Israel’s Worst-Kept Secret

 

Israel’s Worst-Kept Secret

 

Middle East Israel WMDs

Douglas Birch and R. Jeffrey Smith The Atlantic September 16, 2014

 

 

 

Israel has a substantial arsenal of nuclear weapons.

 

Former CIA Director Robert Gates said so during his 2006 Senate confirmation hearings for secretary of defense, when he noted—while serving as a university president—that Iran is surrounded by “powers with nuclear weapons,” including “the Israelis to the west.” Former President Jimmy Carter said so in 2008 and again this year, in interviews and speeches in which he pegged the number of Israel’s nuclear warheads at 150 to around 300.

 

Authors

Douglas Birch is a writer for the Center for Public Integrity. Full Bio

R. Jeffrey Smith is managing editor for national security at the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit investigative newsroom. Full Bio

But due to a quirk of federal secrecy rules, such remarks generally cannot be made even now by those who work for the U.S. government and hold active security clearances. In fact, U.S. officials, even those on Capitol Hill, are routinely admonished not to mention the existence of an Israeli nuclear arsenal and occasionally punished when they do so.

 

The policy of never publicly confirming what a scholar once called one of the world’s “worst-kept secrets” dates from a political deal between the United States and Israel in the late 1960s. Its consequence has been to help Israel maintain a distinctive military posture in the Middle East while avoiding the scrutiny—and occasional disapprobation—applied to the world’s eight acknowledged nuclear powers.

 

But the U.S. policy of shielding the Israeli program has recently provoked new controversy, partly because of allegations that it played a role in the censure of a well-known national-laboratory arms researcher in July, after he published an article in which he acknowledged that Israel has nuclear arms. Some scholars and experts are also complaining that the government’s lack of candor is complicating its high-profile campaign to block the development of nuclear arms in Iran, as well as U.S.-led planning for a potential treaty prohibiting nuclear arms anywhere in the region.

 

The U.S. silence is largely unwavering, however. “We would never say flatly that Israel has nuclear weapons,” explained a former senior State Department official who dealt with nuclear issues during the Bush administration. “We would have to couch it in other language, we would have to say ‘we assume’ or ‘we presume that Israel has nuclear weapons,’ or ‘it’s reported’ that they have them,” the former official said, requesting that his name not be used due to the political sensitivity surrounding the topic.

 

President Barack Obama made clear that this four-decade-old U.S. policy would persist at his firstWhite House press conference in 2009, when journalist Helen Thomas asked if he knew of any nations in the Middle East with nuclear arms. “With respect to nuclear weapons, you know, I don’t want to speculate,” Obama said, as though Israel’s established status as a nuclear-weapons state was only a matter of rumor and conjecture.

 

So wary is Paul Pillar, a former U.S. national-intelligence officer for the Middle East, of making any direct, public reference to Israel’s nuclear arsenal that when he wrote an article this month in The National Interest, entitled “Israel’s Widely Suspected Unmentionables,” he referred to warheads as “kumquats” throughout his manuscript.

 

Even Congress has been coy on the subject. When the Senate Foreign Relations Committee published a 2008 report titled “Chain Reaction: Avoiding a Nuclear Arms Race in the Middle East,” it included chapters on Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey—but not Israel. The 61-page report relegated Israel’s nuclear arms to a footnote that suggested that Israel’s arsenal was a “perception.”

 

“This report does not take a position on the existence of Israeli nuclear weapons,” the report said. “Although Israel has not officially acknowledged it possesses nuclear weapons, a widespread consensus exists in the region and among experts in the United States that Israel possesses a number of nuclear weapons. For Israel’s neighbors, this perception is more important than reality.”

 

While former White House or cabinet-level officers—such as Gates—have gotten away with more candor, the bureaucracy does not take honesty by junior officials lightly. James Doyle, a veteran nuclear analyst at Los Alamos National Laboratory who was recently censured, evidently left himself open to punishment by straying minutely from U.S. policy in a February 2013 article published by the British journal Survival.

 

“Nuclear weapons did not deter Egypt and Syria from attacking Israel in 1973, Argentina from attacking British territory in the 1982 Falklands War or Iraq from attacking Israel during the 1991 Gulf War,” Doyle said in a bitingly critical appraisal of Western nuclear policy, which angered his superiors at the nuclear-weapons lab as well as a Republican staff member of the House Armed Services Committee.

 

Even though three secrecy specialists at the lab concluded the article contained no secrets, more senior officials overruled them and cited an unspecified breach as justification for censuring Doyle and declaring the article classified, after its publication. They docked his pay, searched his home computer, and, eventually, fired him this summer. The lab has said his firing—as opposed to the censure and search—was not related to the article’s content, but Doyle and his lawyer have said they are convinced it was pure punishment for his skepticism about the tenets of nuclear deterrence.

 

Neither Doyle nor his colleagues revealed if the sentence in his article about Israel’s arsenal was the one that provoked officials to nitpick about a security violation, but several independent experts have surmised it was.

 

Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, said the clues lie in the Energy Department’s citation—in a document summarizing the facts behind Doyle’s unsuccessful appeal of his ill treatment—of a classification bulletin numbered “WPN-136.”

 

The full, correct title of that bulletin, according to an Energy Department circular, is “WNP-136, Foreign Nuclear Capabilities.” The classification bulletin itself is not public. But Aftergood said Doyle’s only reference to a sensitive foreign nuclear program was his mention of Israel’s, making it highly probable this was the cudgel the lab used against him. “I’m certain that that’s what it is,” Aftergood said in an interview.

 

The circumstances surrounding Doyle’s censure are among several cases now being examined by Department of Energy (DOE) Inspector General Gregory Friedman, as part of a broader examination of inconsistent classification practices within the department and the national laboratories, several officials said.

 

Doyle’s reference to the existence of Israel’s nuclear arsenal reflects the consensus intelligence judgment within DOE nuclear weapons-related laboratories, former officials say. But some said they find it so hard to avoid any public reference to the weapons that classification officers periodically hold special briefings about skirting the issue.

 

“It was one of those things that was not obvious,” a former laboratory official said, asking not to be identified due to the sensitivity of the topic. “Especially when there’s so much about it in the open domain.”

 

Israel’s nuclear-weapons program began in the 1950s, and the country is widely believed to have assembled its first three weapons during the crisis leading to the Six-Day War in 1967, according to the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nonprofit group in Washington that tracks nuclear-weapons developments.

