nuclear arsenal.

On Superbowl Sunday President Obama kept the tradition intact.

Of course, so did ABC News and reporter Matt Lauer who let Obama’s statement go unchallenged. But, hey, that’s what the mainstream media has done for years.

Whatever your views on this crisis, how are we supposed to discuss it--never mind resolve it--with such a political blind spot.

Check it out the missing issue yourself as you follow the breathless coverage of the current crisis. 

The Iran Crisis: Only Half the Story

             Yesterday upon the stair

            I met a man who wasn’t there

He wasn’t there again today

Oh, how I wish he’d go away

                              William Hughes Mearns, 1899

One of the most uncommented on ironies today is that Israel is threatening military action to prevent Iran from continuing the same clandestine route to nuclear weapons that Israel took; just as Israeli planes destroyed nuclear reactors in Syria and Iraq to prevent those countries from following Israel’s lead.  

A parallel irony: President Obama champions an economic embargo to force Iran to back off its nuclear program. Yet, for more than half a century one American president after another declined to sound any alarums over Israel’s secret drive for nukes. Indeed, U.S. leaders refused to even officially acknowledge the foreboding intelligence about Israel’s intentions that American analysts were providing. That flimflam continues to this day.

[Perhaps the most incisive chronicle of this official deception is “The Samson Option,” written in 1991 by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh. Most of the following is drawn from that book.]

The charade began in the early 1950’s during the Eisenhower administration. Worried about Israel’s survival in the face of massive Arab opposition, and unable to get assurances from Eisenhower that the new Zionist state would be protected by America’s nuclear umbrella, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion set out clandestinely to provide Israel with its own nuclear weapons.

The secret facility would be constructed at Dimona in the Negev desert. The mammoth project would be off the books, paid for by wealthy Jews from around the world. France would also play a key but secret role, engineering a sophisticated reprocessing plant deep under the reactor at Dimona.

The Israeli leader who oversaw the clandestine program was Shimon Peres. These days, as President of Israel, Peres talks darkly of Iran’s nuclear deception. For decades however, he repeatedly lied to American officials about Israel’s nuclear intentions, claiming that Israel was working on a small reactor for peaceful purposes.

It was impossible however to hide the massive new construction from America’s high-flying U2 spy plane. In late 1958 or early 1959, CIA photo intelligence experts, spotted what looked almost certainly to be a nuclear reactor being built at Dimona. They rushed the raw images to the White House, expecting urgent demands from the Oval Office for more information. This was, after all, a development that could initiate a disastrous nuclear arms race in the Middle East. 

But there was absolutely no follow-up from the White House. As one of the analysts later told Seymour Hersh “Nobody came back to me, ever, on Israel.” Though the analysts continued regular reporting on Dimona, there were no requests for high-level briefings. “ ‘Thank you,’ and ‘this isn’t going to be disseminated is it?’ It was that attitude.” 

“By the end of 1959,” writes Hersh, “the two analysts had no doubts that Israel was going for the bomb. They also had no doubts that President Eisenhower and his advisers were determined to look the other way.”

The reason was evident: Eisenhower publicly was a strong advocate of the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT). If he was formally to “know” of Israel’s nuclear program, he would be obliged to react--against Israel. Which, in the U.S. could mean serious political consequences.

It was only in December 1960, that the Eisenhower administration, nearing its end, leaked word about Dimona and France’s involvement to the New York Times. The administration hoped that, without having to make any official accusations itself, it could oblige the Israeli government to sign the NPT.

But Ben Gurion flatly denied the Times report. He assured American officials –as well as the Israeli Knesset--that the Dimona reactor was completely benign. French officials guaranteed that any plutonium produced at Dimona would be returned to France for safekeeping (another lie).

The Eisenhower administration, however, had no stomach to take on Israel and its American lobby. Despite the reports of CIA analysts, Ben Gurion’s denials went unchallenged.  That hypocrisy would remain official America’s policy--even as U.S. presidents decried the attempts of countries like India, North Korea, Pakistan, Libya and Iraq to themselves develop the bomb.

