nuclear related 141107

The king of the castle

By Zvi Bar'el

Five planeloads of advisors, interpreters, doctors and nurses, young family members and some of King Abdullah's 30 wives landed last month at London's Heathrow Airport. The immediate Saudi royal family was hosted at Buckingham Palace, as is proper. The remaining relatives filled up the luxury hotels of London and the management of Harrods decided to keep the gates of the emporium open beyond the usual closing time. After all, it isn't every day that an entire tribe arrives for the annual shopping spree.

The king is in town and Britain is doing obeisance. Not a single word was said, of course, about the dodgy deal for the sale of fighter planes to Saudi Arabia. Rumor has it that in order to win the contract, about $33 million flowed through back channels into Saudi hands from the planes' manufacturer, BAE Systems. The noise of demonstrations in the streets, protesting the corruption in Saudi Arabia, did not penetrate the walls of the guest palace, nor did the decision by the British court to reconsider the moratorium on the investigations sully the congenial atmosphere of the visit, which culminated as planned in the signing of more contracts for the sale of aircraft to Saudi Arabia. Naturally, it also proved immensely helpful that the Annapolis conference is approaching and Saudi sponsorship is so important that no one wants to annoy the 84-year-old king whose realm just continues getting richer as oil prices soar.

The Arabic press, most of which is controlled by the Saudis, is reporting only on the positive atmosphere and Abdullah's attempts to advance the peace process throughout the Middle East. From Iraq to Lebanon, from the Iranian atom to the Palestinian issue - Saudi Arabia is the main producer of diplomatic initiatives in the region.

This is not just a matter of the first meeting between a Saudi king and a Pope, which took place this month at the Vatican, or of the fact that Saudi Arabia has granted Pope Benedict XVI a kashrut certificate after he stirred up a huge storm in the Islamic countries a year ago when he quoted a hostile description of Islam. Saudi Arabia, for example, is worried about the possibility of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons, just as it was worried in the past, when Iran demonstrated its ballistic capabilities with Shihab 3 missiles. Now King Abdullah has a new initiative aimed at neutralizing the danger of another war close to his palace grounds.

In interviews with the media he has been proposing the following arrangement: An international center for the enrichment of uranium will be established in some neutral country, say Switzerland, and any state in the region that is in need of enriched uranium for peaceful purposes will receive what it wants from this center, which will be supervised by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). This idea is somewhat similar to a proposal made by Russian President Vladimir Putin to Ali Khamenei, Iran's spiritual leader - but in the Saudi view Russia is not a neutral country. In any case, Iran is not showing any signs that it is prepared to buy either the Russian or the Saudi idea.

One thing is certain: Saudi Arabia will make every effort to prevent a war with Iran. Even if it does not have veto power in the UN Security Council, it does have a sympathetic ear in the corridors of the U.S. administration and in all the other veto-wielding countries. It also has good connections in Iran thanks to the diplomatic activity of Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal, who has built up friendly relations with the Iranian leadership and has also initiated cooperation agreements between the Sunni kingdom and the Shi'ite state. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to Saudi Arabia this year therefore marked a milestone in the relations between the countries.

Iran and Saudi Arabia have a few more common interests in the region. Just like Washington is brewing a series of sanctions against Iran while at the same time planning the next dialog with it on matters concerning Iraq, Riyadh is fomenting anti-Shi'ite discourse in the country and talking about the Iranian danger, while continuing to maintain trade relations with Iran. The extent of annual trade between the two countries amounts to about $1 billion (not counting oil). And this year their finance ministers met to examine the possibility of further expanding the economic cooperation.

Washington is gritting its teeth but has so far refrained from scolding. When trade with Saudi Arabia amounts to more than $41 billion, there's no spoiling the relations. But it is not just economic relations that connect Saudi Arabia, Iran and the United States. All three are opposed to the breakup of Iraq into autonomous federal provinces - Riyadh in order to maintain the status of Iraq's Sunnis; Tehran in order to be able to influence all of Iraq by means of a Shi'ite government. As for Washington, it will certainly not be able to depict a crumbled Iraq as a diplomatic achievement.