 

For decades, however, Israel itself has wrapped its nuclear program in a policy it calls amimut, meaning opacity or ambiguity. By hinting at but not confirming that it has these weapons, Israel has sought to deter its enemies from a major attack without provoking a concerted effort by others to develop a matching arsenal.

 

Israeli-American historian Avner Cohen has written that U.S. adherence to this policy evidently grew out of a September 1969 meeting between President Richard Nixon and Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. No transcript of the meeting has surfaced, but Cohen said it is clear the two leaders struck a deal: Israel would not test its nuclear weapons or announce it possessed them, while the United States wouldn’t press Israel to give them up or to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and would halt its annual inspections of Dimona, the site of Israel’s Negev Nuclear Research Center.

 

As an outgrowth of the deal, Washington, moreover, would adopt Israel’s secret as its own, eventually acquiescing to a public formulation of Israeli policy that was initially strenuously opposed by top U.S. officials.

 

“Israel will not be the first country to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East,” the boilerplate Israeli account has long stated. “Israel supports a Middle East free of all weapons of mass destruction following the attainment of peace.” When Nixon’s aides sought assurances that this pledge meant Israel would not actually build any bombs, Israeli officials said the word “introduce” would have a different meaning: It meant the country would not publicly test bombs or admit to possessing them, leaving ample room for its unacknowledged arsenal.

 

“While we might ideally like to halt actual Israeli possession,” then-National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger wrote in a July 1969 memo to Nixon that summarized Washington’s enduring policy, “what we really want at a minimum may be just to keep Israeli possession from becoming an established international fact.”

 

Even when Mordechai Vanunu, a technician at Dimona, provided the first detailed, public account of the program in 1986 and released photos he had snapped there of nuclear-weapons components, both countries refused to shift gears. After being snatched from Italy, Vanunu was imprisoned by Israel for 18 years, mostly in solitary confinement, and subsequently forbidden to travel abroad or deal substantively with foreign journalists. In an email exchange with the Center for Public Integrity, Vanunu indicated that he still faces restrictions but did not elaborate. “You can write me again when I am free, out of Israel,” he said.

 

The avoidance of candor has sometimes extended to private government channels. A former U.S. intelligence official said he recalled being flabbergasted in the 1990s by the absence of any mention of Israel in a classified document purporting to describe all foreign nuclear-weapons programs. He said he complained to colleagues at the time that “we’ve really got a problem if we can’t acknowledge the truth even in classified documents,” and finally won a grudging but spare mention of the country’s weaponry.

 

Gary Samore, who was President Obama’s top advisor on nuclear nonproliferation from 2009 to 2013, said the United States has long preferred that Israel hold to its policy of amimut, out of concern that other Middle Eastern nations would feel threatened by Israel’s coming out of the nuclear closet.

 

“For the Israelis to acknowledge and declare it, that would be seen as provocative,” he said. “It could spur some of the Arab states and Iran to produce weapons. So we like calculated ambiguity.” But when asked point-blank if the fact that Israel has nuclear weapons is classified, Samore—who is now at Harvard University—answered: “It doesn’t sound very classified to me—that Israel has nuclear weapons?”

 

The U.S. government’s official silence was broken only by accident, when, in 1979, the CIA released a four-page summary of an intelligence memorandum titled “Prospects for Further Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons” in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the Natural Resources Defense Council, a nonprofit environmental group.

 

“We believe that Israel already has produced nuclear weapons,” the 1974 report said, citing Israel’s stockpiling of large quantities of uranium, its uranium-enrichment program, and its investment in a costly missile system capable of delivering nuclear warheads. Release of the report triggered a spate of headlines. “CIA said in 1974 Israel had A-Bombs,” a New York Times headline declared. “Israel a Nuclear Club Member Since 1974, CIA Study Indicates,” announced The Washington Star.

 

But it stemmed from a goof.

 

John Despres, who was the CIA’s national-intelligence officer for nuclear proliferation at the time, said he was in charge of censoring or “redacting” the secret material from the report prior to its release. But portions he wanted withheld were released, he said in an interview, while sections that were supposed to be released were withheld.

 

“This was a sort of classic case of a bureaucratic screw-up,” said Despres, now retired. “People misinterpreted my instructions.” He said that as far as he knows, no one was disciplined for the mix-up. Moreover, in 2008, when the National Security Archive obtained a copy of the document under the Freedom of Information Act, that judgment remained unexcised.

 

But Washington’s refusal to confirm the obvious in any other way has produced some weird trips down the rabbit hole for those seeking official data about the Israeli arsenal. Bryan Siebert, who was the most senior career executive in charge of guarding DOE’s nuclear-weapons secrets from 1992 to 2002, said he recalls seeing a two-cubic-foot stack at one point of CIA, FBI, Justice, and Energy department documents about Israel’s nuclear program.

 

John Fitzpatrick, who since 2011 has served as director of the federal Information Security Oversight Office, confirmed that “aspects” of Israel’s nuclear status are considered secret by the United States. “We know this from classifying authorities at agencies who handle that material,” said Fitzpatrick, who declined to provide more details.

 

Kerry Brodie, director of communications for the Israeli embassy in Washington, similarly said no one there would discuss the subject of the country’s nuclear status. “Unfortunately, we do not have any comment we can share at this point,” she wrote in an email. A former speaker of the Israeli Knesset, Avraham Burg, was less discrete during a December 2013 conference in Haifa, where he said “Israel has nuclear and chemical weapons” and called the policy of ambiguity “outdated and childish.”

 

Through a spokesman, Robert Gates declined to discuss the issue. But a growing number of U.S. experts agree with Burg.

 

Pillar, for example, wrote in his article this month that the 45-year-old U.S. policy of shielding Israel’s program is seen around the world “as not just a double standard but living a lie. Whatever the United States says about nuclear weapons will always be taken with a grain of salt or with some measure of disdain as long as the United States says nothing about kumquats.”

 

Victor Gilinsky, a physicist and former member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission who has written about the history of the Israeli program, complained in a recent book that “the pretense of ignorance about Israeli bombs does not wash anymore. … The evident double standard undermines efforts to control the spread of nuclear weapons worldwide.”