Even John Kennedy, who also felt strongly about nuclear proliferation, was forced for domestic political reasons to back off his demand for full-scale nspections of Dimona by the U.N.’s IAEA. Instead he agreed to a charade: inspections would be carried out only by Americans, who would be required to announce their visits well ahead of time, with the full agreement of Israel. No spot checks were allowed. The inspectors also were never shown some of the key intelligence that CIA analysts had gathered on Dimona.   

In April 1963, when Kennedy asked Shimon Peres point blank about Israel’s nuclear intentions, Peres replied with the prevarication that remains to this day: “I can tell you forthrightly that we will not introduce atomic weapons in to the region. We certainly won’t be the first to do so. We have no interest in that. On the contrary, our interest is in de-escalating the armament tension, even in total disarmament.”

Five years later, however, in 1968, Dimona began producing four or five warheads a year. But when Lyndon Johnson received a CIA report of that fact, he ordered CIA director Richard Helms to bury the estimate. No one else was to be informed, not even Secretary of State Dean Rusk nor Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.

Later, though Israel was still refusing to sign the non-proliferation treaty, Johnson agreed to supply that country with high-performance F-4 Fighters capable of carrying a nuclear weapon on a one-way mission to Moscow.

Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger came to power in 1969, with an even more sympathetic attitude towards Israel. Its nuclear ambitions, they felt, were fully justified. They had only contempt for the NPT. As Kissinger’s deputy Morton Halperin later told Hersh, “Henry believed that it was good to spread nuclear weapons around the world… He felt it inevitable that most major powers would get nukes and better for the United States to be on the inside helping them, than on the outside futilely fighting the process.”

In fact, Israel’s real nuclear intentions were hair-raising: They would target their nukes not on Egypt or Syria, but the Soviet Union. And they would make sure that Moscow understood that. The calculation was that Egypt and Syria, would never dare launch a war against Israel without the support of the Soviets, at the time their principal ally and arms provider. But if the men in the Kremlin realized they might face nuclear immolation themselves, they would never permit their Arab clients to drive Israel into the sea.  

Indeed, that calculation may have worked in 1973. According to Hersh, after Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack overwhelming Israel’s defenses, an alarmed Gold Meir gave the order to prepare the nukes for imminent use. Alerted to Israel’s action, the Soviets immediately cautioned the Egyptian’s to back off. At the same time, Nixon and Kissinger —informed by the Israelis themselves of the nuclear deployment ---agreed to a massive emergency airlift to replace Israel’s depleted arms and ammunition.  

But even after those near- catclysmic events, Kissinger kept the lid on the entire matter. And when Egyptian President Sadat claimed that Israel had developed nuclear weapons, Shimon Peres again categorically denied the charges. He accused Sadat of “gathering information of his own making”

And so it went with the administration of Jimmy Carter.  On September 21, 1979, when an American spy satellite picked up a brilliant double flash over the South Indian Ocean, some American analysts concluded that it was the product of a nuclear explosion-a test conducted jointly by Israel and South Africa’s apartheid regime.  

Once again, the discovery presented the White House with a terrible dilemma,  President Carter was also brandishing the banner of non proliferation. If he were obliged to formally recognize Israel’s nuclear status, and didn’t seek tough sanctions against the Jewish state, he would be roundly criticized as a hypocrite. But, as always, punishing Israel could also mean serious domestic political trouble.    

Once again, the administration shielded the Oval Office from the truth. Wrote Hersh, “it was important that an American president not know what there was to know.”

But then, in 1986 the London Sunday Times published an extraordinary account of Dimona. It was based on extensive interviews and pictures furnished by Mordecai Vanunu, a thirty-one year old Moroccan Jew who had been working inside Dimona. He claimed that Israel’s nuclear stockpile totaled more than two hundred warheads.

[Even before the report was published, Israeli’s leaders discovered Vanunu’s apostasy. He was enticed by a female Mossad agent to fly to Rome for a few days; then was drugged, kidnapped and returned to Israel to stand trial. He was ultimately sentence to eighteen years in a maximum security prison, spending eleven of those years in solitary confinement. Even today, in Israel he is still being harassed, forbidden from speaking with any foreigners, reporters, or attempting to leave the country.]

