Averting a nuclear fallout

Editorial

NATO defence ministers meeting in Canada this week will be joined by Israel’s defence minister, Ehud Barak. The special visitor – Israel is not a member of NATO – will be a star attraction as the world determines how to proceed in the wake of the clearest indications yet that Iran is poised for nuclear capability.

An International Atomic Energy Agency report last week removed any doubt that Iran is plotting to develop atomic weapons. This is news only to the most credulous. Peter MacKay, Canada’s defence minister, said Iran has exhibited “blatant disregard” for Israel’s right to exist. This is diplomatic language, of course, since the Iranian leader has threatened to “wipe Israel from the pages of time” and held a conference on “a world without Zionism.”

But even the scrupulous IAEA report with its ominous conclusion does not apparently alarm Russian President Dmitry Medvedev or Chinese President Hu Jintao. The two leaders – each of whom holds a veto at the United Nations Security Council – appeared unswayed after speaking privately about the issue with U.S. President Barack Obama on the sidelines of an economic summit in Hawaii last weekend.

The lack so far of a unified response to the Iranian nuclear matter pushes the world closer to the brink. In the absence of unanimity, sanctions and international pressure are unlikely to succeed. Even with unanimity, they hold no guarantee of impact on an ideologically and theologically deranged dictatorship. Are sanctions and diplomacy the world’s only hope to avoid war? The potential for war between Israel and Iran is unthinkable in its consequences. Not only Iran, but Russia as well, has warned of calamitous, if unpredictable, reactions if Israel were to act. These are ominous warnings. But the reality of a nuclear Iran is more ominous. Stopping that potential catastrophe, while avoiding a regional conflagration of unprecedented proportions, presents two deeply unsavory choices.

So it was with some curiosity that the world learned of an explosion at a missile base near Tehran last Saturday. Between 17 and 32 people were killed in the explosion, depending on reports, including a top military official behind Iran’s missile strategy.

The Israeli media outlet Debkafile cited “exclusive sources” as saying that the first of many explosions was caused by “a failed effort to mount a possible nuclear warhead on a Shahab-3 intermediate-range missile.” Continuing blasts shattered windows in the capital city, 43 kilometres away.

“Mainstream” media were reporting early in the week what bloggers and some undiplomatic observers had been saying since news of the explosion broke: Israel may be behind the explosion. (Sadly, when Barak was asked by Israel Army Radio whether he knew anything about the cause of the explosion, he said, “I don’t know, but the more the merrier.”)

Initially, Iranian officials said the explosion was an accident. Then, on Monday, Iran acknowledged that its defence computer systems had been undermined by the “Duqu” virus, similar to the “Stuxnet” worm that last year undermined Iran’s progress in enriching uranium. These are reportedly extremely advanced computer “superviruses” that have the potential to undercut advances in that country’s march toward nuclear capability. Nobody is taking responsibility for these highly advanced acts of sabotage, but nobody is more pleased, probably, than Israel.

Israelis, and anyone who cares about them, are deeply concerned about the Iranian threat. Nobody wants war, with its costs, human, economic, environmental and otherwise. However, the Jewish homeland takes seriously rhetoric that promises to annihilate it. While the world dithers, many observers expect Israel to act in preemptive self-defence.

Talk of a preemptive Israeli strike is not only a result of what the Washington Post’s Jackson Diehl calls the “weird but wonderful feature of Israeli democracy [in which] even fateful decisions about national security – like whether to carry out a military attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities – are publicly debated and covered in the press.” The talk is based on precedents, including Israel’s 2007 attack on Syria’s al-Kibar nuclear facility and the 1981 attack on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor.

Yet the events of the weekend suggest a possible third way, a sliver of narrow space between diplomacy and war, in which apocalyptic threats are undermined not by headline-making acts of belligerence, but through comparatively small – and “smart” – acts of sabotage that set back the mission of a genocidal regime.

To what end? To buy time, perhaps. Every day a nuclear Iran is postponed is a day of relative peace and a day, perhaps, closer to the end of a regime that faces serious internal, as well as external, opposition.

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