“What About Israel’s Nuclear Bomb?”: The Tangled History Of Israel’s Poorly Kept Secret
After Bibi Netanyahu’s provocative speech to Congress, The New York Times provided helpful clarifications in an article headlined “What Iran Won’t Say About the Bomb.” Written by two superbly expert reporters, William Broad and David Sanger, the piece walked through the technical complexities for non-experts (myself included) and explained key questions Iranians have failed to answer.
But this leads me to ask a different question: What about Israel’s bomb? Why isn’t that also part of the discussion?
In the flood of news stories about Iran’s nuclear intentions, I have yet to see mention of Israel’s nuclear arsenal (if I missed some mentions, they must have been rare).
Yet Israel’s bomb is obviously relevant to the controversy. The facts are deliberately murky, but Israel has had nuclear weapons for at least forty years, though it has never officially acknowledged their existence. The Israeli diplomatic approach has been called “nuclear ambiguity.”
I asked a friend who’s a national-security correspondent in Washington why news stories don’t mention Israel’s bomb. He shrugged off my question. “Because everybody knows that,” he said. Probably that’s true among policy elites and politicians, though I am not so sure this is widely known among average Americans.
In any case, if everyone knows Israel has the bomb, why not acknowledge this in the public debate?
I asked another friend (a well-informed journalist sympathetic to the Palestinian cause) why reporters don’t talk about the Israeli bomb. “Groupthink,” he said. “It’s almost as though Israel gets a bye from the media.”
The Iranians, he added, have raised the issue of the Israeli bomb many times in the past, but their complaints were generally ignored in the Western press. Iranian diplomats pointed out that Iran has signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and submits to international inspections as the treaty requires (though Iran still hides stuff, as The New York Times account described). Israel has never signed the NPT and therefore does not submit to inspections.
My point is, the existence of Israel’s nuclear superiority is clearly a pivotal fact of life in the chaotic conflicts and occasional wars of the Middle East. It should not be left out.
Israel’s bomb might be an important factor in motivating Iran to seek a nuclear bomb of its own (though Iran denies that intention). It might also be the subtext for Netanyahu’s bellicose warnings and his occasional calls for bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Bibi’s country would lose valuable leverage if it no longer had a nuclear monopoly in the region. Yet it might be considered a provocative act if Israel bluntly acknowledged its nuclear arsenal.
According to Wikipedia’s account, largely based on scholarly sources, Israel has seventy-five to 400 bombs (others say it is more like 100 to 200). It has never threatened to use them anywhere, though during the Yom Kippur War in 1973 Israeli leaders put eight of its nuclear-armed F-4’s on alert. Its adversaries no doubt got the word.
Other nations with nukes are Pakistan, India and North Korea as well as the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France. The United States is the only nation that has ever used atomic bombs on people in another nation—Japan at the close of World War II.
The Center for Public Integrity in Washington published an article in September 2014 by Douglas Birch and Jeffrey Smith that described the tangled history of Israel’s poorly kept secret. Some scholars, they wrote, complained that the lack of candor complicates efforts to confront Iran, since the US government cooperates in the pretense of not knowing.
Back in 2009, President Obama was asked about whether Israel possessed nuclear bombs. “With respect to nuclear weapons, you know, I don’t want to speculate,” the president said. In US terms, it is an official secret. The government can even prosecute people with security clearance if they tell the truth to the American public.
In a sense, Israel’s nukes have been like an “invisible hand” that warns hostile neighbors and keeps them from going too far. At the same time, however, Israel adopted an “option of pre-emption”—attacking neighbors like Iraq and Syria with non-nuclear bombs if they seemed to be developing nuclear arms.
Israel’s essential rationale was described by various sources cited by Wikipedia: “It cannot afford to lose a single war and thus must prevent them by maintaining deterrence including the option of preemption.”
That brings the story back around to Bibi. For roughly twenty years, Netanyahu has now and then called for bombing Iran to crumple its nuclear intentions. The Obama administration is attempting to accomplish the same result peacefully, through negotiations.