The good relations that have been forged between Saudi Arabia and Iran are now also being enlisted to end the political crisis in Lebanon. Iran supports Hezbollah's position demanding the establishment of a national unity government in which the opposition will have the right to veto important government decisions, whereas Saudi Arabia supports the position of the majority led by Saad Hariri, the son of Rafik Hariri, who held Saudi citizenship and was considered a darling of the kingdom where he attained his tremendous wealth. But Saudi Arabia and Iran, and not Egypt or the Arab League, are suggesting the compromises, and it is they who will have to nod when the crucial moment comes.

Abdullah, who also holds the positions of prime minister, commander of the Royal Guard, head of the National Economic Council, president of the national Council on Petroleum and Minerals and head of the Center for National Dialogue, is not a healthy man. He inherited his formal position from his brother King Fahd in 2005, but by this point he had already run the kingdom in his brother's stead for many years, after Fahd suffered a stroke and was not even able to run a single working meeting.

It was Abdullah, as crown prince, and not King Fahd, who articulated the idea of "the Saudi initiative" that became "the Arab initiative" - an initiative that promises peace and normalization with the entire Arab world if in return Israel withdraws to the 1967 armistice lines. Since the initiative was first proposed, at the Arab League conference in 2002, it has become a formative document that not only has canceled the old perceptions of non-recognition of and non-negotiation with Israel, but has also transmuted non-recognition of Israel from a rigid ideological stance into a matter subject to change with the help of a diplomatic formula.

This is the position that has transformed Saudi Arabia from a "country that joins" initiatives by others into a country that initiates. In fact it has been establishing its position as the Arab world's hegemon over the diplomatic discourse in the Middle East. Though Abdullah's failed attempt to mediate between Fatah and Hamas at the Mecca conference in February of this year showed the kingdom's limitations, its support for the Annapolis conference - although it is not yet clear whether it will send a senior representative - and the financial backing it is providing and will continue to provide to the Palestinian Authority are turning Saudi Arabia into President George W. Bush's most reliable ally when it comes to managing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and his Middle East policy as a whole.

And because of this special status, Bush could only bite his lip when Abdullah informed him at the last minute that he would not show up for a special dinner the president had organized for him last April. Bush does not host many state dinners - he enjoys this "about as much as having a root canal," according to commentator Jim Hoagland in The Washington Post - thus the great importance he attributed to the dinner with Abdullah is clear. A short time later the king made it clear why he had slapped the royal family's friend in the face: "The United States is an illegal occupying force in Iraq," the Saudi king declared and in so doing showed Bush that there are Arab red lines to White House policy. The pomp of his latest visit to Europe has made it clear to Washington once again that the friend from Riyadh does not see the U.S. as his only ally.

The upshot of this is that when it comes to Saudi Arabia, Washington tends to close its eyes. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, for example, has no problem publicly chastising Egypt for human rights violations. Bush has unhesitatingly called for the release of the leader of the opposition Al Raad party, Ayman Nour, from Egyptian prison. Yet apart from the periodic State Department reports on the human rights situation in Saudi Arabia, no presidential or other governmental statement has been heard from Washington concerning the state of human rights in the kingdom.

Today, too, despite Abdullah's promises to revise the curriculum, one can still read in Saudi textbooks about the need to hate Jews and Christians, about the Jews' evil plans and about how some Jews - true, not all of them - are devil-worshippers. But what is all this compared to a handshake between a senior Saudi representative and an Israeli prime minister?

Source: Haaretz

Those Nuclear Flashpoints Are Made in Pakistan

By Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins

George W. Bush is hardly the first U.S. president to forgive sins against democracy by a Pakistani leader. Like his predecessors from Jimmy Carter onward, Bush has tolerated bad behavior in hopes that Pakistan might do Washington's bidding on some urgent U.S. priority -- in this case, a crackdown on al-Qaida. But the scariest legacy of Bush's failed bargain with Gen. Pervez Musharraf isn't the rise of another U.S.-backed dictatorship in a strategic Muslim nation, or even the establishment of a new al-Qaida haven along Pakistan's lawless border. It's the leniency we've shown toward the most dangerous nuclear-trafficking operation in history -- an operation masterminded by one man, Abdul Qadeer Khan.

