Ultimate Nuke Hypocrites: That Would Be the U.S.

What is the Iranian government up to? For once the imperial coalition, overstretched in Iraq and unpopular at home, is proposing jaw, not war. The U.N. Security Council's offer was a good one: If Iran suspended its uranium enrichment program, it would be entitled to legally guaranteed supplies of fuel for nuclear power, assistance in building a light water reactor, foreign aid, technology transfer and the beginning of the end of economic sanctions. The United States seems prepared, for the first time since the revolution, to open a diplomatic office in Tehran. But in Geneva, the Iranians filibustered until the negotiations ended. On Saturday, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced that Iran has now doubled the number of centrifuges it uses to enrich uranium. A fourth round of sanctions looks inevitable.

The unequivocal statements Barack Obama and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown made in Israel last week about Iran's nuclear weapons program cannot yet be justified. Nor can the unequivocal statements by some anti-war campaigners that Iran does not intend to build the bomb. Why would a country with such reserves of natural gas and so great a potential for solar power suffer sanctions and the threat of bombing to make fuel it could buy from other states, if it accepted the U.N.'s terms?

Those who maintain that Iran's purposes are peaceful clutch at the National Intelligence Estimate published by the U.S. government in November. While it judged that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003, it saw the country's civilian uranium program as a means of developing "technical capabilities that could be applied to producing nuclear weapons, if a decision is made to do so." The latest report from the International Atomic Energy Agency notes that no fissile material has been diverted from Iran's stocks, but raises grave questions about some of the documents it has found, which suggest research into bomb-making (Iran says the papers are forgeries). Those of us who oppose an attack on Iran are under no obligation to accept Ahmadinejad's claims of peaceful intent.

Nor do we have to accept the fictions of our own representatives. The Security Council's offer to Iran claimed that resolving this enrichment issue would help to bring about a "Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction." But like every other such document, it made no mention of the principal owner of weapons in the region: Israel. According to a leaked briefing by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, Israel possesses between 60 and 80 nuclear bombs. But none of the countries demanding that Iran scrap the weapons it doesn't yet possess are demanding that Israel destroys the weapons it does possess.

This subject is the great political taboo. Neither Brown nor Obama mentioned it last week. The U.S. intelligence agencies provide a biannual report to Congress on the weapons of mass destruction developed by foreign states; the report covers Iran, North Korea, India, Pakistan and others, but not Israel. During a parliamentary debate in March, the British defense minister, Bob Ainsworth, was asked whether he thought that Israel's nuclear weapons are "a destabilizing factor" in the Middle East. "My understanding," he replied, "is that Israel does not acknowledge that it has nuclear weapons." Does Ainsworth really buy this nonsense? If so, can we have a new minister? If Iran builds a bomb, it will do so for one reason: that there is already a nuclear-armed state in the Middle East, by which it feels threatened.

But we make the rules and we break them. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) obliges the five official nuclear states, of which the U.K. is one, to work toward "general and complete disarmament." On Friday, the Guardian published the notes for a speech made last year by a senior civil servant that suggested that the decision to replace the U.K.'s nuclear missiles had already been made, in secret and without parliamentary scrutiny. Since then defense ministers have told the Commons on five occasions that the decision has not yet been made. They appear to have misled the House.