As Juan Cole has written in The Nation, that may be a false choice, because Israeli intelligence and a former defense minister have admitted that Iran has no nuclear weapons program. Cole explained: “Nuclear weapons are in any case defensive, not offensive, and Iran could not deploy a bomb (if it had one, which it doesn’t) against Israel because the Israelis would retaliate by wiping Iran off the map,”
In other words, even if Tehran were to acquire nukes, it could not use them against Israel. Both nations would become prisoners of the stalemate that ruled the United States and Soviet Union for forty years during the Cold War. The doctrine was known as Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD for short..
That’s an unsatisfying result for the hawks in Israel but also the hawks in the United States. Remember Senator John McCain singing his light-hearted little ditty? “Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran.”
But isn’t talk-talk preferable to risking massive human slaughter and the destruction of nations? The war party in Washington evidently doesn’t think so. Inspired by Bibi, wannabe warriors are brutally trashing their American president. Their logic assumes the mullahs in Tehran are crazy fanatics and that crazy people are not deterred by the prospect of self-destruction.
If Obama’s negotiations fail or Republican meddling derails them, then Americans would face the ultimate question. Do we really want to go to war—again—in the Middle East? Israel might face a different question. Do Israeli citizens really want to bomb Iran if their American friends say, No, thanks—this time you’re on your own?
Maybe the Times reporters, Broad and Sanger, could do another article about the Israeli bomb that has been absent from the debate.
By: Wiliam Greider, The Nation, March 12, 2015
“The Poison In Which Conservatives Marinate”: The Rancid Stew Of Fantasy, Hatred, And Yes, Racism
If you look at poll results saying that most Republicans think Barack Obama is a Kenyan Muslim enacting a secret plan to destroy America and think, “What the hell is wrong with these people?”, you have to understand that it gets reinforced day after day after day by media sources they believe to be lonely islands of truth amid a sea of lies. Yes, they hear it from politicians like Rudy Giuliani, who seems to be on some kind of mission to prove himself to be America’s most despicable cretin. But that only reinforces the river of political sewage that flows into their ears each and every day.
To wit, here’s Republican uber-pundit Erick Erickson, filling in for Rush Limbaugh and telling his millions of listeners what they want to hear:
“Barack Obama believes that for the world to be more safe the United States must be less safe. For the world to be more stable the United States must be less stable. Barack Obama believes the United States of America is a destabilizing, arrogant force in the world, we need our comeuppance and we need to be humbled. And so everything Barack Obama does domestically and in foreign policy is designed to humble the arrogant crackers who have always run the United States.”
Yes, that’s right, “arrogant crackers.” How on earth anyone could get the idea that the attacks on Obama by people like Erickson are meant to stoke their audience’s racial resentments, I have no idea.
As a general rule, whenever you hear a conservative pundit start a sentence with “Barack Obama believes…” you’re about to hear something that not only bears no plausible relationship to reality but is also meant to play on the worst instincts of his or her audience. And it is simply impossible to overstate the ubiquity of this particular theme in conservative media: Barack Obama hates not just America but white people in general, and all of his policies are meant to exact racial vengeance upon them. This is the rancid stew of fantasy, hatred, and yes, racism in which millions upon millions of conservatives have spent the last six years marinating.
To my conservative friends: I know that you are obsessed with the idea that conservatives are constantly being unfairly accused of racism. And there are certainly times when some liberals are too quick to see racist intent in a comment that may be innocuous or at worst unintentionally provocative. But you make heroes out of people like Giuliani, Limbaugh, and Erickson. You applaud them, honor them, extol them, and when other people occasionally notice the caustic hairballs of bile they spit onto waiting microphones, the most you can say is, “Well, I wouldn’t go that far.” So you have nothing to complain about.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, March 13, 2015
“Clinton; Not A Scandal, Yet. But…”: The Right Is Going To Be Gunning For Her From Day One
So by now we’ve read every possible interpretation of why Hillary Clinton used a personal email account to conduct her State Department business. There’s a lot that isn’t clear, and a lot we still don’t know. The main thing we know that is the original Times story that broke the news was really slipshod, staggeringly so for such a major story in America’s best newspaper. After I and others noted this, you could tell the Times acknowledged as much, because the paper’s Day Two follow-up didn’t really have any new news, just facts and dates that should have been in the original article to begin with. It took reporters the better part of the day Tuesday to figure out exactly which regulation the Times piece was accusing Clinton of potentially violating.
