"Iran Nuclear Deal Opposition: 'Dirty Hands'," LeadStories.com, August 7, 2015

DIRTY HANDS

Raphael Sassower

Just between observing the 70-year anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima (august 6^th) and the second dropped on Nagasaki (August 9^th), the Republican presidential candidates reiterated in unison their vehement contempt for the Iran deal to prevent it from building nuclear weapons. Instead of framing their outrage in moral terms or global disarmament terms, they merely want Iran not to have nuclear capability. The fact that the US is still spending billions annually to develop and build nuclear bombs wasn’t even mentioned. The first presidential debate saw the seamless mixture of a commitment to increasing the military budget and confessions of faith, enlisting divine intervention in America’s military might and global leadership.

The candidates’ misguided outrage against President Obama shouldn’t be about his weak negotiation skills with Iran, as some of them claim, but rather about his inconsistent, even hypocritical stance on nuclear weapons. While pledging in 2013 to reduce our nuclear arsenal and bring down nuclear weapon stockpiles around the world (meaning primarily Russia) he keeps authorizing billions of dollars in nuclear weapon spending, as is evident in the booming economy of Los Alamos, New Mexico. Does this sound like a Democratic capitulation to global nuclear threats? Has this Democratic president veered even slightly from his Republican predecessor’s hawkish stance? Would any American president dare challenge the military-industrial-academic complex that spends annually more than the entire world combined on its military might?

All of this reminds me of Jean Paul Sartre’s play “Dirty Hands” (1948) where intrigue and treachery are exposed as the way political maneuvers are bound to unfold over time, and where a straight-forward moral judgment is difficult to come by. The context of the play was World War II and the flirting of communist regimes with fascist Nazi Germany. Today’s realpolitik is cast similarly in terms of friends and foes, democratic regimes versus “Islamofascists,” where the moral high-ground can be asserted in unequivocal political terms. Does anyone seriously believe that a declaration of war against Iran will bring to an end tensions in the Middle-East? Are those who believe that the only way to handle Middle-East unrest is with another war be willing to personally participate in it, and if too old, send their sons and daughters?

Amidst this debate over nuclear threats, we should acknowledge the only nation ever to have actually used nuclear bomb has been the US, not once but twice, killing more than 200,000 people, primarily civilians. Was this the only way to end the Japanese threat? The debate, decades later, is still not settled. But it is this nation’s Republican candidates for the presidency who without a historical perspective or any sense of guilt or shame lecture the rest of the world on the danger of Iran’s nuclear program. Whose hands are “dirty” after all?

"Stop the Hypocrisy of Nuclear Threats," LeadStories.com, July 27, 2015

Stop the Hypocrisy of Nuclear Threats

Raphael Sassower

As Congress is about to review the deal made with Iran to lift international sanctions against it in exchange for slowing its nuclear ambitions, the specter of Israel’s survival has been brought up. Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has inserted himself into the American debate as if he were a member of Congress or at least a presidential candidate on the absurd level of a Donald Trump. Sensationalizing the threat to Israel, Netanyahu and some Republicans have argued against tipping the delicate balance of powers in the Middle East.

A few relevant facts must be recalled to set the stage for a rational (rather than hysterical) assessment of the deal. First, Israel isn’t party to the treaty with Iran, so why is its prime minister inserting himself into the debate? Second, if Israel will be affected, does its concerns overshadow those of all other nations in the region? How come they don’t intervene in American domestic politics? Third, since the treaty was signed by the UK, France, Germany, China, and Russia (in addition to the US), why only protest in the American media? Has Israel lost all credibility in the rest of the world? Fourth, if nuclear threat is at issue, have we all forgotten the open secret that Israel has nuclear capabilities and, according to some, nuclear weapons? The balance right now is wholly skewed in favor of Israel as compared to other nations in the region. Fifth, and related to the fourth point, Israel is also the only known nuclear power in the world that has not signed the international non-proliferation treaty—is this because a signature would be an admission of having nuclear weapons, or is it because American might protects it from international accountability.

The hypocrisy of demanding nuclear supervision of Iran but not of Israel is clear. For the longest time Israel has demanded to be considered beyond any moral reproach—and therefore its own hypocrisy couldn’t be mentioned in polite company—because of its designation as the homeland of the Jews, especially in light of the shameful international response to Nazi Germany’s extermination of the Jews during WWII. But we are no longer in 1945 (the end of the war) or 1948 (the establishment of the State of Israel). Israel is a military powerhouse that exports more weaponry than oranges, and has been able to conquer large territories of its neighbors in the Six Days’ War of 1967. As an occupying military force, it has behaved immorally (and many times in full violation of international law) towards its Palestinian wards. It’s hypocritical to demand moral authority only in the case of Iran, but display moral indifference about one’s own conduct in the occupied territories.

Even if Iran’s nuclear ambitions are neutralized for only a decade or two, it’s a far better solution to a nuclear arms’ race in the region. And how heart-warming to see Russia, China, and the US on the same side of the table with aligned interests in the region.