For nearly four years, under the banner of the "war on terror,'' Bush has refused to demand access to Khan, the ultranationalist Pakistani scientist who created a vast network that has spread nuclear know-how to North Korea, Iran and Libya. Indeed, Bush has never seriously squeezed Musharraf over Khan, who remains a national hero for bringing Pakistan the Promethean fire it can use to compete with its nuclear-armed nemesis, India. Khan has remained under house arrest in Islamabad since 2004, outside the reach of the CIA and investigators from the International Atomic Energy Agency, who are desperate to unlock the secrets he carries. Bush should be equally adamant about getting to the bottom of Khan's activities.

Bush's sluggishness over Pakistan-based proliferation, even as he has funneled about $10 billion in military and financial aid to Musharraf since Sept. 11, 2001, is even harder to explain when one considers the damage Khan has done to the world's fragile nuclear stability. Khan used stolen technology and black-market sales to help Pakistan obtain its nuclear arsenal, setting the stage for a possible atomic showdown with India. He played a pivotal role in helping Iran start what we increasingly fear is a clandestine nuclear-arms program, allowing Tehran to make significant progress in the shadows before its efforts were uncovered in 2002. He gave key uranium-enrichment technology to North Korea. And if all this weren't enough, he was busily outfitting Libya with a full bomb-making factory when his network was finally shut down in late 2003. Khan has been held incommunicado ever since, leaving the world with new nuclear flashpoints -- and some burning, unanswered questions about his black-market spree.

The most urgent line of inquiry -- particularly given Bush's bellicose statements about the threat posed by Iran's nuclear ambitions -- centers on what exactly Khan provided to the Iranians over 15 years of doing business with them. He could help answer the questions on which war may depend: Is Iran trying to get the bomb? If so, how close is Tehran to obtaining it? Or are the mullahs simply pursuing a civilian nuclear capacity? We do know that Khan sold Iran advanced equipment to manufacture and operate the centrifuges that can enrich uranium, either to generate electricity or to provide the fuel for a weapon. But Khan's nuclear bazaar trafficked in other goodies as well -- including the blueprints for a Chinese-made nuclear warhead, which were found in Libya after Moammar Gadhafi abandoned his atomic aspirations in December 2003 and fingered Khan as his chief supplier.

Despite all these compelling reasons for interrogating Khan, the Bush administration has treated Musharraf with kid gloves, insisting that the general is simply too critical to the fight against Islamic extremism to jeopardize his tenuous hold on power by forcing him to hand over such a national icon. (The same type of flawed rationale is now being rolled out to defend U.S. timorousness in the face of Musharraf's repugnant crackdown on his political foes, the judiciary, the media and human rights groups.) The nastiest legacy of Musharraf's reign will almost certainly not be his turn toward tyranny. It will be his reluctance to get tough on Khan in the past and to question him now -- a reluctance echoed by U.S. reticence about demanding that Pakistan's leaders control its rogue nuclear network. The dangers those failures created will threaten the world long after Musharraf and Bush are gone.

In fact, Khan could have been stopped before he got started. In the mid-1970s, he was working as a mid-level scientist at a research laboratory in Amsterdam, preparing to steal top-secret Dutch plans for building centrifuges and busily compiling a list of potential suppliers for Pakistan's nascent atomic-weapons program -- the seeds of the procurement network that led Pakistan to the bomb. In the fall of 1975, the Dutch secret service discovered what Khan was up to and grew eager to arrest him on espionage charges. But more pragmatic officials from the Dutch economics ministry urged them to hold off, worried about the embarrassment of exposing a spy in the heart of their nuclear establishment.

The CIA turned out to be a tiebreaker. Ruud Lubbers, the Dutch economics minister at the time and later prime minister, told us that the security service had asked the CIA to support its pleas to bust Khan. But the Americans surprised their Dutch colleagues, asking that the scientist be allowed to continue working so that they could monitor his budding procurement operation. Instead of being thrown in jail, Khan was transferred to a less sensitive job. That demotion tipped him off that time was running out, so he bolted for home, taking with him the nuclear secrets that would help make Pakistan a nuclear power. It was a "monumental error,'' said Robert Einhorn, a senior State Department official who worked on arms control under Bush and President Bill Clinton.