Even Mark Halperin, nobody’s idea of a Clintonista, slammed the original article. “There are things in the Times story that if they’re not flat out wrong are really misleading and unfair to the Clintons,” he said on Bloomberg TV.
The Times’ overheated sloppiness does not mean, however, that Clinton is totally in the clear here. I didn’t say that (“Clinton still has some questions to answer,” I wrote Tuesday). The citizens on whose behalf she was conducting business obviously have the right to hear her explain why she opted to use a private account. And we have the right to know whether the private server was more secure than State’s or less, and whether any classified information was electronically transported across this server. (You may think it implausible that a private server could have been more secure than State’s, but remember, Wikileaks didn’t seem to find the State systems too impenetrable, and it is after all the federal government we’re talking about.)
If the answers to any of these questions turns out to be alarming, this could become a legitimate scandal. And of course, depending on the content of the emails, we may well be in for another, related Clinton “scandal.” She doesn’t have to have said anything self-incriminating in these emails. The way the other side is out to get her, one ill-considered verb could end up being hung around her neck for days or weeks.
But even if this story were to end right here, or right after she does a press conference about it, there are a couple of lessons Clinton ought to take away from this.
First, she desperately needs someone on her staff to serve as a kind of average person-common sense barometer, and this person has to have the stature to be able to give it to her straight, and she has to listen to this person. In this case, back in early 2009, this person might have said something like, “I don’t know, Hillary. When an average person gets a job at First Federal Bank, he gets a First Federal email address, and that’s the account through which he conducts his banking business. Anything other than that is just gonna look weird to people.”
Or, last year, on the topic of her paid public appearances: “No, Hillary, not Goldman Sachs. Avocado growers, I see no harm. American Association of Sheetrock Manufacturers? Fine, if you insist. But not Goldman!”
Or: “You know, maybe it’s not the world’s best idea for you to put your name on that foundation. Cuz then whenever a question arises about its funding sources you can say ‘Hey, it’s his foundation, not mine!’”
Or, more proactively: “I was thinking, Hillary, with all these millions you’ve now made, and coming out of State, why not start your own foundation? Help women around the world with microcredit and all that. Can’t lose.”
Yes, she ought to be able to make these calls herself, but it seems clear that she can’t. They’re obviously not Bill’s strong suit either. So since neither of them seems able to do it, they need to hire some help. Or maybe assemble a panel of actual average Americans, and when one of these decisions looms, her staff can video-tape the panel reacting, and she can watch.
The second thing she needs to get is this: If she does become president, the right is going to be gunning for her from Day One, sniffing around for impeachable offenses from the second she takes the oath. This kind of secrecy and defensiveness will only add fuel to the fire—and it will put the media on the right’s side. It will make it look—not just to Hillary-haters, but to average people—like she’s hiding something even when she doesn’t have anything she needs to hide. We’ve seen that movie many times.
If she’s president, she has to break that habit. The White House operates under far more onerous disclosure and accountability rules than the cabinet departments do, and if she doesn’t follow those rules and then some, she’s just going be handing those out to get her the proverbial match.
Old habits die hard as they say. We seemed to have reason to think that the Hillary Clinton who urged the stonewalling of The Washington Post on Whitewater documents back in 1994 had gone away. We never heard any such stories in her Senate or State years until now. But that Hillary is still around, apparently. The Tweet she sent out late Wednesday night doesn’t quite equate to transparency.
