Now You See Nuke, Now You Don’t
The Syrians still haven’t decided whether they got hit or not, but the Yanks and the Israelis apparently like it as a nuke. NYT:
WASHINGTON, Oct. 13 — Israel’s air attack on Syria last month was directed against a site that Israeli and American intelligence analysts judged was a partly constructed nuclear reactor, apparently modeled on one North Korea has used to create its stockpile of nuclear weapons fuel, according to American and foreign officials with access to the intelligence reports.
The description of the target addresses one of the central mysteries surrounding the Sept. 6 attack, and suggests that Israel carried out the raid to demonstrate its determination to snuff out even a nascent nuclear project in a neighboring state. The Bush administration was divided at the time about the wisdom of Israel’s strike, American officials said, and some senior policy makers still regard the attack as premature.
Well, I suppose they could wait a few years, and hope the next administration isn’t constituted of handwringers, who by then would be too busy figuring out what not to do about Iran.
The attack on the reactor project has echoes of an Israeli raid more than a quarter century ago, in 1981, when Israel destroyed the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq shortly before it was to have begun operating. That attack was officially condemned by the Reagan administration, though Israelis consider it among their military’s finest moments. In the weeks before the Iraq war, Bush administration officials said they believed that the attack set back Iraq’s nuclear ambitions by many years.
By contrast, the facility that the Israelis struck in Syria appears to have been much further from completion, the American and foreign officials said. They said it would have been years before the Syrians could have used the reactor to produce the spent nuclear fuel that could, through a series of additional steps, be reprocessed into bomb-grade plutonium.
You know, if they tied a note to the bomb that said, “Next one takes out Damascus,” they might not have to come back. Anyway, here’s a couple of very oddly couched graphs:
The New York Times reported this week that a debate had begun within the Bush administration about whether the information secretly cited by Israel to justify its attack should be interpreted by the United States as reason to toughen its approach to Syria and North Korea. In later interviews, officials made clear that the disagreements within the administration began this summer, as a debate about whether an Israeli attack on the incomplete reactor was warranted then.
The officials did not say that the administration had ultimately opposed the Israeli strike, but that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates were particularly concerned about the ramifications of a pre-emptive strike in the absence of an urgent threat.
“There wasn’t a lot of debate about the evidence,” said one American official familiar with the intense discussions over the summer between Washington and the government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel. “There was a lot of debate about how to respond to it.”
Sounds like sensible heads prevailed. Uh oh. Legal niceties favored terrorism-backing state:
Even though it has signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, Syria would not have been obligated to declare the existence of a reactor during the early phases of construction. It would have also had the legal right to complete construction of the reactor, as long as its purpose was to generate electricity.
Hang on, never mind:
In his only public comment on the raid, Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, acknowledged this month that Israeli jets dropped bombs on a building that he said was “related to the military” but which he insisted was “not used.”
Here’s the best part.
A senior Israeli official, while declining to speak about the specific nature of the target, said the strike was intended to “re-establish the credibility of our deterrent power,” signaling that Israel meant to send a message to the Syrians that even the potential for a nuclear weapons program would not be permitted. But several American officials said the strike may also have been intended by Israel as a signal to Iran and its nuclear aspirations. Neither Iran nor any Arab government except for Syria has criticized the Israeli raid, suggesting that Israel is not the only country that would be disturbed by a nuclear Syria. North Korea did issue a protest.
That means they got the message. The conventional wisdom is there’s a conventional threat from North Korea that stands as an obstacle to military action there. But it is a second-rate old-school commie army with a lot of missiles that can barely get off the launchpad, and purely as an academic matter, it would be interesting to see what effect a couple of missiles up the reactor would have on Kim. Kim has not learned the bitter lesson that Syria, Jordan and Egypt learned so well. I wonder how quickly the South Koreans and the USA could shut down all that North Korea artillery and armor if they did decide to fire it up.
Behind closed doors, however, Vice President Dick Cheney and other hawkish members of the administration have made the case that the same intelligence that prompted Israel to attack should lead the United States to reconsider delicate negotiations with North Korea over ending its nuclear program, as well as America’s diplomatic strategy toward Syria, which has been invited to join Middle East peace talks in Annapolis, Md., next month.
