Reporting on the final U.S. presidential campaign debate, on foreign
policy, The Wall Street Journal observed that “the only country
mentioned more (than Israel) was Iran, which is seen by most nations in
the Middle East as the gravest security threat to the region.”
The
two candidates agreed that a nuclear Iran is the gravest threat to the
region, if not the world, as Romney explicitly maintained, reiterating a
conventional view.
On Israel, the candidates vied in
declaring their devotion to it, but Israeli officials were nevertheless
unsatisfied. They had “hoped for more ‘aggressive’ language from Mr.
Romney,” according to the reporters. It was not enough that Romney
demanded that Iran not be permitted to “reach a point of nuclear
capability.”
Arabs were dissatisfied too, because Arab
fears about Iran were “debated through the lens of Israeli security
instead of the region’s,” while Arab concerns were largely ignored –
again the conventional treatment.
The Journal article,
like countless others on Iran, leaves critical questions unanswered,
among them: Who exactly sees Iran as the gravest security threat? And
what do Arabs (and most of the world) think can be done about the
threat, whatever they take it to be?
The first question
is easily answered. The “Iranian threat” is overwhelmingly a Western
obsession, shared by Arab dictators, though not Arab populations.
As
numerous polls have shown, although citizens of Arab countries
generally dislike Iran, they do not regard it as a very serious threat.
Rather, they perceive the threat to be Israel and the United States; and
many, sometimes considerable majorities, regard Iranian nuclear weapons
as a counter to these threats.
In high places in the
U.S., some concur with the Arab populations’ perception, among them Gen.
Lee Butler, former head of the Strategic Command. In 1998 he said, “It
is dangerous in the extreme that in the cauldron of animosities that we
call the Middle East,” one nation, Israel, should have a powerful
nuclear weapons arsenal, which “inspires other nations to do so.”
Still
more dangerous is the nuclear-deterrent strategy of which Butler was a
leading designer for many years. Such a strategy, he wrote in 2002, is
“a formula for unmitigated catastrophe,” and he called on the United
States and other nuclear powers to accept their commitment under the
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to make “good faith” efforts to
eliminate the plague of nuclear weapons. More
Saturday 5 January 2013
US, Israel The Gravest Threat to World Peace, Not Iran
Posted @ 13:54
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