WarSclerotic

Iran is going nuclear while Israel gets a bashing – Haaretz – Israel News.

Just as Iran enters a decisive phase in its progress towards the ability to build a nuclear weapon, a bizarre reversal has put Israel’s nuclear program at the top of the agenda as the United Nations begins a review of its global non-proliferation regime in New York on Monday.

The Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), which takes place every five years, gathers representatives from 190 countries. Only signatories of the treaty, which was drafted in 1968, came into force in 1970 and was extended in 1995, are entitled to attend. As a result, Israel ? along with Pakistan, India and North Korea ? is forbidden from taking part.

While Israel, through its diplomatic mission at the UN and its International Atomic Energy Agency, will no doubt keep a close eye on proceedings, there remains a fear that Egypt, along with partners in the Arab League and from across the Muslim world, will hijack the conference, turning it into a month-long exercise in bashing Israel.

Three main issues dominate the agenda: Nuclear disarmament, as demanded by paragraph four of the treaty; stopping the spread of atomic weapons; and enhancing the use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.

This year the treaty parties will meet in an atmosphere of high tension – between the majority bloc of states, known as the Non-Aligned Movement, and a small group of countries who between them have a near-monopoly on nuclear arms and technology. Put simply, this is the same old tension between rich countries and poor ones, between the developed West and the developing East.

The West, led by the United States, hopes to rein in proliferation by stiffening the IAEA’s powers of inspection. In this, they have in mind a dangerous precedent set by Iraq, Syria and Libya ? all signatories to the NPT, yet all of whom ran clandestine nuclear programs under the noses of international inspectors.

The West also has in mind North Korea, whose accession to the treaty did little to stop the country from carrying out two nuclear weapons tests and successfully building a bomb. Western nations also fear Iran, which has repeatedly mocked, defied and ignored both the UN Security Council and the IAEA, and is working systematically toward the point at which – if it chooses – it will be able to build a nuclear weapon.

To prevent this, Western states want to make the IAEA’s powers more binding by enforcing an ‘additional protocol’ to the treaty, allowing unscheduled and more intrusive inspections. They also want to toughen the terms under which a country could leave the NPT, to prevent a ‘break-out’ scenario in which Iran suddenly unveils a nuclear capability, just a North Korea did eight years ago.

Israel might well be happy with this sort of agenda, which chimes closely with its own position. But this year, Israel is not in luck: Egypt, as leader of the Non-Aligned bloc, is working to make its neighbor hostage to the global non-proliferation regime. The Egyptians plan to use this May’s conference to call on Israel to sign the NPT, open its reactor at Dimona to international inspectors and join regional talks to declare the Middle East a ‘nuclear-free zone’ ? talks that would also involve Iran. Cairo has signaled that if its demands are rejected, it may carry its 118 non-aligned allies to obstruct the West’s proposed reforms to the NPT.

Israel, for its part, has been left wondering why the conference has decided to pick on its own particular stance on the NPT, when India and Pakistan are in much the same position. Israel says it has no problem with the idea of a ‘nuclear-free’ Middle East, provided the declaration comes as part of wider package of peace deals and security agreements to rid the region of weapons of mass destruction in all forms, including chemical and biological agents and the missiles that would deliver them.

At the first nuclear review conference in 1995, the Clinton administration approved the meeting’s joint closing statement in its entirety, including a call for a non-nuclear Middle East ? in return for extending the treaty indefinitely. In 2000, Israel did not even make it onto the agenda; while in 2005 the Bush administration was prepared to scotch any Egyptian-Arab-Muslim attempt to engineer ‘linkage’ with Israel, even at the price of the conference failing altogether.

The big question now is how the Obama government, which has made non-proliferation a cornerstone of its foreign policy, will behave. The coming month will reveal how far the United States is prepared to go to protect Israel by blocking resolutions against it, or at least softening their tone.

This entry was posted on May 1, 2010 at 8:51 PM and is filed under Iran / Israel War. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.