American intelligence experts were floored by the Times account and the evident sophistication of Israel’s clandestine program. Officially, however Washington still went along with the fiction that Israel was not a nuclear state.

Yet again in 1991, Israel made use of its stockpile, deploying missile launchers armed with nuclear weapons facing Iraq: a terrible warning of retaliation to Saddam Hussein if he were to fill the Scud missiles he was firing at Israel with chemical weapons. He never did.

‘Which makes our case!’ defenders of Israel’s nuclear program will exclaim. Faced with the implacable Arab hostility, Israel was obliged to get the bomb. And thank God they did.   

The problem is that other embattled regimes, make the same argument. Since the days of the Shah, for instance, Iran’s leaders, feeling threatened first by the Soviet Union, then after 1979, by the United States, have pushed for nuclear weapons. And not without reason. To this day, the American president—not to mention rabid Republican primary candidates—openly discuss the option of attacking Iran.  

But wait, we are assured, Israel is different—an ally, not governed by crazies like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who have sworn to wipe Israel from the map.

Not to defend the tyrants running Iran, but many experts convincingly dispute that Ahmadinejad actually threatened nuclear annihilation of Israel.  In addition, the Zionist state has had its own share of crazies who have long advocated using force to create a “Greater Israel.” Ariel Sharon, for instance, who precipitated a bloody invasion of Lebanon in 1982 in a futile attempt to wipe out the PLO. He also openly talked about overthrowing King Hussein to turn Jordan by force into a Palestinian State.

Officially, however, Washington and Israel continue the ridiculous pretence that Israel has no nuclear weapons. To this day, Israel reporters can only write about their country’s nuclear capacity if they cite foreign publications as the source. And in the U.S., Washington’s official silence seems curiously contagious: how often, in the current flurry of media reports about the threat from Iran is there any mention of Israel’s own nuclear arsenal? 

The bottom line is this—whatever your view about Iran or Israel’s right to nuclear weapons--how can statesmen or reporters or anyone seriously discuss the current crisis over Iran when a key part of the dispute is officially hidden from view? How can the U.S. and Israel deal with proposals for a nuclear free Middle East when they still refuse officially to acknowledge that the region is not nuclear free—and hasn’t been for the past fifty years?

 

Afghanistan: Coffins for the U.S. & NATO; contracts for China

Some bitter ironies in Afghanistan these days: U.S. and French soldiers gunned down by the very Afghan troops they work with. America and its NATO allies, facing huge budget problems themselves, persist in squandering billions in Afghanistan, to defeat Islamic radicals and create a propitious climate for growth and investment. Right now, the largest investments so safe guarded are Chinese.  

Another paradox, it was American engineers who, in the summer of 2010, completed a survey concluding that Afghanistan sits atop one trillion dollars of untapped copper, iron and lithium deposits. If it could just get its act together, the country had a promising future. Skeptics immediately claimed that rosy estimate didn’t take account Afghanistan’s woeful infrastructure: it could cost more to mine those resources than they were worth.

But that’s not how the Chinese see it. A few weeks ago, China’s National Petroleum Corporation became the first foreign company to be allowed to explore Afghanistan’s oil and gas reserves in the Amu Darya Basin. The deal is estimated to be worth more than $700 million. Some speculate it could ultimately be worth ten times that amount to China.

Even before that deal, however, China was already the largest foreign investor in Afghanistan. In 2007 Beijing signed a $3 billion agreement to explore huge copper deposits in Mes Aynak, south of Kabul.

India is the only other country to go after Afghan minerals. Last November a deal was signed giving Indian firms the rights to 1.8 billion tons on iron-ore, one of the largest untapped deposits in Asia.

It’s very unlikely that the Chinese [and Indians] would be making such risky bets without the security provided by the U.S. and its allies. After the copper deal was inked,  2,000 U.S. troops were deployed to provide general security in Logar Province where the Mes Aynak mine is located. They also protected the projected routes of the road and railway which will service the huge development. Another 1,500 Afghan National Police, presumably paid and trained by the U.S. and its allies, were sent to guard the mine itself.