Four years later, Washington got a second chance to stop Khan. By 1979, U.S. intelligence agencies had a clear picture of Pakistan's pursuit of nuclear arms and Khan's crucial role as the chief of its uranium-enrichment efforts. In April, Carter slapped economic sanctions on Pakistan -- a shrewd move that turned out to be woefully short-lived.

On Christmas Eve 1979, Soviet troops landed at Kabul International Airport, and by Christmas morning, Red Army soldiers were rolling across pontoon bridges in northern Afghanistan and fanning out across the country. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's national security adviser, saw an opportunity to confront the Soviets by funneling money and arms to the nascent Afghan resistance movement, dominated by the zealous Muslim fighters who would one day become the Taliban and al-Qaida. But Brzezinski's plan required using Pakistan as a conduit for aid to the anti-Soviet jihad, which meant abandoning the sanctions on Islamabad. "This will require a review of our policy toward Pakistan, more guarantees to it, more arms aid, and, alas, a decision that our security policy toward Pakistan cannot be dictated by our nonproliferation policy,'' Brzezinski wrote Carter in a memo dated Dec. 26, 1979.

Carter reluctantly agreed. But by revoking the sanctions, he granted Pakistan -- and Khan -- carte blanche on the nuclear front. Washington sacrificed the goal of stopping Pakistan's nuclear-arms effort, and the moral authority that the United States had used to advocate the cause of nuclear nonproliferation was severely damaged.

The blame did not end with Carter. During a campaign stop in Florida in January 1980, Ronald Reagan was asked about Pakistan's atomic ambitions. "I just don't think it's any of our business,'' he replied.

In office, Reagan and his aides made an art of ignoring Pakistan's march toward the bomb, including intelligence in 1987 that warned that Khan had transferred nuclear equipment to Iran. That transaction started Tehran's clandestine atomic program and marked Khan's transformation from a buyer of nuclear technology to a seller of it. Once again, an opportunity to stop him -- and to derail Iran's fledgling efforts -- was missed.

Bush brags that he helped shut down Khan's network. In fact, much of the damage had already been done. And even Bush's supposed great nonproliferation victory -- persuading Libya to abandon its secret nuclear program -- was too little, too late.

Between 1997 and 2003, we found, Libya paid Khan and his associates nearly $100 million for bomb-making technology and expertise. Among Libya's purchases were detailed plans, which arrived in Tripoli in 2000 or early 2001, for a Chinese warhead. International experts who have seen those designs strongly suspect that the Libyans copied them before turning the plans over to the Americans, along with their nuclear hardware.

In fact, the Americans could have acted against Khan before Libya ever got the nuclear designs. A CIA case officer nicknamed "Mad Dog'' had recruited a Swiss technician at the center of Khan's ring who was providing regular reports on what was going to Libya. We don't know whether the mole was aware of the warhead plans, but we do know that he provided the CIA with a list of equipment so frighteningly thorough that British intelligence, after learning how much material Gadhafi was receiving, was clamoring for action against Libya well before the Americans agreed to move.

The mole also revealed another bombshell. In previously secret briefings with senior IAEA officials in Vienna, he disclosed that he had made electronic copies of the warhead plans in the fall of 2003, acting on orders from Khan, according to diplomats with direct knowledge of the briefings. The mole said that he sent the copies to Khan and one of his associates. But the plans have never surfaced.

Other items from Khan's deadly inventory are missing, too, including a shipment of centrifuge components and precision tools that disappeared in mid-2003. International inspectors worry that the material wound up in the hands of a previously unknown Khan customer -- perhaps Saudi Arabia or Syria, both countries where Khan had tried to peddle his wares before he was arrested. Another possible destination: Iran, where some U.S. and Israeli intelligence officials suspect that the military is operating a second, parallel enrichment program buried deep within the mountains that cover much of the country. But solving such dangerous riddles is apparently not as attractive as propping up a dubious ally in the fight against Islamic extremism.

