Why Trump and Israel have only encouraged Iran to go nuclear
We have entered a new rogue order. The rules-based order that underpins international relations, helped the birth of modern Israel and held back annihilation during the Cold War, has finally been blown away.
It crumbled with the 2003 US-led illegal invasion of Iraq, which paved the way for Russia’s illegal colonial war in Ukraine and now Israel’s attacks on Iran, enhanced by American bunker busters and stealth bombers.
Israel’s aim, to end Iran’s nuclear weapons programme, has not been underwritten with any hard evidence that Iran posed an immediate threat.
Ironically, those states that have always been thought of as “rogue” – notably Iran, North Korea, sometimes Cuba, one day even Yemen or Eritrea – will now conclude that they need to get hold of a nuke, and fast.
The tearing up of international order began in the early 2000s with the doctrine of pre-emption, in which Israel pioneered so-called “targeted killing” of alleged terrorists posing an imminent danger. It was co-opted by the West after 9/11 and included extra-judicial killings by the US, the UK, and other allies around the world – often of their own citizens and always without trial. Alleged terrorists were blown up, frequently using drones, and many innocent civilians were killed along with them.
Ami Ayalon, a former Israeli admiral, was responsible for gathering intelligence and often drawing up the lists of people to kill.
In 2012, he revealed how damaging the idea can be in The Gatekeepers, a startling documentary featuring five other former heads of Israel’s internal security service.
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“There’s a concept, ‘the banality of evil’,” he said. “When you start doing it en masse, 200, 300 people die because of the idea of ‘targeted assassinations’. Suddenly, the processes become a kind of conveyor belt. You ask yourself less and less where to stop.”
But the US and Israel’s pre-emptive strikes on Iran over the last 12 days have not prompted Tehran to give up on its intent to rid the Middle East of the Jewish state.
Iran knew the US was likely to strike against its stockpile of uranium that had been enriched using centrifuges to 60 per cent purity.
According to The New York Times, citing Israeli officials, 400kg of this uranium material – which can, in theory, be spun to weapons-grade 90 per cent purity, were moved away from danger before the US airstrikes on the nuclear site of Fordow. The UN’s nuclear watchdog the IAEA thinks this is likely too.
“The Iranians are not dumb. They have had years to plan for this and there’s no reason on earth why they would not have moved their uranium. It would have only taken a couple of trucks,” a senior Israeli military officer told The Independent.
Low-tech stealth is often highly effective. Pakistan is said by Western intelligence agencies to hide its nuclear warheads in plain sight by keeping them on the move in lorries floridly disguised as ordinary freight “jingle trucks”.
