WarSclerotic

Cables expose Arab states’ hypocrisy over Iran | The Australian.

WASHINGTON has little help to contain the nuclear threat.

THE US is leading a quite desperate struggle to prevent nuclear weapons proliferation around the world to rogue states with mad leaders, to unstable states and to terrorists. The four nations which are at the centre of its concern are Iran, North Korea, Pakistan and China.

This is the central geo-strategic struggle of our time. This week we know a little more about it than we did last week.

The explosion of leaked US diplomatic cables courtesy of WikiLeaks revealed very few state secrets and nothing which compromises Western security.

Instead at almost every point they profoundly confirm the narrative which the US, and incidentally Australian, governments have been broadcasting relating to Iran, North Korea, China and the Middle East.

There is a danger that the bitchy gossip in the cables – a perfectly normal part of the diplomat’s need to assess the subjective qualities of significant figures, as well as their formal policies – will obscure their substance.

The over-arching theme of the cables is the growing danger of the proliferation of nuclear weapons technology and the sustained, difficult, pretty much thankless task the Americans are engaged in, on behalf of all of us, to try to stop this from happening.

For my money the single most startling set of revelations concerns the Arab world’s view of Iran. Over the years many American, Israeli and British contacts have told me the Arab regimes are even more concerned about the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran than Israel is. David Miliband, then British foreign secretary, told me this last year in an interview at the British Foreign Office.

Although I trusted and believed all these contacts, even I thought they were probably gilding the lily a bit: that the Israelis were really scared of a nuclear Iran but the Arabs were probably just pretty uncomfortable about it. I was wrong. If anything, my contacts were understating the Arab fear of Iran.

One of the clear revelations from these leaked cables is that numerous Arab leaders have asked the Americans to take military action to stop Iran getting nuclear weapons.

One might note that this does rather give the lie to the insane notion – peddled not least by US academics John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt – that an all-powerful Jewish lobby is the only group in the world so exercised about a nuclear Iran as to consider supporting military action.

Instead, all over the Arab world, rulers are begging the Americans to do anything they can, even military action, to stop Tehran acquiring nukes.

Here’s a sample of Arab rulers’ opinions. Sheik Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, Abu Dhabi’s crown prince and the deputy commander of the United Arab Emirates’ armed forces, used Israeli terminology to describe Iran as an “existential threat”. He urged the US to strike Iran from the air, but went further, saying if such strikes were not enough then the US should consider using ground forces against Iran.

He also described Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as “another Hitler” and called on the Americans not to appease Iran.

The UAE Foreign Minister, according to the cables, describes Iran as “a huge problem that goes far beyond nuclear capabilities . . . Iranian support for terrorism is broader than just Hamas and Hezbollah. Iran has influence in Afghanistan, Yemen, Kuwait, Bahrain, the eastern province of Saudi Arabia and Africa.”

The most important Arab view on Iran comes from King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. His ambassador in the US, on the king’s behalf, repeatedly urged Washington to attack Iran and “cut off the head of the snake”.

Hosni Mubarak of Egypt regards the Iranian government as pathological liars. Egypt’s Major General Muhammad al-Assar tells the Americans “Egypt views Iran as a threat to the region.”

Bahrain’s King Hamad said last year: “The (Iranian nuclear) program must be stopped. The danger of letting it go on is greater than the danger of stopping it.” (Is the king of Bahrain a neo-conservative, do you think?)

The king of Jordan is equally distressed about Iran. His officials call for its nuclear program to be stopped “by any means”. There are many more such comments. These I think are the most important revelations in WikiLeaks. They help explain the increased urgency of the Obama administration’s approach to the Iranian nuclear threat. However, they are profoundly significant for several other reasons.

They refute the nonsensical idea the key dispute in the Middle East is the Israeli-Palestinian one. There is no Israeli dimension to the Saudi fear of Iran.

Secondly, while the gossip in many cables can have many different explanations, in these matters the Arabs knew exactly what they were saying to the Americans and exactly what its consequences might be. They are all tightly controlled, top-down regimes.

They know that among the options Washington is considering is a strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities. These communications therefore are not idle diplomatic chit-chat. This is the Arab leadership begging the Americans to take military action against Iran.

However, the cables also show the weakness, one might even say the hypocrisy, of much Arab politics. The only Middle Eastern leader who seems to talk about Iran in private in exactly the same way as he talks about them in public is Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu.

Indeed, Netanyahu emerges from all these cables very well. He tells the Americans in private, just as he says in public, that he does not want to rule over the Palestinian West Bank. If he can get rid of it in a way which does not involve massive security risk to Israel, he will do so as soon as possible.

But the Arab leaders understand that the chief threat to them and their societies is Iran. They take many covert actions against Iran, they help the Americans in such actions, but they will not speak openly or honestly to their own people about this issue. Yet probably if the Americans took their advice and took action against Iran they would then criticise the Americans for doing so.

The roles of North Korea and China in helping Iran become a nuclear weapons state is also etched in these WikiLeaks cables and is deeply disturbing. This is not exactly new. We knew of this before. But here are repeated American entreaties to Beijing to stop North Korean assistance to Iran on matters nuclear.

One cable shows then secretary of state Condoleezza Rice urgently asking the Chinese to stop a shipment of missile components from North Korea to Iran, which is passing through China. The cable claims at least 10 such previous shipments have gone through China.

Here there is a little question of interpretation. Some cables show some Chinese diplomats disparaging North Korea, in talks with US and South Korean diplomats. One Chinese official says China would not mind a unified Korean peninsula under South Korean leadership, even if South Korea remains allied to the US, so long as there were no American forces in the North Korean part of the peninsula. Another shows a Chinese speculating that North Korea could fall apart after the death of the dictator, Kim Jong-il.

Not all diplomatic cables have equal authority. It depends who is talking and what their purpose is. The value of the Arab messages to Washington on Iran is that they are so consistent and repeated, they come from such senior Arab leaders, and their context is so specific, that there can be no doubt of their meaning.

Chinese diplomatic talk on North Korea is much harder to interpret. As this column has previously outlined, Western analysts believe there are varying views of North Korea within the Chinese leadership. Undoubtedly the most important views are those held by the People’s Liberation Army and the politburo.

Typically, in the Chinese decision-making process, the Foreign Ministry is not very powerful at all. It may be that these cables confirm the existence of differing views within Beijing. It may be that the diplomats involved were engaging in soothing talk with their American and South Korean interlocutors.

But the best way to come to a judgment is to look at Chinese actions. The Chinese will not even acknowledge that the North Koreans torpedoed the South Korean navy corvette, the Cheonan, killing 46 South Korean sailors. Beijing has stopped any UN Security Council resolution on this. Similarly, it has refused to criticise North Korea for firing artillery shells at South Korean civilians. And it provides critical economic and fuel assistance to North Korea every year. In other words, there is no indication in its actions that Beijing is sincere in its criticisms of North Korea.

North Korea’s involvement with Iran is profoundly disturbing. If, as these cables suggest, a part of that is routed through China, then it is a fair assumption that China is complicit in the North Korea-Iran co-operation. That is a deeply disturbing conclusion. It is not proven, but it seems the most likely explanation.

Finally, the cables show the extreme danger of nuclear weapons proliferation from Pakistan.

All of this is not exactly new to people who have been following these matters. But these cables do give us a lot of detail about just how bad the situation really is, how much of an effort the Americans are making to contain it, and how relatively little help they get from their allies.

They show the paranoid interpretations of Washington are untrue, but the paranoid interpretations of Washington’s enemies substantially understate the problems, problems about which there’s no point any longer being diplomatic.

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