Hypocrisy is A Weapon US Doesn't Need in Arsenal

by DeWayne Wickham for USA Today

May 23, 2006

Simply put, the Bush administration wants to keep Iran and North Korea from obtaining nuclear weapons. The two nations are the remaining legs — Iraq under Saddam Hussein was the other — of what President Bush famously labeled the "axis of evil." But when it comes to nuclear non-proliferation, the effort to keep these and other nations from possessing such weapons is complicated by a U.S. penchant for applying malleable principles.

Last week, on the same day that The New York Times reported the Bush administration is considering negotiating a peace treaty with North Korea in return for that country dismantling its nuclear program, Reuters said the White House scotched the idea of offering Iran a non-aggression pact in return for it getting rid of its nuclear program. "I think it reflects the advancement of the program in North Korea," Joanna Spear, director of the U.S. Foreign Policy Institute at The George Washington University, said of the different approaches. "The stick is just not an option with North Korea" because it is already believed to have nuclear weapons.

Iran, on the other hand, is at most 10 years away from having a nuclear weapon, many experts conclude. That's assuming it presses ahead with a program to build one. But the Islamic regime in Tehran only wants to use nuclear power to generate electricity, its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has insistently told the world, despite widespread skepticism. The Bush administration and its European allies are pressing Iran to forgo its nuclear program and to end its support of groups that the United States has branded terrorist organizations. "When Iran is prepared to give that (nuclear program) up, it can have a different relationship with us as the government of Libya has proven, and as we have proven reciprocally just in the past few days," John Bolton, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said last week. The United States recently restored diplomatic relations with Libya after it ended its nuclear program and renounced its support of terrorist groups.

Even so, this nation's treatment of countries that launch nuclear programs — and seek to possess nuclear bombs over its objection — is far from balanced. In 1969, when Israel was discovered to have a nuclear weapons program, the Nixon administration decided against trying to stop it. Instead, Nixon cut a secret deal that allowed Israel to possess such weapons as long as it didn't tell the world it had them. "Israel would be committed to maintaining full secrecy over its nuclear activities, keeping their status ambiguous and uncertain," Avner Cohen and William Burr write in the current issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a publication on global security.

In March, the Bush administration reached a deal with India that required no such subterfuge. If approved by Congress, it would let India acquire civilian nuclear technology from the USA. This agreement comes more than three decades after India launched a nuclear weapons program despite international condemnation. The agreement doesn't demand that India kowtow to U.S. demands, as Bolton does of Iran. Perhaps that's a concession to the advanced state of India's nuclear program and the growing economic ties between the world's largest democracy, India, and its most powerful one, the United States. Such preferential treatment on the world stage doesn't go unnoticed. Though certainly the United States will use its economic, political and even military leverage to protect its interests worldwide, such actions can carry a strong scent of hypocrisy. Israel gets one set of rules, while Iraq — and now Iran — must live by another.

If the United States dealt with countries as equals, rather than playing favorites — especially in the Middle East — we'd have more credibility in negotiating our way out of these crises. Or just maybe we'd find ourselves with fewer fires to put out in the first place.