Martin LeFevre: Nuclear Half Measures

The stage is set for Israel to take military action against Iran. And Obama’s “new” nuclear policy opens the door to Israel’s use of nuclear weapons.

How? A Nuclear Posture Review that carves out exceptions for “outliers like Iran and North Korea,” is a nuclear policy that implicitly says if the impending “smart sanctions” fail, Israel has the right to attack Iran with any means it deems fit, under the guise of self defense.

Of course, from another perspective (and I don’t just mean an Iranian or Palestinian perspective), Israel is an “outlier.” After all, Israel won’t even admit it has nuclear weapons, much less join the international non-proliferation regime, the NPT.

This explains why, when Egypt and Turkey indicated they were going to bring up the open secret of Israel having Yahweh-knows how many nukes, Netanyahu yanked Israel out of a summit starting today in Washington. It’s being slated as “a two-day summit to talk about the threat of nuclear terrorism.”

Netanyahu, speaking with an obliviousness to projection and irony that only a nation that considers itself, because of its special past/present/future victim status, above and beyond the laws (OK, treaties) that other nations make and abide by.

Netanyahu said: "This conference is about nuclear terrorism, and I'm not concerned that anyone will think that Israel is a terrorist regime. Everybody knows a terrorist and rogue regime when they see one, and believe me they see quite a few -- around Israel."

Well, not quite, Mr. Prime Minister. For those who found the line between rogue regimes and the Israeli state already a little blurry, Israel obliterated the distinction with its grotesquely disproportionate response to crude cross-border rocket attacks. The leveling of Gaza, and continuing to turn it into a larger version of the Warsaw ghetto, calls into question Israel’s right to call itself a member of the community of nations.

Then again, methinks when push comes to shove, Israel is OK with being an outcast, as long as US military power underwrites its intransigence. After all, isolation is a condition that Jewish people of the Diaspora have to some degree fostered, and to a large degree been forced to live under for centuries.

Obama’s new nuclear policy “not to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons on non-nuclear countries,” with the exceptions of Iran or North Korea, and with the exceptions of chemical or biological attacks on the United States, and with the exceptions of…any time we damn well feel like using them, is absurd on the face of it. And it’s actually no change at all.

Rather, it’s another example of Barack’s fatal flaw—the hubris of assuming that a change in rhetoric and tone is a change in policy and substance.

The signing, in Prague, of a new nuclear treaty between the US and Russia, which reduces both country’s nuclear arsenals by about a third, is a step in the right direction. But any treaty worth its SALT, I mean worth a START in a global society, must be universal. And this one is largely cosmetic, meant to highlight American (read Obama) “leadership.”

However when you hear the Russian ambassador to the United Nations, Vitaly Churkin, say, “in the Middle East our cooperation with the United States is close to perfect,” you know that things are completely out of whack.

There comes a point when events in human history prove inexorable, and no power, not even God herself, can stop them. What then is to be done?

Inshallah, Israel won’t go ballistic. But if we don’t prepare for the aftermath of a latter-day mushroom cloud, humankind will live in its shadow for decades, if not centuries.

The psychological preparation is the most important. And I don’t mean the kind of self-protection many people now think they have, because they’ve given up on humanity and so wouldn’t be surprised at anything.

Indeed, by the reams of misanthropic garbage on cable TV, a lot of people positively wish for some worldwide apocalypse to put them out of their misery. In a cosmic display of the truism that misery loves company, they want everyone else to perish with them.

The preparation I’m referring to flows from faith and love for humanity. Notice how those words elicit the kinds of derisive scoffs reserved for the delusional, as if faith and love for humanity have become, ex post facto, a pipe dream.

Fully mindful of how hellish man has made the world however, we can and must hold fast to the ancient verities. We better, or we’ll be swept up in the vortex of primeval hatreds.

Sovereignty belongs to humanity now. Internalize it.

- Martin LeFevre is a contemplative, and non-academic religious and political philosopher. He has been publishing in North America, Latin America, Africa, and Europe (and now New Zealand) for 20 years. Email: martinlefevre@sbcglobal.net. The author welcomes comments.

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