Mr. Cheney in particular, officials say, has also cited the indications that North Korea aided Syria to question the Bush administration’s agreement to supply the North with large amounts of fuel oil. During Mr. Bush’s first term, Mr. Cheney was among the advocates of a strategy to squeeze the North Korean government in hopes that it would collapse, and the administration cut off oil shipments set up under an agreement between North Korea and the Clinton administration, saying the North had cheated on that accord.
Topics: North Korea, Syria
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 11:31 pm on Saturday, October 13, 2007
4 Responses to “Now You See Nuke, Now You Don’t”
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October 13th, 2007 at 11:54 pm
It is disheartening to read of these attitudes within the administration, though they have been obvious throughout the whole of Bush’s presidency.
October 14th, 2007 at 12:01 am
Well, I suppose they could wait a few years, and hope the next administration isn’t constituted of handwringers, who by then would be too busy figuring out what not to do about Iran.
MIght not be the next administration, Jules. Heck, maybe it’ll be far enough in the future that President Chelsea Clinton might have to send her father to Syria to negotiate a treaty for our surrender.
October 14th, 2007 at 10:21 am
The Israelis, at least, see the situation clearly and do what they must, while ignoring our Nanny Nitpickers. They recognize the threat to their survival, even if we don’t to ours.
October 15th, 2007 at 2:20 pm
A couple of weeks a go I commented on the strike and - well - the commentary that strike was recieving. I won’t you with a complete recount of that post, but I will repost my comments on a different american blog criticizing any notion of a hit on Syria - nukes or not:
My positive attitude towards such a hit stems from my being in Lebanon and having witnessed first hand the Syrian dictatorship’s historical (and continuing) use of instruments of terror on my countrymen and women. The argument, which I’m neither wholly convinced of nor willing to completely disregard, is that a hit on Syria would dislodge the assassin-regime there and provide the Lebanese with a respite from the ongoing assault on the state and the anti-Syrian parliamentary majority we’ve been subject to. Any negative fallout from the hit could be limited to Syria - and not Lebanon - by the fact that the dislodging of the regime would free those pro-Syrian elements active in the country from the obligation to go down with the sinking regime’s ship and realign with the more US-friendly political movements. This argument, holds most true for the Christians among the pro-Syrian ranks. For the Shiites, there will continue to be Hizballah - fully armed, trained, and funded from Iran - but they would surely find an untrusting partner in Amal and its leader Nabih Berri, who is a political chamellion well-acquainted with the business of realignment.
As for extremist Sunni groups present in Lebanon, there is a danger that turmoil in Syria would provide a magnet for global jihadists. In Lebanon, however, the presence of such groups has, for the most part, been an integral strategy of the Syrian regime’s strategy for interfering in our internal affairs. Generally, the strategy is made up of creating instability in Lebanon and then “coming to our aide”. A dislodgement of the Syrian regime would provide a break in the central nervous system coordinating these groups across the country, allowing the Lebanese Army to (hopefully) finish them off one at a time.
Anyway, its a risky move, thats for sure, and yes it is absolutely part of the build up towards eventually knocking off Iran. But from the standpoint of a Lebanese who is tired of seeing his country being used as a limb of Iran’s regional policy (through Hizballah) and as a playground for Syria’s looting and assissinating intelligence agencies and regime, it might just be worth the risk.
I’ll add to the above that the main internal strategy the Syrian regime is using to deter such a scenario is the brutal repression of democracy activists in the country and the fermenting of radical forces among the Palestinian and (especially) Iraqi refugees entering the country. The logic of the move is to deprive “the West” of moderate/democractic alternatives and thereby make it an option between them and the extremists. To the Syrian regime’s detriment, however, there is a building moment among the parties that make up the Syrian opposition with many of their leaders based outside the country. Some of these born-again-humanitarians were former regime henchmen, including Rifaat al Assad and Abdel Halim Hafez, providing them with a valuable powerbase inside Syria along with a checkered track-record on democracy - but you take what you can get.