 

J. William Leonard, who ran a government-wide declassification effort as President George W. Bush’s director of the Information Security Oversight Office from 2002 to 2008, commented that “in some regards, it undermines the integrity of the classification system when you’re using classification to officially protect a known secret. It can get exceedingly awkward, obviously.”

 

Aftergood said the secrecy surrounding Israel’s nuclear weapons is “obsolete and fraying around the edges. … It takes an effort to preserve the fiction that this is a secret,” he said. Meanwhile, he added, it can still be abused as an instrument for punishing federal employees such as Doyle for unrelated or politically inspired reasons. “Managers have broad discretion to overlook or forgive a particular infraction,” Aftergood said. “The problem is that discretion can be abused. And some employees get punished severely while others do not.”

 

Dana H. Allin, the editor of Doyle’s article in Survival magazine, said in a recent commentary published by the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London that “anyone with a passing knowledge of international affairs knows about these weapons.” He called the government’s claim that the article contained secrets “ludicrous” and said Doyle’s ordeal at the hands of the classification authorities was nothing short of Kafkaesque.

 

※出典

【Israel’s Worst-Kept Secret 】

http://goo.gl/bo6bF7

 

 

The 47-year-old nuclear elephant in the room

 

National Security

The 47-year-old nuclear elephant in the room

A growing number of U.S. experts say that feigning ignorance about Israel’s nuclear arsenal creates more trouble than it averts

By Douglas BirchemailR. Jeffrey Smithemail

5:00 am, September 16, 2014 Updated: 11:33 am, September 16, 2014

 

Mordechai Vanunu's photograph of what appears to be a mock-up of a nuclear weapon's plutonium core at the Negev Nuclear Research Center at Dimona.

Screenshot/Center for Nonproliferation Studies for the Nuclear Threat Initiative Youtube

 

Israel has a substantial arsenal of nuclear weapons.

Former CIA director Robert Gates said so during his 2006 Senate confirmation hearings for secretary of defense, when he noted — while serving as a university president — that Iran is surrounded by “powers with nuclear weapons,” including “the Israelis to the west.” Former President Jimmy Carter said so in 2008 and again this year, in interviews and speeches in which he pegged the number of Israel’s nuclear warheads at 150 to around 300.

But due to a quirk of federal secrecy rules, such remarks generally cannot be made even now by those who work for the U.S. government and hold active security clearances. In fact, U.S. officials, even those on Capitol Hill, are routinely admonished not to mention the existence of an Israeli nuclear arsenal and occasionally punished when they do so.

The policy of never publicly confirming what a scholar once called one of the world’s “worst-kept secrets” dates from a political deal between the United States and Israel in the late 1960s. Its consequence has been to help Israel maintain a distinctive military posture in the Middle East while avoiding the scrutiny — and occasional disapprobation — directed at the world’s eight acknowledged nuclear powers.

But the U.S. policy of shielding the Israeli program has recently provoked new controversy, partly because of allegations that it played a role in the censure of a well-known national laboratory arms researcher in July, after he published an article in which he acknowledged that Israel has nuclear arms. Some scholars and experts are also complaining that the government’s lack of candor is complicating its high-profile campaign to block the development of nuclear arms in Iran, as well as U.S.-led planning for a potential treaty prohibiting nuclear arms anywhere in the region.

The U.S. silence is largely unwavering, however. “We would never say flatly that Israel has nuclear weapons,” explained a former senior State Department official who dealt with nuclear issues during the Bush administration. “We would have to couch it in other language, we would have to say ‘we assume’ or ‘we presume that Israel has nuclear weapons,’ or ‘it’s reported’ that they have them,” the former official said, requesting that his name not be used due to the political sensitivity surrounding the topic.

President Barack Obama made clear that this 4-decade-old U.S. policy would persist at his first White House press conference in 2009, when journalist Helen Thomas asked if he knew of any nations in the Middle East with nuclear arms. “With respect to nuclear weapons, you know, I don’t want to speculate,” Obama said, as though Israel’s established status as a nuclear weapons state was only a matter of rumor and conjecture.

So wary is Paul Pillar, a former U.S. national intelligence officer for the Middle East, of making any direct, public reference to Israel’s nuclear arsenal that when he wrote an article this month in The National Interest, entitled “Israel’s Widely Suspected Unmentionables,” he referred to warheads as “kumquats” throughout his manuscript.

Even Congress has been coy on the subject. When the Senate Foreign Relations Committee published a 2008 report titled “Chain Reaction: Avoiding a Nuclear Arms Race in the Middle East,” it included chapters on Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey — but not Israel. The 61-page report relegated Israel’s nuclear arms to a footnote that suggested that Israel’s arsenal was a “perception.”

“This report does not take a position on the existence of Israeli nuclear weapons,” the report said. “Although Israel has not officially acknowledged it possesses nuclear weapons, a widespread consensus exists in the region and among experts in the United States that Israel possesses a number of nuclear weapons. For Israel’s neighbors, this perception is more important than reality.”

Get our email newsletter

Sign up for the Center for Public Integrity's Watchdog email and get the news you want from the Center when you want it.

The 'Demand Side': avoiding a nuclear Iran

Avoiding a nuclear arms race in the Middle East

While former White House or cabinet-level officers — such as Gates — have gotten away with more candor, the bureaucracy does not take honesty by junior officials lightly. James Doyle, a veteran nuclear analyst at Los Alamos National Laboratory who was recently censured, evidently left himself open to punishment by straying minutely from U.S. policy in a February 2013 article published by the British journal Survival.

“Nuclear weapons did not deter Egypt and Syria from attacking Israel in 1973, Argentina from attacking British territory in the 1982 Falklands War or Iraq from attacking Israel during the 1991 Gulf War,” Doyle said in a bitingly critical appraisal of Western nuclear policy, which angered his superiors at the nuclear weapons lab as well as a Republican staff member of the House Armed Services committee.

The February 2013 cover for Survival, the journal affiliated with the International Institute for Strategic Studies which published a controversial article by James Doyle.

Courtesy of the International Institute for Strategic Studies

Nuclear weapons lab employee fired after publishing scathing critique of the arms race

By Douglas Birch

July 31, 2014

 

DOE official seeks probe of dissident analyst’s dismissal by nuclear weapons laboratory

By Douglas Birch

September 16, 2014

 

Even though three secrecy specialists at the lab concluded the article contained no secrets, more senior officials overruled them and cited an unspecified breach as justification for censuring Doyle and declaring it classified, after its publication. They docked his pay, searched his home computer and, eventually, fired him this summer. The lab has said his firing — as opposed to the censure and search — was not related to the article’s content, but Doyle and his lawyer have said they are convinced it was pure punishment for his skepticism about the tenets of nuclear deterrence.

