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Al-Ahram Weekly 28 Jan. - 3 Feb. 1999 Issue No. 414 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 28 Jan. - 3 Feb. 1999 Issue No. 414
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Focus Economy Opinion Culture Features Living Travel Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters The nuclear impasse
By Mohamed Sid-Ahmed
How will history remember Saddam Hussein? There is no doubt that his record on human rights will be unequivocally condemned. Like Hitler and Stalin, he will go down in history as one of the 20th century's bloodiest adversaries of democracy, pluralism and humanitarian values, a symbol of totalitarianism at its worst who ruled through terror and bribery. As such, he will be remembered as representing retrogressive trends opposed to social progress. However, in one field he will perhaps be remembered as a forerunner of developments in the making, independently from his own will. It is this particular aspect of Saddam Hussein's political life, namely, the role he has played on the issue of nuclear proliferation, that will be discussed in this article.
The present 'nuclear world order', based on the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT), purports to be aimed at limiting the proliferation of nuclear weapons. But this noble aim is offset by the fact that the treaty does not require the elimination of all such weapons. It excludes five powers (who happen to be the five permanent members of the Security Council), which are authorised to remain nuclear, plus a number of states which have (or have had) secret nuclear arsenals. Two of the states known to possess (or to have possessed) secret nuclear arsenals, although they never admitted to this publicly, are Israel and South Africa.
Under its white supremacist regime, Pretoria relied mainly on its own resources (with some help from Israel) in building its nuclear arsenal, probably against the will of most western powers. However, the apartheid government dismantled its nuclear capability before government passed into the hands of Nelson Mendala. But Israel has never relinquished its nuclear arsenal. In this it is supported by the western powers, which have always guaranteed its military superiority over all the Arab states combined, on the grounds that, because it is the only state on earth threatened in its very right to exist, it enjoys the 'moral' right to possess the ultimate overkill capability!
So the nuclear world order is based on a nuclear club, five of whose members legitimately possess nuclear weapons and one, Israel, possessing them in secret but with the blessing, or at least tacit acceptance, of the regular members. This encouraged Israel to attack the Iraqi nuclear facility in the late seventies, on the pretext that the facility had undeclared military uses -- an allegation denied not only by Iraq but even by France which had built the facility for Iraq. In a flagrant demonstration of the double standards that apply on this issue, no western protests were raised over Israel's destruction of the Iraqi plant. As this event occurred over a decade before Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, it is clear that the West's antipathy for the Iraqi regime has been a more permanent factor that any specific reason for dissatisfaction with Iraq's foreign policy.
Actually, a policy of nuclear apartheid requires that nuclear technology remain the monopoly of a limited number of highly developed states. But this requirement is being steadily eroded. Nuclear secrets are no longer the exclusive prerogative of an elite few but have become accessible to an ever growing number of developing states. Two states, India and Pakistan, confirmed this with the nuclear blasts they set off last year. And, with the threat of Israel's secret nuclear arsenal looming over the Middle East, other states in the region are certain to enter the nuclear race sooner or later.
Iraq was one of the first Third World states to acquire a nuclear capability. Because of its defeat in the wake of its abortive attempt to invade Kuwait, it was compelled to accept Washington's conditions for a cease-fire, which were imposed in the guise of Security Council resolutions. These resolutions entailed exposing Iraq's entire territory to UNSCOM's systematic search for hidden caches of weapons of mass destruction. For eight long years, a game of hide and seek has been played out between UNSCOM and Iraq. The assumption that UNSCOM operates within the scope of international legality is belied by the recent press reports which exposed the UN commission as a nest of spies whose expertise was less in the field of removing arms of mass destruction than in the field of electronic surveillance and eavesdropping on the Iraqi regime.
If it was not for the humiliating agreement Iraq was forced to sign in the aftermath of its defeat in the second Gulf war, it would have been able to raise the question of why double standards should apply in the field of weapons of mass destruction, and why it is legitimate for certain nations to go nuclear and not others. That is not to say that arsenals of nuclear weapons, which could imperil life on earth and bring about the annihilation of our species, are to be in any way condoned. But it would be illusory to believe that the nuclear race can be halted as long as nuclear apartheid prevails.
The only real solution is the one India has been advocating all along, which is that no state should be allowed to remain nuclear and that a procedure should be devised to have all weapons of mass destruction destroyed. The Indian plan proposes that a system of checks and balances be put in place to ensure that no power whatsoever (whether a state, a transnational organisation, a terrorist group, etc.) can take advantage of the dismantling process to pursue the race otherwise. The issue cannot be solved merely by increasing the supervisory role of one state or relying on the allocation by the United States of billions of dollars (as President Clinton proposed this week) to develop more sophisticated techniques of monitoring activities aimed at developing new types of deadly weapons, chemical, biological, electronic or otherwise.
In a way, Saddam Hussein has compelled the world community to give serious consideration to the objective fact that nuclear technology can no longer remain the monopoly of a limited number of developed states, and that other, less developed states, are bound to join the race. One of the regions where a replay of the Indian subcontinent scenario can easily be envisaged is the Middle East. Because Israel keeps its arsenal outside the realm of international legality, this can only encourage a number of states in its vicinity to enter the race. After all, their security, indeed, their very survival, depends on their ability to build up their own deterrence systems, i.e., to build the Bomb. With easier access to nuclear technology now available to many developing states, it is imperative to rethink the whole issue of nuclear disarmament which, like freedom, must be dealt with as an indivisible whole.
Perhaps the only positive contribution for which Saddam will be remembered is that he was one of the first to put this issue on the global agenda, an issue which, because of its critical importance for the survival of our species, will occupy priority status for decades to come.