In addition, facing restless Muslim groups in their own country, the Chinese are not at all unhappy about the U.S. and Nato taking on Islamic militants in Afghanistan.

Yet, all the while, China has consistently refused to contribute to the joint Western military force. They even turned down a request to permit NATO to ship non-lethal supplies via China to Afghanistan. 

So why aren’t the U.S. and its allies screaming about the situation?  Because, if they are to have a face-saving way out of Afghanistan that doesn’t disintegrate into chaos, they desperately need China’s huge new investments to continue and prosper.

As things now stand, once the income from opium production is deducted, 97% of Afghanistan’s GNP comes from foreign aid.  A whole new economy is needed.

After China’s National Petroleum Council signed its recent oil agreement with Kabul, experts warned that success was far from a sure thing: it could take five to ten years of expensive exploration to see if the oil fields are really worth developing.

But the Chinese are after more than oil and copper. They see each deal as another foot in the door. The are also determined to reap huge potential profits to come from rebuilding Afghanistan’s shattered infrastructure and economy, among such projects, a high-speed rail system.  In this way, without massive military deployments, China has already become a major player throughout the region. [I’ve written about China’s activities in Pakistan, Iran, Iraq and the Gulf in other recent blogs]  

A particularly insightful comment on China’s tactics in Afghanistan followed an article in The Diplomat:

“Achieving a peace agreement is always the number one preference for Chinese government. By nature Chinese are not interested in “beating” other group of people, but are interested in “gaining” concrete benefits. This is due to the Chinese culture and history. In Chinese culture, people believe in “harmony brings wealth”. Therefore, when dealing with a dispute, a Chinese normally do not set his goal as completely beating the others, but rather sequence his goals according to priority, and try to achieve the goal with the highest priority first, and so on. Each disputant may achieve some goal upon settlement of the dispute.”


Case in point: thanks to the Chinese, the Afghans may benefit from a real high-speed rail system before the United States.

Iran, Israel, the U.S: Blind Mans Buff

In a perilous spiral of assassinations, threats and counter-threats, the leaders of Washington, Jerusalem and Tehran keep ratcheting the tension. What is most alarming about the situation, is that the principle players and their advisors are engaged in an incredibly dangerous three-way game of blind mans buff.  

None of them expresses a real understanding of the others: of their motives, their concerns, nor their likely reactions. That’s true even with Israel and the United States:  though the U.S. risks being sucked into any conflict between Israel and Iran, the Obama administration is currently forced to guess what its supposed Israeli allies are planning.

What would America or Israel --or any country-- do if five of its scientists were assassinated by an enemy power?  How would they react if, at the same time, the mightiest country on the planet dispatched its forces towards their borders even as it tightened a blockade to garrote their economy?

Would they kowtow to the demand that they terminate any activities related to the research or development of nuclear weapons [which, of course, both Israel and the U.S. possess]--or lash out in violent reprisal?

A lot of people with important sounding titles pontificate on what lies ahead, but who are they kidding? It’s like we’re watching kids playing around with vials of highly volatile chemicals. No one’s sure when an explosion will come, nor how calamitous might be the chain reactions it ignites.  

What makes the situation even more perilous is the fact that the leaders of the three countries involved—Israel, Iran and the U.S.--are all challenged by strident enemies in their own countries.  Since this current dispute plays front and centre, every move they make is automatically the target of virulent homegrown--and often woefully ignorant--opponents.

In other words, if the leaders and their advisors were more secure on their respective thrones, they might all be able to follow a much cooler, more rational course. They might even be able to sit down and negotiate.  

Worse, is the likelihood that the principle actors, their advisors, intelligence agencies and domestic critics, don’t really comprehend what the others are up to—where they are coming from and what they want to achieve.