Neither Doyle nor his colleagues revealed if the sentence in his article about Israel’s arsenal was the one that provoked officials to nitpick about a security violation, but several independent experts have surmised it was.

Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, said the clues lie in the Energy Department’s citation — in a document summarizing the facts behind Doyle’s unsuccessful appeal of his ill treatment — of a classification bulletin numbered “WPN-136.”

The full, correct title of that bulletin, according to an Energy Department circular, is “WNP-136, Foreign Nuclear Capabilities.” The classification bulletin itself is not public. But Aftergood said Doyle’s only reference to a sensitive foreign nuclear program was his mention of Israel’s, making it highly probable this was the cudgel the lab used against him. “I’m certain that that’s what it is,” Aftergood said in an interview.

The circumstances surrounding Doyle’s censure are among several cases now being examined by Department of Energy (DOE) Inspector General Gregory Friedman, as part of a broader examination of inconsistent classification practices within the department and the national laboratories, several officials said.

Doyle’s reference to the existence of Israel’s nuclear arsenal reflects the consensus intelligence judgment within DOE nuclear weapons-related laboratories, former officials say. But some said they find it so hard to avoid any public reference to the weapons that classification officers periodically held special briefings about skirting the issue.

“It was one of those things that was not obvious,” a former laboratory official said, asking not to be identified due to the sensitivity of the topic. “Especially when there’s so much about it in the open domain.”

Israel’s nuclear weapons program began in the 1950s, and the country is widely believed to have assembled its first three weapons during the crisis leading to the Six-Day War in 1967, according to the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nonprofit group in Washington that tracks nuclear weapons developments.

For decades, however, Israel itself has wrapped its nuclear program in a policy it calls “amimut,” meaning opacity or ambiguity. By hinting at but not confirming that it has these weapons, Israel has sought to deter its enemies from a major attack without provoking a concerted effort by others to develop a matching arsenal.

An aerial view of the Negev Nuclear Research Center near Dimona, Israel.

Wikicommons

Israeli-American historian Avner Cohen has written that U.S. adherence to this policy evidently grew out of a September 1969 meeting between President Richard Nixon and Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. No transcript of the meeting has surfaced, but Cohen said it is clear the two leaders struck a deal: Israel would not test its nuclear weapons or announce it possessed them, while the United States wouldn’t press Israel to give them up or to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and would halt its annual inspections of Dimona, the site of Israel’s Negev Nuclear Research Center.

As an outgrowth of the deal, Washington, moreover, would adopt Israel’s secret as its own, eventually acquiescing to a public formulation of Israeli policy that was initially strenuously opposed by top U.S. officials.

“Israel will not be the first country to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East,” the boilerplate Israeli account has long stated. “Israel supports a Middle East free of all weapons of mass destruction following the attainment of peace.” When Nixon’s aides sought assurances this pledge meant Israel would not actually build any bombs, Israeli officials said the word “introduce” would have a different meaning: It meant the country would not publicly test bombs or admit to possessing them, leaving ample room for its unacknowledged arsenal.

“While we might ideally like to halt actual Israeli possession,” then-National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger wrote in a July 1969 memo to Nixon that summarized Washington’s enduring policy, “what we really want at a minimum may be just to keep Israeli possession from becoming an established international fact.”

Even when Mordechai Vanunu, a technician at Dimona, provided the first detasiled, public account of the program in 1986 and released photos he had snapped there of nuclear weapons components, both countries refused to shift gears. After being snatched from Italy, Vanunu was imprisoned by Israel for 18 years, mostly in solitary confinement, and subsequently forbidden to travel abroad or deal substantively with foreign journalists. In an email exchange with the Center for Public Integrity, Vanunu indicated that he still faces restrictions but did not elaborate. “You can write me again when I am free, out of Israel,” he said.

 

A closer look at the Negev Nuclear Research Center

Video created by the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies for the Nuclear Threat Initiative.

 

Nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu in June of 2004, holding a copy of the original newspaper in which he revealed Israel's nuclear secrets.

Oded Balilty/AP

The avoidance of candor has sometimes extended to private government channels. A former U.S. intelligence official said he recalled being flabbergasted in the 1990’s by the absence of any mention of Israel in a particular highly-classified document purporting to describe all foreign nuclear weapons programs. He said he complained to colleagues at the time that “we’ve really got a problem if we can’t acknowledge the truth even in classified documents,” and finally won a grudging but spare mention of the country’s nuclear arsenal.

Gary Samore, who was President Obama’s top advisor on nuclear nonproliferation from 2009 to 2013, said the United States has long preferred that Israel hold to its policy of amimut, out of concern that other Middle Eastern nations would feel threatened by Israel’s coming out of the nuclear closet.

“For the Israelis to acknowledge and declare it, that would be seen as provocative,” he said. “It could spur some of the Arab states and Iran to produce weapons. So we like calculated ambiguity.” But when asked point-blank if the fact that Israel has nuclear weapons is classified, Samore — who is now at Harvard University — answered: “It doesn’t sound very classified to me — that Israel has nuclear weapons?”

 The U.S. government’s official silence was broken only by accident, when in 1979, the CIA released a four-page summary of an intelligence memorandum titled “Prospects for Further Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons,” in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the Natural Resources Defense Council, a nonprofit environmental group.

“We believe that Israel already has produced nuclear weapons,” the 1974 report said, citing Israel’s stockpiling of large quantities of uranium, its uranium enrichment program, and its investment in a costly missile system capable of delivering nuclear warheads. Release of the report triggered a spate of headlines. “CIA said in 1974 Israel had A-Bombs,” a New York Times headline declared. “Israel a Nuclear Club Member Since 1974, CIA Study Indicates,” announced The Washington Star.

But it stemmed from a goof.

John Despres, who was the CIA’s national intelligence officer for nuclear proliferation at the time, said he was in charge of censoring or “redacting” the secret material from the report prior to its release. But portions he wanted withheld were released, he said in an interview, while sections that were supposed to be released were withheld.

