|| -----Original Message-----
|| From: Doug Henwood
||
|| Memo on the Margin November 28, 2001
||
|| Memo To: Rich Lowry, National Review editor
|| From: Jude Wanniski
|| Re: Saddam's nuclear power plant (...)
|| Now it is true that after Osiraq, Saddam decided No-More-Mr. Nice
|| Guy, and began his clandestine project to match Israel bomb-for-bomb,
|| just in case it came to that. It was in this period, while Iraq
|| warred with Iran, that the IAEA was only shown the legitimate
|| operations in Iraq. Since the end of the Gulf War, though, after the
|| UN inspectors learned about the clandestine program, the IAEA
|| protocols have been tightened. Nobody talks about this openly, Rich,
|| but if you check you will find that IAEA inspectors can go anywhere
|| they wish in Iran or Iraq, if they suspect a clandestine nuke
|| program, and they will be taken for a look-see. An IAEA team did such
|| an inspection in Iraq early this year and has at least twice checked
|| out suspicions in Iran. It is easy to hide a chem/bio research
|| facility, but because a nuke plant requires so much infrastructure,
|| so much electric power, it is practically impossible to hide. In
|| other words, it may not be necessary to bomb the Islamic world to
|| bits to be safe from atomic attack. Quite the opposite might work.
|| Maybe we can get Ariel Sharon, even at this late date, to pony up the
|| money to rebuild Osiraq. That would be a nice gesture, wouldn't it?
||
Israel has hundreds of nuclear weapons and they aren't only targeted at Arab locations. In the Yom Kippur war, Israel opened up its silo hatches and put its Jericho missiles on alert - against the Soviet Union, no less. This was nuclear blackmail to force the US to back Israel. Nixon the crap player didn't think Meir was bluffing, so US transports started flying in. The irony is that he had agreed with Meir to discontinue nuclear inspections in exchange for Israel keeping quiet about its bombs. So it's not just the Jewish lobby that's twisting America's arm, but Israeli Strangeloves. Kennedy was the last US president who actually tried to stop the Israeli nuclear weapons program. The Israelis finally accepted US inspections of the Osirak reactor in exchange for the US abandoning its policy of not arming Israel (yes, there was such a policy once) but stage-managed the inspections so that the weapons development was concealed.
More about this in The Samson Option by Seymour Hersh (Random House, 1991) and Israel and the Bomb by Aver Cohen (Columbia University Press, 1998)
If you start looking for rogue states with nukes, Israel is pretty hard to miss. But the US can't do anything about it and is forced to support Israel to the bitter end because the minute Israel decides that "the end of the third temple" is nigh, it will start a nuclear war.
On a totally different note, Just saw a one-act Tariq Ali play at Counterpunch: Tigris and Euphrates. An Iraqi doctor is having a lesbian relationship with a recently widowed woman, and the name of the play is what she calls her lover's breasts, whose husband has died from the effects of DU irradiation. All the doctor's patients are dying for lack of medicine, and the two rivers is all she lives for. http://www.counterpunch.org/tariqtigris.html
Hakki