If it’s not blind-man’s buff, it’s shadow boxing—sparring with caricatures: In this corner, the deceitful bearded mullahs in Tehran obsessed with obtaining nuclear weapons to exterminate Israel and establish a new Caliphate. In that corner, the  grasping imperialists in Washington, who for decades have used the CIA and American military to put down movements of national liberation, sustain the Zionist State of Israel and the corrupt oil-rich Arab dictators.

Those caricatures become so deeply embedded that even the supposedly objective intelligence agencies of each of the combatants—not to mention the mainstream media--tend to censor, edit out, or shy away from information that runs counter to official “truth”.

I had a personal run-in with this phenomenon in 1980 when I was a producer at 60 Minutes covering the on-going revolution in Iran during the hostage crisis.

Travelling back and forward between Tehran, New York and Washington, I was struck by the total inability of Americans—even at the highest level—to understand the emotions and history that drove the hatred of all things American that had exploded in Iran with the fall of the Shah.

Just up West 57^th street from CBS News, for instance, was a huge billboard with the diabolical image of Khomeini glowering down on New York.

I suggested we do a report to give Americans a better idea of what was driving Iran’s revolutionaries and their violent feelings against the United States.

Though certainly encouraged by radical elements in Tehran, that hatred was fueled by real facts: the shameful history of U.S. intervention in Iran, from the CIA’s organizing a coup to oust the democratically elected nationalist leader Mohamed Mossadegh in 1953 to America’s subsequent backing of the Shah of Iran.

That support included the closest of relations between the CIA and the Shah’s infamous secret police, the SAVAK, notorious for torture and brutality. [In the future, of course, SAVAK’s brutality would pale beside the horrific prisons and savage repression of Khomeini and the regimes to follow. ]

To give an idea of America’s relations with the Shah and SAVAK, I stitched together a tough report with Mike Wallace based on a series of interviews in New York and Washington. “You’d have to be blind, deaf and dumb and a presidential candidate not to know there was torture going on in Iran under the Shah,” Jesse Leaf, a former C.I.A. analyst told us.

“We knew what was happening and we did nothing about it and I was told not to do anything about it. By definition, an enemy of the Shaw was an enemy of the CIA. We were friends. This was a very close relationship between the United states and Iran.”

Another former CIA officer, Richard Cottam, also condemned the U.S. and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, for turning a blind eye to the excesses of the Shah, and refusing to have any contact with the opposition groups.

“What you seemed to be saying, Professor Cottam, “Mike Wallace interjected, “is that when the question “Who lost Iran?” is finally asked, Henry Kissinger is at the top of your culprit’s list.”

“I think Henry Kissinger’s idea of diplomacy in this sense is…is intolerable,” replied Cottam.

We also reported on some of the classified U.S. government documents divulged by the Iranians who had taken over the American Embassy. Those documents showed that American diplomats based in Teheran had warned Washington months earlier of the threat of a possible hostage taking--particularly if the U.S. allowed the despised Shah to come to America for medical treatment, as the U.S. ultimately did. Those warnings had been completely ignored by Washington.

In return for releasing the hostages what the Iranian government of President Bani-Sadr was demanding was a pledge by the U.S. not to interfere in the future affairs of Iran and an agreement not to block their efforts to get back the Shah and the wealth of Iran he embezzled. They also wanted an admission by the U.S. of past wrongs. In light of that past, we asked, were those demands so outrageous?

In the context of America’s superheated passions at the time, however, even posing that question was considered outrageous.

Over the next few days, as we were preparing the report, we received calls from many Washington officials concerned about the broadcast. This was capped by President Jimmy Carter himself who called Bill Leonard, the President of CBS News, to try to convince him not to broadcast report. It would, he said, undermine U.S. negotiations with Iran at a very delicate time.

To his credit, Bill Leonard refused to back down. The only thing he requested was to change the title of our report from “Should the U.S. Apologize?”  to a more neutral “The Iran file.”

When questioned by Leonard, we argued that it was difficult to understand how our report could upset the hostage negotiations.  We were not revealing any secrets to Iran. The Iranians already knew well the role of the U.S. in their own history. The people we were informing were 20 million Americans—who didn’t understand what was really roiling Iran.  

And still don’t.