“This was a sort of classic case of a bureaucratic screw-up,” said Despres, now retired. “People misinterpreted my instructions.” He said that as far as he knows, no one was disciplined for the mix-up. Moreover, in 2008, when the National Security Archive obtained a copy of the document under the Freedom of Information Act, that judgment remained unexcised.

But Washington’s refusal to confirm the obvious in any other way has produced some weird trips down the rabbit hole for those seeking official data about the Israeli arsenal. Bryan Siebert, who was the most senior career executive in charge of guarding DOE’s nuclear weapons secrets from 1992 to 2002, said he recalls seeing a two-cubic-foot stack at one point of CIA, FBI, Justice and Energy department documents about Israel’s nuclear program.

But when Siebert filed a FOIA request to DOE for information about the program after his retirement in April 2004, DOE’s official reply — written by David Osias, a former CIA official who was then deputy director for intelligence and analysis at DOE — was that the department “can neither confirm nor deny the existence of information on the requested subject. Such confirmation or denial of the records at issue, would pose a threat to national security.”

John Fitzpatrick, who since 2011 has served as director of the federal Information Security Oversight Office, confirmed that “aspects” of Israel’s nuclear status are considered secret by the United States. “We know this from classifying authorities at agencies who handle that material,” said Fitzpatrick, who declined to provide more details.

Kerry Brodie, director of communications for the Israeli embassy in Washington, similarly said no one there would discuss the subject of the country’s nuclear status. “Unfortunately, we do not have any comment we can share at this point,” she wrote in an email. A former speaker of the Israeli Knesset, Avraham Burg, was less discrete during a December 2013 conference in Haifa, where he said “Israel has nuclear and chemical weapons” and called the policy of ambiguity “outdated and childish.”

Through a spokesman, Robert Gates declined to discuss the issue. But a growing number of U.S. experts agree with Burg.

Pillar, for example, wrote in his article this month that the 45-year old U.S. policy of shielding Israel’s program is seen around the world “as not just a double standard but living a lie. Whatever the United States says about nuclear weapons will always be taken with a grain of salt or with some measure of disdain as long as the United States says nothing about kumquats.”

Victor Gilinsky, a physicist and former member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission who has written about the history of the Israeli program, complained in a recent book that “the pretense of ignorance about Israeli bombs does not wash anymore. … The evident double standard undermines efforts to control the spread of nuclear weapons worldwide.”

J. William Leonard, who ran a government-wide declassification effort as President George W. Bush’s director of the Information Security Oversight Office from 2002 to 2008, commented that “in some regards, it undermines the integrity of the classification system when you’re using classification to officially protect a known secret. It can get exceedingly awkward, obviously.”

Aftergood said the secrecy surrounding Israel’s nuclear weapons is “obsolete and fraying around the edges. … It takes an effort to preserve the fiction that this is a secret,” he said. Meanwhile, he added, it can still be abused as an instrument for punishing federal employees such as Doyle for unrelated or politically-inspired reasons. “Managers have broad discretion to overlook or forgive a particular infraction,” Aftergood said. “The problem is that discretion can be abused. And some employees get punished severely while others do not.”

Dana H. Allin, the editor of Doyle’s article in Survival magazine, said in a recent commentary published by the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London that “anyone with a passing knowledge of international affairs knows about these weapons.” He called the government’s claim that the article contained secrets “ludicrous” and said Doyle’s ordeal at the hands of the classification authorities was nothing short of Kafkaesque.

 

※出典

【The 47-year-old nuclear elephant in the room】

by  Douglas Birch

http://goo.gl/g7lYxJ

Israel's Nuclear Weapons: Widely Suspected Unmentionables

 

Israel's Nuclear Weapons: Widely Suspected Unmentionables

Paul R. Pillar

September 3, 2014

 

Some things, or possible things, are important enough that we would be foolish to presume or pretend that they do not exist even if we lack any official confirmation or acknowledgment that they in fact exist. One such possible thing is of high importance to security issues in the Middle East. Almost everyone outside of government who writes or speaks about these issues takes as a given that Israel has long had an arsenal of nuclear weapons. No Israeli government, however, has ever said publicly that Israel has such weapons, and neither has the U.S. government, under any administration, said so either.

Let us be very careful in how we discuss this subject. The world is full of widely accepted conventional wisdom, some of which turns out not to be true. After all, we do not know whether Israel has nuclear weapons. So let us not frame a discussion of this subject in terms of assertions of fact. Instead, we can play off the widely held consensus on the subject, discussing implications of the consensus itself and other implications if the consensus happened to be correct.

One disadvantage of this approach is that to adhere scrupulously to the agnostic qualifiers that the approach requires makes for clumsy prose that is uncomfortable to read. A way to cope with this problem is inspired by the late Alfred Kahn, the Cornell economist who served in Jimmy Carter's administration. Kahn is best known for deregulating the airline industry as chairman of the Civil Aeronautics Board. He later was Carter's anti-inflation czar, in which post the blunt-spoken Kahn was once chastised by his political betters at the White House for warning of a possible “depression”. Don't use the word depression, he was told. Kahn complied, but rather than resort to some awkward circumlocution such as “an economic downturn that is more serious than what is customarily called a recession” he started using the term banana as a substitute for the word he was not supposed to utter. When the head of the United Fruit Company complained to him about this negative use of the term, Kahn switched to kumquat as his substitute word whenever he discussed the danger of a depression.

Using both Kahn's technique and his term, in the rest of this essay let kumquats mean “Israel's widely suspected nuclear weapons” or, in its more complete form, “Israel's widely suspected nuclear weapons—so widely and strongly suspected that just about everyone who says anything about related topics takes them as a given, even though we cannot say for certain that they exist.”

Kumquats are not just a subject of conventional wisdom. They have been carefully addressed by serious historians and political scientists and have been taken into account in countless analyses of security problems in the Middle East. They also routinely figure into global rundowns of nuclear weapons arsenals, such as from the Ploughshares Fund or the Arms Control Association, with Israel listed alongside the eight declared nuclear weapons states. The Arms Control Association's inventory estimates the number of kumquats at between 75 and 200. Most other estimates are similar; a more detailed examination of kumquats and associated Israeli military forces that appeared in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists twelve years ago used the same range. The fullest understanding of the kumquat program can be found in the writings of the foremost historian of that program, Avner Cohen, including in his most recent book, The Worst-Kept Secret: Israel's Bargain with the Bomb.

