The other day long-time commentator Andrei said the following on my post about the Iranian threat (implied) to use nuclear weapons in their war with Israel:
Fool me once – shame on you (Iraq)
Fool me twice – shame on me (Libya)
Fool me again – I’m just an idiot (Syria)
Fool me now – not a chance.
My response was longer than a comment should be and since I’m a blogger nowadays….
Iraq
The WMD stuff for Iraq was not around nuclear weapons, and as for the bio-chem stuff none other than the BBC’s Jeremy Paxman – producer of the 2004 documentary, The Power of Nightmares which argued that all the WMD stuff had been made up – had argued in August 2002, in an updated copy of his early 1990’s book, A Higher Form of Killing, that Saddam did have such WMD’s.
As said in this post, Leftist Myths on the Iraq Invasion, (and there’s an extensive quote from Paxman’s book), in 2002 the notion that Saddam Hussein had kept his stockpiles of WMDs and was an immediate threat was not yet an argument in America’s and George W. Bush’s interest; it was still, at that point, an argument with which to indict the West.
But the point here is that Paxman and others were looking at much the same evidence and history that the CIA was and coming to the same conclusion.
Libya
I didn’t support the actions of Britain, France and Obama, which I thought were stupid, but I don’t recall WMD’s being part of the debate. Much as I wanted Reagan to wipe out Gaddafi in the 1980’s there was no point by 2011, by which time he’d given up his nuclear programme – but then got wasted by the West anyway.
Syria
If you want to blame someone blame Turkey, who’d had it in for the Assad regime for decades. Sure, there were many other players in the mix, including the USA and Russia, but in the end they weren’t the main players. Besides, Assad and his Dad had brought this on themselves with decades of terrible treatment of the Syrian people, like the city of Hama in 1982.
Moreover, the Iranian Mullahs would have looked at the collapse of the regimes in those three nations and at the survival, against greater odds, of the North Korean regime, and made the obvious conclusion that having nuclear weapons was the difference. Likely their overwhelming motivation for having such a program.
For those who would argue that Israel and the West have thus created their own problem in Iran it should be pointed out that this logic goes both ways; which is to say that if Jimmy Carter had not got in the way in 1994 Bill Clinton would likely have bombed the North Korean nuclear sites. Instead we got another decade of the familiar bullshit of international “agreements” and IAEA inspectors that ended with the Norks exploding their first bomb in 2006, plus having the ballistic missiles to deliver a warhead.
Reading the timeline of all this is to see an advance copy of Iran’s approach.
But with at least two of those nations, Iraq and Syria, something is being forgotten, which is that it’s not always about the USA and the Big Powers. It’s about nukes and Israel – the Begin Doctrine – and in Israel that has had bipartisan support for decades now:
We chose this moment: now, not later, because later may be too late, perhaps forever. And if we stood by idly, two, three years, at the most four years, and Saddam Hussein would have produced his three, four, five bombs. … Then, this country and this people would have been lost, after the Holocaust. Another Holocaust would have happened in the history of the Jewish people. Never again, never again! Tell so your friends, tell anyone you meet, we shall defend our people with all the means at our disposal. We shall not allow any enemy to develop weapons of mass destruction turned against us.
…
This attack will be a precedent for every future government in Israel. … Every future Israeli prime minister will act, in similar circumstances, in the same way.
That’s Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin (quite the terrorist himself) speaking at the UN after Israel had bombed a nuclear reactor in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1981.
It was called Operation Orchid, an attack on the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq. The French, who helped him build it, were pissed, as were even Reagan and Thatcher. But after Desert Storm in 1991, when inspectors went in and discovered the extent of Saddam’s new nuclear program (which embarrassed the CIA, who were clueless about it), a former Reagan advisor, Dick Cheney acknowledged that it was an “outstanding” Israeli operation that had made the US’s “job much easier in Desert Storm.”
It should be noted that Iran did not protest the attack, which isn’t a surprise since they’d attacked Osirak in 1980.
Then, on 2007, Israel destroyed another reactor being built, this time in Syria, where satellite photos showed something that looked like an exact copy of a North Korean reactor (which also explained the otherwise strange traffic of scientists and engineers between the two nations). Notably, the only nation that protested the attack was … North Korea. Even the Syrians said nothing and simply bulldozed the site. The Israelis said almost nothing about it for years.
The Jews were right both times. They’re right again here in the case of Iran.
No Minister 