The Other Nuclear Option: John Bolton, Ending the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and Iran

My electrician asked me the other day, as he was wiring my bathroom, "so, when do you think we will invade Iran?" The eternal optimist that I am, I answered to the effect that I was hopeful that we wouldn't, since the Dems in Congress (and American public to some extent) have seemed finally to have woken up and are doing a respectable job shuting down the GOP's insane agenda, hence disallowing the Neo-cons their chance.

What I didn't realize is that for the Neo-cons, their chance is here and they are going for it.

Follow me down...

 

Allah bless Aljazeera.  How do you say "fair and balanced" in Arabic?  I like Aljazeera because, even more than BBC, they have a clear perspective on American politics that probably comes from being on the outside looking in...or maybe its because they have not sold their collective soul to corporations.

Either way, in an Aljazeera opinion piece entitled "Israel Guns for Iran", Jude Wanniski links the nomination of John Bolton as UN Ambassador to Neo-con/Bush Administration plans to attack Iran.

It is no secret that Israel gets nervous whenever any of its neighbors have possession of enriched Uranium.  But unlike Osirak, Iranian sites are out of Israel's strike range; they can't haul big enough bombs far enough.  So, what is a paranoid government to do? I suppose Sharon could attempt to buy American long range bombers.  But why bother if he can get his Neo-con friends in the White House to do the job of bombing Iran for him.

There is one little hurtle to get over though, and it is that the Bush Administration has to come up with at least some justification, even if it is flimsy - and more so now following Iraq - before it can launch the planes. And an unfortunate little detail for Sharon is the fact that Iran hasn't broken any rules that haven't already been broken by South Korea, Egypt and the US, among others. Iran has "not fully complied" with IAEA safeguards. As Wanniski puts it, this non-compliance "simply means that they were found to have done something that they were obliged to report to the IAEA and failed to do so, for example moving material from Building A to Building B."

Furthermore, Tehran is making it hard on Sharon because they have agreed to a 27/7 monitoring regime with the IAEA. Plus, unlike Iraq, they are in full compliance with the Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which states that nations have a right to possess Uranium enriched to 4% which is sufficient for power plants but is not even close to the 90% required for weapons.

Enter John Bolton. The Neo-con plan, according to Wanniski is to eliminate the NPT.  Here is how it would work:

The plan of the neo-conservatives in the Bush administration, who work closely with Sharon, ...aim at changing the terms of the NPT when the countries that are party to the treaty will gather in New York City in May for the 1970 treaty's Seventh Review Conference.

The members, practically every nation on earth, meet every five years to assess how things are going.

Actually, things have been going very well, as evidenced by the fact that the IAEA has been proven correct in its assessment that Saddam Hussein had no nuclear programme and would be incapable of building one. Its assessment was made before the president decided we had to go to war anyway, just to make sure.

The neo-cons, who essentially control Vice-President Dick Cheney and his office, have already made great strides in persuading the president that the NPT is outmoded and must be modernised. His statements in support of the NPT say that he likes it so much he wishes it to be strengthened.

How? By removing from its provisions the "inalienable" right of signatory nations to enrich uranium to the 4% potency required for power plants, but not the 90% required for nuclear weapons. To accomplish this, the president has named John Bolton to be UN ambassador.

Send in the Destroyer, the man Cheney calls in when he wants negotiations to fall apart. But thats not all, the plan next calls for Bolton to lie, lie, lie.  To muddy the waters, and confuse for the American public the stricter IAEA standards with those set by the NPT.  If they can do that, and then claim that the NPT is too easy to violate without repercussions, it gives the White House an excuse to pull out of NPT.  Especially since other nations in the NPT will raise holly hell over Bolton's proposal to eliminate the right of nations to have enriched Uranium at all.

Once the US has withdrawn from NPT under the cover of Bolton's smoke screen, the Rove spin machine will further capitalize on the ground work done by Bolton's shrieking about the ease of which nations, like oh, I don't know, Iran, can violate the Treaty and get away with it.  Then the mighty Wurlitzer will be playing Wham Bamb Bomb Tehran.

The good news is that Bolton's nomination looks like its going down in flames.  The bad news is that there are more galatic assholes of his odious stripe where he came from and I am sure Cheney has one or two more waiting in the wings to be nominated.  The conspiracy will survive the failure of Bolton's nomination. We have got to be ready.