Cohen and co-author Marvin Miller argued in an article four years ago that the policy of non-acknowledgment of kumquats has outlived whatever usefulness it had for Israel, and that Israel should change that policy. According to these authors, the policy was grounded in an understanding that Golda Meir and Richard Nixon reached in 1969, by which the United States would not make a public issue out of kumquats as long as Israel did not acknowledge their existence. Cohen and Miller contend that being more transparent about this capability would enable Israel to demonstrate that it is a responsible nuclear power, to participate in arms control endeavors that are in Israel's interests, and to diminish one of the grounds for the international community to treat Israel as an outlaw pariah state. Greater transparency also would facilitate useful discussion and debate among Israelis themselves of issues related to ownership of kumquats, such as questions of safety, command and control, and identification of circumstances in which the kumquats might ever be used.

From a U.S. point of view, the policy of not saying anything publicly about kumquats has also long outlived whatever usefulness it may have had, for the reasons Cohen and Miller offer as well as for others. The very fact that there is now such a broad and strong consensus about the existence of kumquats, which was not yet the case in 1969, is one reason. Moreover, keeping any mention of kumquats out of bounds inhibits full and fruitful discussion about Israel's security, with the Israelis themselves as well as among American politicians and policy-makers. Anyone who professes to have high concern about Israel's security—which includes almost every American politician—ought to favor uninhibited and fully informed discussion of the subject.

Arms control also is at least as important to U.S. interests as to Israel's, at both regional and global levels. Regionally, proposals for a Middle East nuclear-weapons-free zone (or in some variants, a weapons-of-mass-destruction-free zone) are worth discussing, however much realization of such a goal will depend on resolution of political conflicts that will determine the willingness of regional states to give up whatever weapons they currently have. Any such discussion will be a feckless charade, however, as long as neither Israel nor the United States will say anything about kumquats.

That the United States is so out of step on this subject with the rest of the world is taken by the rest of the world as one more example of double standards that the United States applies to shield Israel. Even further, it is taken as not just a double standard but living a lie. Whatever the United States says about nuclear weapons will always be taken with a grain of salt or with some measure of disdain as long as the United States says nothing about kumquats.

The issue of Iran's nuclear program, negotiations on which will be coming to a climax this fall, is highly germane to this problem. We have the spectacle of the government of Israel being by far the most energetic rabble-rouser on the subject of a possible Iranian nuclear weapon, to the extent of repeatedly threatening to attack Iran militarily. Some might call this irony; others would call it chutzpah. Anyone would be entitled to say that any state that not only refuses to become a party to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) or to subject any of its nuclear activities to any kind of international inspection or control but also already possesses kumquats or their equivalents has no standing to conduct such agitation about Iran, which is a party to the NPT, has already subjected its nuclear activities to an unprecedented degree of intrusive inspection, and is in the process of negotiating an agreement to place even further limits on its nuclear program to ensure it stays peaceful.

The need for full and well-informed discussion of Israel's security will play into any debate in the United States about a completed nuclear agreement with Iran. Fully taking into account kumquats—which, as noted above, private scholars and nongovernmental organizations estimate to number in the dozens or scores—also underscores how misplaced is the preoccupation with an Iranian "breakout" or feared rush to build one or even a few bombs. Whatever the United States may or may not say on the subject, it is safe to assume that Iranian leaders believe that kumquats really do exist, and probably in the numbers that private experts estimate.

The U.S. refusal to discuss this subject has other, less direct, distorting and stifling effects on discourse in the United States about Middle Eastern security issues. When the U.S. government takes a posture such as this, it has damaging trickle-down effects, not necessarily visible to the public, on the broader discourse. Then there is the sheer silliness of the posture. With such a broad and strong consensus about kumquats and all the extensive discussion that has already taken place about them elsewhere, clearly the official U.S. posture serves no purpose in safeguarding U.S. security interests. It is only a legacy of a policy constructed to deal with a situation U.S. policy-makers faced 45 years ago.

The U.S. posture appears to outsiders inconsistent not only with the broader consensus but also with some of the United States' own public revelations. Six years ago the U.S. government released a redacted and declassified version of an intelligence estimate from 1974 about prospects for nuclear proliferation, in which the lead judgment about Israel was “We believe that Israel already has produced nuclear weapons.” The kumquat program has since had, of course, 40 years to progress from wherever it may have been in 1974.

Within the past couple of weeks the U.S. government has publicly released another pertinent set of previously classified material: about 100 pages of documents from internal U.S. government deliberations about the kumquat problem in 1968 and 1969, spanning the Johnson and Nixon administrations. The documents make interesting reading, although so far the the press has given almost no attention to them apart from an article in the left-leaning Israeli newspaper Haaretz. A strong refrain, spanning both U.S. administrations, running through these deliberations was that any Israeli development of nuclear weapons would be a major negative for U.S. interests. As one interagency assessment put it, “The disadvantages to U.S. global interests are such that a major U.S. effort to induce Israel not to produce nuclear weapons is justified.” U.S. policy-makers faced several complications in trying to achieve this objective, however, including the already-emerging problem of Israeli colonization of territory conquered in the Six Day War less than two years earlier. An interagency study group described this part of the quandary this way:

"Use of leverage on the NPT/nuclear issue may seriously detract from our capability to influence Israel on the settlement issue. On the other hand, if we decide to defer using pressure on the nuclear question so as to preserve leverage on a possible peace settlement, we must ask how long we are prepared to do this in the face of Israel's rapidly advancing program, and the knowledge that, the longer we put off making Israel feel the seriousness of our purpose, the harder it will be to arrest Israel's program."

Another complication was the fear that using the most obvious source of U.S. leverage over Israel—arms supplies, with shipment of F-4 Phantom jets being the top Israeli interest at the time—would only make the Israelis more determined than ever to push ahead with the development of nuclear weapons. The State Department in particular argued this point, and was generally in favor of relying only on persuasion rather than leverage to try to slow down the Israeli program. The Department of Defense favored taking a harder line and using the arms spigot as a tool of leverage without fear of endangering Israel's conventional advantage over its neighbors, noting that “for the present Israel's military superiority is complete.” The documents do not take us to the end of this interagency debate or to whatever Nixon and Meir said to each other in private. But in effect the outcome was a passive don't ask, don't tell approach.

