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Proliferation already top crisis for the next U.S. president

Tuesday, May 27, 2008 Free Headline Alerts

Sen. Barack Obama, an aspirant and possible next president of the United States, has added a final straw to bring crashing down the U.S.’ effort to prevent runaway proliferation of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction.

It isn’t as though he hasn’t had help.

There is the State Department’s insistence on following a negotiating pattern with the North Koreans that resembles nothing so much, from Pyongyang’s point of view, as “salami tactics” once described by Hungarian Communist leader Mátyás Rákosi. The idea is very simple: you whittle down your opponents demands slice by slice before he realizes that the whole salami is gone.

So, the essence of the six power negotiations to present a powerful and common front to North Korea, was given away first by secondhand bilateral meetings at the UN and then face-to-face meetings with Pyongyang’s representatives. Effective economic sanctions, which even the Chinese had to worry about because of interlocking bank relationships, were diluted with almost immediate concessions to parts of the North Korean accounts in a banking front just as they were beginning to produce results. Demands for a full explanation of a possible alternative second line of nuclear fission have now given way to Foggy Bottom’s trumpeting a few pounds of paper — probably counterfeited or bogus in a hundred different ways — that Pyongyang has proffered. Most of all, there has been no insistence that China — as North Korea’s principal source of trade and aid — use her leverage. Instead Beijing has been allowed to escape all responsibility in the talks for the major issues.

Meanwhile, back at the farm, the effort to halt what was a secret program for uranium enrichment in Iran as a prelude to bomb manufacture has been allowed to drift while Tehran announces almost daily progress — probably exaggerated. But since no one knew about a 17-year-long secret problem, least of all the UN Atomic Energy Agency which was supposed to be monitoring the situation, who knows. Enriched uranium, by the way, is not the fuel needed for the Russian-designed and built power reactor which the Iranians claim is the aim of their program and for which Moscow has offered fuel.

The perfidy of our allies — the West Europeans who were supposed to be playing bad cop to our good cop in talking directly to the mullahs — is unlimited. The increasingly dysfunctional government of Chancellor Angela Merkel — at almost the moment she is addressing the Israeli Knesset reaffirming Germany’s special responsibility for that country’s survival -- in ther governmen is quietly wining and dining one of Tehran’s major figures and signing new trade agreements. It is German trade which has undermined the relatively effective — even with the high price of oil — bilateral sanctions kept in place by the U.S. The Swiss — who can always be relied on for treachery — have meanwhile signed new oil agreements. [These are the same Swiss who during World War II knowingly bought gold from the Nazis taken from the teeth of Jews sent to the crematorium and bars stolen from the Belgian Central Bank. And when confronted with it, and acknowledged in the immediate postwar period, escaped even a limited restitution for more than half a century because their banks and economy were needed for the success of the Marshall Plan.]

Now Obama tells us that Iran is a “tiny” country, that if he were president he would sit down without preconditions with the thug who now is its chief of government. That is the man who commands smuggled weapons and operatives killing our soldiers in Iraq. And it is the regime that backs the world’s second most dangerous terrorist organization, Hizbullah, which killed more than 220 Marines, 18 Navy personnel and 3 Army soldiers in.Beirut in 1983. Add that to the incredible goof of the Central Intelligence Agency which falsely summed up its own research as suggesting there may have been an end to the nuclear weapons program in Iran. No one read the fine print of that report, indicating among other things, that the American intelligence community simply did not know whether it had been resumed. And we already knew that the first reports of the Iranian nuclear program had come from expatriate Persian sources, not from American or its allied foreign intelligence agencies.

Now Obama has pulled the rug out from under whatever opponents of an adventurist policy may exist inside Iran. He immediately concedes the promise made on many occasions by not only President George W. Bush but other European leaders that the world cannot tolerate a nuclear weapon in the hands of this regime. That has been the sine quo non of any negotiation with the mullahs. Building on what the rest of the world perceived to be the U.S. backing down with the CIA report, suddenly every pipsqueak government in the region has started talking about a nuclear “power” program. He has forced the issue for Israel which has been repeatedly named as the target for any nuclear weapon and nuclear blackmail the regime may be able to wield. Whatever the odds and the nature of an Israeli administration — and we may have a new one momentarily — it cannot dither about a threat so manifest, with or without American support.

But there has been far too much talk about how it is Israeli security that is issue here. A bomb in the hands of the Tehran regime would be a threat to the whole region — not the least the Persian Gulf with the overwhelming world dependence on its oil resources. Give the increasing proof of Iranian missile competence — in some quarters it is believed they already can reach some parts of southern Europe — the issue of an Iranian bomb is a world security concern.

One might well ask why the Europeans are not more alarmed and why they are not taking more determined steps to deter potential Iranian aggression or blackmail. The fact is that the Europeans are ill served at the moment: a German government which has a chancellor and a foreign minister saying the direct opposite publicly on a number of issues, a Britain with a seemingly incompetent Prime Minister who faces revolts in his own party over such constitutional issues as the very existence of the United Kingdom, a French government with a president who flies like a butterfly from one issue to another with no apparent sense of priority.

For a Europe that has for more than a half century refused to carry its share of the burden in the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance, none of this is new.

So anti-missile defense, in part necessitated by the Iranian missile development, has again to become a function of American resolve. Its first emplacements in Poland and The Czech Republic are as unpopular in Europe as President Ronald Reagan’s missile deployment against the Soviet Union which helped bring down that tyranny and its world threat to peace.

Listening to explanations of someone like Obama’s adviser, Dennis Ross, who has a way of being on all sides of all issues [and candidates], is grotesque. An earlier foreign policy adviser, you remember, had to quit when she told Canadian officials the candidate’s public pronouncements on the North American Free Trade Agreement were not his real intent.

The fact is that again and again Obama’s statements on foreign policy are not only controversial and violate the long line of American decision-making and commitment since World War II, but they are so naïve as to be incendiary. [No one seems to remember his threat to send American troops in Pakistan without that country’s permission; just another little “thought” he has thrown out.]

The Bush Administration’s grab at a straw, offered by New Delhi’s paid lobbyists even if a former ambassador hardly dry from his last embassy shower in New Delhi, to extend nuclear power technology to India has run aground. It has become a defining and controversial issue in Indian domestic policy with the weasel-worded agreement being criticized for its debatable effort to insist Washington wasn’t to help India continue to defy international opinion with its nuclear weapons developed in secret. The geniuses of the Clinton Administration who thought the U.S.’ Indian and Pakistan bilateral policies could be pursued on different tracks are now finding out that is not the case. Pakistan is now going forward, ostensibly in a counter to the U.S. proposal to India, with a massive program of nuclear development with Chinese aid. With the history of China’s courting of pariah regimes from Burma to Sudan and its long history of missile transfers to Pakistan [in violation of its signatures on a anti-missile proliferation agreements], can one not wonder exactly what this program is intended to do?

All this means that no matter who is in the White House come late January 2009, the whole program of anti-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction will be in tatters. Not only will it pose the problem of more unstable national entities armed with weapons beyond their means to manage and control, but the possibility of rogue non-state elements like the Islamicist terrorists getting their hands on them would have been vastly enhanced. That is perhaps not a subject for debate as the U.S. presidential campaign goes forward. But it is one that every candidate and his advisers had better start boning up on — now.

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