Nukular Meltdown

This seems to me to be the worst possible politics in the world — not to mention that it is purely insane:

Administration now opposes inspections as part of nuclear treaty:

In a shift of U.S. policy, the Bush administration announced this week that it will oppose provisions for inspections and verification as part of an international treaty that would ban production of nuclear-weapons materials.

For several years the United States and other nations have been pursuing the treaty, which would ban new production by any state of highly enriched uranium and plutonium for weapons. At U.N.-sponsored Conference on Disarmament in Geneva this week, the Bush administration told other nations it still supported a treaty, but not verification.

The planned treaty wouldn’t affect existing stockpiles or production for non-weapons purposes, such as energy or medical research. Mainly, it was designed to impose restraints on India, Pakistan and Israel, whose nuclear programs operate outside the reach of Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty inspectors.

Administration officials said they made the decision after concluding such a system would cost too much, require overly intrusive inspections and wouldn’t guarantee compliance with the treaty.

Nuclear proliferation is a potent issue politically and an extremely important issue on the merits. That Bush and his team think it’s smart on either level to do this right now is simply inexplicable to me. I’m starting to wonder if those Capital Hill Blue reports of a White House on drugs aren’t true.

There can be no peace, no winning the GWOT, no safety for the people of the United States and the world without new measures and controls on the development of nuclear weapons. The idea that they are not doing absolutely everything possible to get formal and informal information about those weapons, whatever the cost, is shocking. That they aren’t concerned particularly about Pakistan and India, one of which is the prime breeding ground of islamic fundamentalism ferchristssake, is completely and totally bizarre.

Are these the kind of deals is this government making with the Musharef government these days to get bin Laden at the right moment? Or have the neocons finally decided that their loyalties really are to Israel rather than the US — although I find it very difficult to believe that Israel is safer with loose nukes in the hands of terrorists? I swear, my tin foil hat is buzzing and honking as I write.

Update: In the post above, the final paragraph mentions neocon loyalties to Israel which seems to set off alarms that I’m an anti-semite or a believer in the Protocols. I doubt that you can find much evidence of that in any of my writing on the subject here on this blog or anywhere else, but suffice to say that it is disturbing enough to me that I feel the need to explain further.

I think that the neocon worldview is as distorted by its view of Israel’s strategic and moral importance as the apocapyptic Christians’ are — indeed that’s partially why they have such a bizarre alliance. There are many reasons for it, some of them no doubt are religious or ethnic identification, but mostly they are the result of an intellectual movement that has fetishized “democracy” and become obsessed with the idea of muscularity and strength as the only way to spread that gospel. Israel, with its historical and religious significance AND as the only democracy in the middle of various quasi Stalinist and theocratic totalitarian regimes has become a symbol of something much bigger than its religious identity. Indeed, I would argue that for the neocon movement the fact that Israel is a Jewish state is far down the list of significant factors explaining their obsession.

The neocons have never, to my knowledge, been consciously working against American interests. Indeed, they believe that Israel and the United States’ interests are the same, which in many cases they are. But, in my view, many of the policies set forth by the Likud party, to which the neocons actively serve as advisors (see “Clean Break”) are counterproductive to real American interests in the region and serve the neocons fevered troskyite wet dream of a democratic world revolution under the Pax Americana.

But, this last year has been something of a disaster for the neocon vision of American hegemony. We have demonstrated to the entire world in as vivid a way as possible that we are something of a paper tiger. It is perhaps impolitic of me to suggest that this might have induced a nutcase like Josh Bolton (who isn’t Jewish, btw) to try to use Israel to undermine America’s now very practical necessity to play fair in that part of the world as regards nuclear proliferation. But, I would not put it past him. His loyalties to the US can surely be questioned when in light of failure after failure on this most serious of issues (let’s not even discuss North Korea) he continues to press on. If that’s anti-semitic, so be it.

One of my commenters raised the question of needing Israel’s complicity regarding the new nuclear threat in Iran. Actually, the fact that Iran is actively pursuing nuclear weapons proves that continuing the fiction that Israel isn’t a nuclear power is useless and renders the laughable UN “mid-east nuclear free zone” finally moribund. Israel and the rest of the region are safer overall allowing inspections under a nuclear proliferation treaty. And, if somebody decides that the nuclear facilities in Iran need to be bombed, there is absolutely no reason that anyone would believe today that Israel acted alone as they did in 1981. If it happens it will be seen as done by the US no matter who takes on the physical task.

As for deterrence, we have thousands and thousand of ICBM’s and submarine precision guided nuclear missiles. There is nobody on this earth who thinks that the United States cannot launch a nuclear strike against any place on the planet if we choose to do so. We don’t need Israel for that.

Nuclear proliferation must be dealt with on many levels, but the first thing we must do is set out clear, understandable international guidelines and procedures for controlling it. That alone will not solve the problem, but it is an absolutely necessary part of the process. Parochial arguments at this point about Israeli exceptionalism are counterproductive to that particular task and I would argue are counterproductive to Israel’s security as well.