Even at that early stage the kumquat program, like the colonization program, involved a lack of Israeli cooperation with the United States. Israel already was playing the verbal game of saying it would not be the first state to “introduce” nuclear weapons into the Middle East. The declassified documents record repeated U.S. efforts to get Israel to state that not “introducing” weapons meant not producing or stockpiling them. The Israelis refused to do so and instead suggested that as long as weapons were neither tested or announced they would not have been “introduced.”

The timing of declassification of government documents can reflect many different and mostly mundane factors, such as when someone happened to submit a Freedom of Information Act request and how fast the wheels of the bureaucratic review process turn. It would be nice to think or at least to hope, however, that this latest release of documents signals a willingness by the current U.S. administration to take a step away from shielding Israeli activities that, even more now than when the policy-makers of 1969 were deliberating, involve significant “disadvantages to U.S. global interests.”  

 

※出典

【Israel's Nuclear Weapons: Widely Suspected Unmentionables】

by  Paul R. Pillar

http://goo.gl/e00UqD

Fight Club: Israel Nuke Edition

 

 

 

Voice

 

Fight Club: Israel Nuke Edition

 

The first rule of Israel's nuclear arsenal is that there is no Israeli nuclear arsenal.

 

• BY Jeffrey Lewis
• SEPTEMBER 26, 2014
•  

Pssst. Come closer. I'm going to let you in on one of the U.S. government's most closely guarded secrets.

Make sure you are sitting down, because what I am going to tell you will blow your mind. This is so close-hold that if a U.S. government official were to so much breathe a word about this, she should would lose her job. Ready?

Israel has the bomb.

You think that's funny? I don't see anyone else laughing. Former Los Alamos employee Jim Doyle certainly doesn't have a smile on his face. In a February-March 2013 article for the journal Survival, Doyle -- a political scientist employed by Los Alamos National Laboratory -- listed a series of nuclear deterrence failures -- instances where states without nuclear weapons nevertheless attacked states that had the bomb. In that list, Doyle included Egypt's 1973 invasion of the Sinai.

Although the article was cleared through classification review, some people had other ideas. Apparently, someone on Capitol Hill asked about the reference to Israel and the counterintelligence trolls decided that, yep, the article should have been classified. (The most shocking thing about this story might that be Hill staffers read journal articles.) The fact that the United States intelligence community believes that Israel possesses nuclear weapons is formally classified

Despite having submitted the article for review, Doyle was held responsible -- he was suspended, had his clearances revoked, and lost his job at Los Alamos. So, let me tell you:

Even though everyone knows Israel has the bomb, if you have a clearance and want to keep it, stick to discussing Israel's stockpile of strategic kumquats.

 

Even though everyone knows Israel has the bomb, if you have a clearance and want to keep it, stick to discussing Israel's stockpile of strategic kumquats.

Since the late 1960s, the United States has treated the fact of Israel's nuclear weapons as an important state secret. This is absurd, and it doesn't do anyone any favors, least of all our friends in Israel. It's time to declassify the fact of Israel's bomb even if Jerusalem doesn't admit it.

Now, one has to read between the lines to determine that Doyle was fired for stating that Israel possessed nuclear weapons. Doyle is fighting back, but can't acknowledge the article, which is now classified. And by "now classified" I mean in a purely administrative sense. You can download it from Survival if you feel like pushing all the buttons in the elevator isn't edgy enough. But the one publicly available document about Doyle's case makes it clear that the dispute concerns what bit of classification guidance is most relevant -- DOE Classification Bulletin WPN-136 on Foreign Nuclear Capabilities or GEN-16 "No Comment" Policy on Classified Information in the Public Domain. 

Foreign Nuclear Capabilities. Everyone, including Survival's editor, Dana Allin, suspects that the single passing reference to Israel is the problem. Steven Aftergood, the Federation of American Scientists's secrecy guru, told my colleague Avner Cohen, "I'm certain that that's what it is." The dispute boils down, as best I can infer, to whether officials with access to classified information can refer to "press reports" about Israel's nuclear status -- which, in case you haven't figured it out, I think is stupid.

If you want all the details on Doyle's plight, Doug Birch at the Center for Public Integrity has owned this story from day one, serving as the most consistent chronicler of Doyle's travails in the Land of Uz. (You don't know Uz? Heathen.) The Santa Fe New Mexican, Albuquerque Journal and Los Angeles Times have also had excellent coverage. 

The situation with Israel is strange. U.S. officials can mention the existence of any other nuclear weapons program -- even those of our friends. I might churlishly add that they've also been free to mention one or two that didn't even exist. (Cough, Iraq, cough.) But Israel is different.

This policy dates to the Nixon administration, which was divided over whether to join the Non-Proliferation Treaty, how much to pressure allies into joining the treaty, and what to do about Israel's bomb in the basement. The Nixon administration, including the good Dr. Kissinger, characteristically opted for secrecy. (Wait, a totally secretive administration that held democratic accountability in contempt? What could possibly go wrong? Okay, other than the secret bombing of Cambodia. Okay, other than that and the coup in Chile. Okay, other than those two and the genocide in East Timor. Okay, and the Watergate break-in. But seriously, what else could go wrong?)

The evolution of the policy by which Israel would look the other way is well documented in two tranches of declassified documents curated by the National Security Archive called Israel Crosses the Threshold and Israel Crosses the Threshold II. (Am I the only one hoping Sofia Coppola will star as Golda Meir in Israel Crosses the Threshold III?) Of course, one can only makes sense of these documents, and the debate they chronicle, if you understand what threshold Israel was crossing but .... SHHHHHHH!

In fact, the United States intelligence community, by the mid-1970s, had concluded that Israel possessed nuclear weapons. There is even a declassified 1974 National Intelligence Estimate that states: "We believe that Israel already has produced nuclear weapons." How that slipped through, I have no idea. But there it is, in black and white. The New York Times even reported the contents -- in 1978.

Any doubt the rest of us might have had was laid to rest by Mordechai Vanunu, an employee at Israel's Dimona nuclear facility. One day, Vanunu brought his camera to work. He then gave the pictures to the Sunday Times of London, which splashed them across the front page in 1986. Here is a picture of a model of an Israeli nuclear weapon component (and more).