In the Carter and Reagan years, the justification for going soft on Pakistan's nuclear adventures was always the hope of defeating the Soviets in Afghanistan. Under George H.W. Bush and Clinton, the CIA argued convincingly that it needed more information before striking at Khan. When it comes to Pakistan, there's always something -- some perfectly sensible, hard-headed reason for putting the dangers of nuclear proliferation on the back burner. And Washington's priorities may well stay that way until the very moment when the unthinkable occurs.

Source: Salt Lake Tribune

After mystery raid, the prospect of Syrian-Israeli talks

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

DAMASCUS, Syria: Israel's reported new secret peace feelers to Syria have deepened the mystery over the countries' relations and the reason why Israeli warplanes bombed a target inside Syria two months ago.

The United States has unofficially said that Israel's target was a nascent Syrian nuclear program. But outside analysts and the U.N. maintain there isn't proof of that, and say the Syrian site could well have been something else, including possibly a radar station.

Syria also has disputed that the site contained anything of significance and drawn a parallel to satellite imagery before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, which proved unreliable.

In addition, Syria has publicly said the Sept. 6 bombing proves Israel is not interested in peace.

Yet on Tuesday, Israel's Yediot Ahronot newspaper said that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had hinted in a briefing to an influential parliamentary committee that he was holding secret peace contacts with Syria.

Olmert also told parliament's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on Monday that he was "ready for peace with Syria and prepared to conduct negotiations" as long as Syria abandoned any ties with North Korea and Iran and did not support terror, according to participants.

In addition, Olmert and Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak have both said publicly in recent days that they hoped Syria would take part in a U.S.-sponsored peace conference in Annapolis, Maryland, later this month.

The focus of the conference will be on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, however. And Syria has said it would not attend unless the issue of the Golan Heights also is on the table. Israel captured the strategic Golan from Syria in the 1967 Mideast war.

Syria did not comment Tuesday on the latest Israeli report of peace talks. But Damascus has in the past rejected claims that it was holding secret talks and has insisted on U.S. participation in peace talks to improve the chances of success.

Syria also might be loathe to give up ties to Iran, with whom it has economic and military relations. Both Syria and Iran also support Hezbollah in Lebanon and Palestinian militants, and Syrian President Bashar Assad has said there is no conflict between supporting militants and working for peace.

The reports of talks are not the first between the two staunch enemies, who have no diplomatic ties and have fought four times since Israel's 1948 creation — three in Mideast wars and the latest in Lebanon in 1982 during the Israeli invasion of the neighboring country.

In 2000, formal U.S.-sponsored Israel-Syria talks neared agreement but broke down over final border and peace arrangements. Since then, reports of talks have popped up occasionally — most recently a half-year ago when Israeli media reported that Olmert had relayed messages to Assad through Turkey.

But those reported talks did not lead to a breakthrough, and over the summer, war talk between Syria and Israel heated up — capped by the September air strike by Israel into northern Syria.

Syria's slow move to provide any specific details of the raid afterward, and Israel's near-silence after the raid, were seen by some as a sign the two countries were engaged in some secret dance outside the public eye.

Likewise, the silence from other Arab countries, who did not condemn the raid, was seen as a sign of Syria's own poor relations with those countries. Syria, under pressure from the United States for allegedly interfering in Lebanon and without many Arab friends, could find talks with Israel a relief, and a chance for some regional political leverage.

Meanwhile, many in the region and in Europe remain skeptical about what proof the United States or Israel have that the bombed Syrian site was nuclear-linked.

"There hasn't been anything that constitutes a definitive smoking gun proof that this facility the Israelis attacked was indeed a nuclear facility," said David Hartwell, Middle East and North Africa editor for Jane's Country Risk in London.

Syria has denied any nuclear ambitions and the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, has asked the United States and Israel to show proof.

A diplomat familiar with IAEA affairs, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the issue's sensitivity, said one theory being considered within the agency is that the bombed site may have been a forward radar system, and not a nuclear site.

But John Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said last week that the site indicated nuclear cooperation between North Korea and Syria, and perhaps also cooperation with Iran.

Source: IHT