The other old habits that won’t die easily are 1) right-wing loathing of her and desire to discredit and even destroy her, and 2) the mainstream media’s reflexive, uncritical, and panting promotion of every charge the right levels against her (remember, though this story came through the Times, it obviously originated in Trey Gowdy’s Benghazi committee’s investigative staff). Clinton’s old habit just feeds these others, and it’s not a dynamic she or the country will need if she’s in the White House.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, March 6, 2015
“Pretty Much How Things Go”: Every Clinton Scandal Is Exactly The Same
We don’t yet know whether there will actually turn out to be something nefarious in the emails that Hillary Clinton somewhat belatedly passed on to the State Department, but I feel confident in predicting that this Clinton scandal will likely play out just like every other Clinton scandal. For those of you who don’t remember the 1990s, here’s how it works:
- Bill and/or Hillary Clinton does something that on first glance looks a little sketchy.
- The news media explode with the story, usually including insinuations that something illegal or corrupt took place.
- Republicans quiver with joy, believing that this scandal will finally be the one to reveal the true depths of the Clintons’ villainy.
- Clintonworld adopts a bunker mentality, insisting that they did nothing wrong yet trying to limit the amount of information that gets out, thereby antagonizing reporters.
- As the eight zillion journalists assigned to the story learn more information, the story grows increasingly complex, yet no actual illegality or corruption is found.
- The story drags on for months or even years, with Republicans never wavering in their certainty that the only reason we haven’t learned the awful truth is the Clintons’ stonewalling.
- The more committed conservatives begin to lose their minds, eventually coming to believe spectacularly outlandish theories about what actually happened.
- The whole thing peters out, and reasonable people conclude that while Bill and/or Hillary might have shown better judgment, they didn’t actually break the law, violate their oaths, betray their country, or anything else their opponents imagined.
There are variations, of course, but that’s pretty much how things go. And even though it’s possible there’s an email somewhere in which Clinton instructs her paramour Ayman al-Zawahiri to launch the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, it’s probably how things are going to go with this one, too.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, March 6, 2015
“The Clinton Rules Are Back”: Big Holes In AP Report On Hillary’s ‘Homebrew’ Email System
Have you heard about that mysterious, vaguely sinister “homebrew” email server located in the Clinton family’s suburban New York home? That was yesterday’s big revelation by the Associated Press, repeated everywhere, evidently without further reporting or checking by outlets both here and abroad. The headline: “Clinton Ran Own Computer System for Her Official Emails.”
Now that’s a very hot story — but is it true? Several very large holes have now appeared in that tale – and the usually reliable AP seems to have quietly abandoned the most incriminating assertions in a rewritten version.
Today’s Daily Banter – an online publication I would recommend, by the way – carries a sharp post by Bob Cesca dismantling the AP story. As Cesca points out, the AP’s original lede indicated that Clinton was “physically running her own email” via a “computer server” located in “her family’s home” in Chappaqua, NY. But by the fourth graf, the AP story conceded: “It was not immediately clear exactly where Clinton ran that computer system.”
Moreover, Cesca reports, the AP seems to have misinterpreted the registration documents that formed the basis of its story – and the location of the Clinton email server is most likely to be found at Optimum Online, an Internet service provider owned by Cablevision in nearby Stamford, Connecticut. Not as sexy as that secretive basement setup in Chappaqua, but a lot more plausible. The Banter post names all the eager beavers, at outlets ranging from Gizmodo to Breitbart and the Washington Post, who broke out with indignant riffs on the AP’s “scoop.”
Cesca’s full post is well worth reading, and serves as fresh warning of what we ought to have learned from all the previous cycles of “Clinton scandal”: Withhold judgment until all the facts are available, and don’t immediately believe everything you read, even in news sources that normally appear trustworthy. The Clinton Rules are back — which in journalism means there are no rules at all.
By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, Editor’s Blog, The National Memo, March 5, 2015
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