The Israelis were so delighted by Vanunu's disclosure that they honey-trapped him in London, according to the reporter at the Sunday Times who published Vanunu's images, using a young woman to persuade the poor guy to fly to Rome for a tryst. Once in Italy, the Israelis bundled up Vanunu and dragged him to prison in Israel. Fun fact: the alleged honey pot is now a realtor in Florida, though by the looks of it her honey pot days are long past. Still, she might be able to get you a good deal on a lightly used safe house. (By the way, I totally recommend Peter Hounam's The Woman from Mossad: The Story of Mordechai Vanunu and the Israeli Nuclear Program. I do not, however, recommend taking photos of sensitive Israeli nuclear facilities or, if you should choose to, thinking you've suddenly become much more attractive to the opposite sex.)

But back to the Doyle and the matter at hand.

One obvious downside to our absurd policy of refusing to acknowledge Israel's bomb is that it ends up being enforced in an arbitrary and capricious manner.

 

One obvious downside to our absurd policy of refusing to acknowledge Israel's bomb is that it ends up being enforced in an arbitrary and capricious manner. When Bob Gates, during his 2006 confirmation hearing to be secretary of Defense, referred to Iran being surrounded by nuclear-armed neighbors including "the Israelis to the West," nothing happened -- even though he had served as director of central intelligence and maintained his clearances. I've certainly heard plenty of current and former officials, in private conversation, state the obvious. It's hard not to mention. Hell, even Ehud Olmert, when he was Israeli prime minister, slipped uponce. As a result, the classification is little more than a handy excuse to prosecute someone we don't like for some other reason -- such as writing annoying articles about disarmament while working for a nuclear weapons lab or something.

There is one simple solution to this problem. Change WPN-136 Foreign Nuclear Capabilities to declassify the "fact" that the United States intelligence community has believed that Israel has possessed nuclear weapons since the 1970s. That's it. We don't have to declassify the details of the stockpile. And we don't have to hold a press conference. (WPN-136 is classified anyway, so there will be no roll-out.) But U.S. officials should be free to acknowledge the obvious without fear of losing their clearances and their jobs. That's all.

Declassifying the fact of Israel's nuclear status would not require changing our policies toward Israel or the bomb. The limitations on U.S. peaceful nuclear cooperation with Israel, for example, arise from the fact that is has not signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, not its actual possession of nuclear weapons. Consider India. The United States openly acknowledges India's nuclear weapons status outside the NPT, but still negotiated a peaceful nuclear cooperation agreement with New Delhi and won a waiver for India in the Nuclear Suppliers Group. Washington has proposed closer ties between the Nuclear Suppliers Group and Israel. That effort would not be affected by U.S. public acknowledgement that it believes Israel has a stockpile of nuclear weapons.

For its part, Israel will almost certainly maintain its policy of amimut. Cohen, in his book The Worst-Kept Secret: Israel's Bargain with the Bomb, has written eloquently that Israel's opacity harms Israeli democracy, arguing that disclosure is needed to open up a domestic debate about the topic. I am not so sure that's a great idea -- especially not with Egypt in its current condition. But either way, our policy does not require that Jerusalem change how it talks about the bomb.

In fact, U.S. secrecy arguably harms Israeli interests. The Iranians are fond of pointing to Israel's nuclear weapons to justify the nuclear weapons they deny building -- and that I believe diplomacy can prevent. I will admit a somewhat unconventional view: I think there is no relationship at all between Israel and Iran's nuclear programs -- beyond the propaganda value that Tehran gets from complaining about double standards..

Iran's interest in the bomb started with Iraq's aggression in the 1980s. Iranians who want the bomb aren't going to nuke Israel. They are more interested in enabling the aggression by proxy of the sort Iran has long supported in Lebanon. The countries most frightened by an Iranian bomb are the Saudis, Emiratis, and other Gulf States who fear Iranian efforts to destabilize and overthrow them. If Israel gave up its nuclear weapons tomorrow, I don't believe that Iranian calculations would change one iota.

Moreover, it is impossible to imagine a situation in which Israel would threaten to use nuclear weapons against Iran, unless Tehran planned to do something insane like shipping a nuclear weapon to Hezbollah. Iran uses Israel to change the subject from the countries most likely to be bullied by a nuclear-armed Iran -- a tactic that works very well, because, of course, there is a double standard, one that is reinforced every time we bend over backwards to avoid saying the obvious.

I would love for U.S. officials to strongly push back against Iran's efforts to blame its nuclear ambitions on Israel. But U.S. officials look like idiots when they're forced to push back against Tehran's accusations while feigning ignorance. They have to be able to speak directly about a reality that everyone else knows.

Israel has the bomb.

 

David Silverman/Getty Images News

 

※出典

 Fight Club: Israel Nuke Edition

by Jeffrey Lewis

http://goo.gl/ViySPv

 

 

 

(CNN) -- Is it ISIL, ISIS or Islamic State?

 

(CNN) -- Is it ISIL, ISIS or Islamic State?

Whatever you call the jihadist group known for killing dozens of people at a time, carrying out public executions, beheadings, crucifixions and other brutal acts, there is no denying they have captured the world's attention.

On the eve of President Barack Obama's speech outlining Washington's strategy against the group, in which he will likely refer to it as ISIL, we ask: What's in a name?

It all started in 2004 when the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi formed an al Qaeda splinter group in Iraq. Within two years, al-Zarqawi's al Qaeda in Iraq was trying to fuel a sectarian war against the majority Shiite community.

Terrorists finding recruits in Canada

Why is U.S. not targeting ISIS leaders?

Twitter: Looking into terror threats

In June 2006, al-Zarqawi was killed in a U.S. strike. Abu Ayyub al-Masri, his successor, several months later announced the creation of the Islamic State in Iraq (ISI).

In April 2013, Islamic State in Iraq absorbed the al Qaeda-backed militant group in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra, also known as the al-Nusra Front. Its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi said his group will now be known as Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. Since then, the English-speaking world seems to have had a hard time settling on a name for them.

ISIL

President Obama, the United Nations and some news organizations refer to the jihadist group by the acronym ISIL, which stands for Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant.

CNN Global Affairs Correspondent Elise Labott said the U.S. has stuck with ISIL because the group appears to have to set it sights beyond Iraq and Syria. And also because Washington doesn't want to recognize their plans for a caliphate.

CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen believes ISIL is a more accurate translation of the group's name.

The 'L' stands for Levant which is a translation of "al-Sham" -- the word the group uses to refer to itself, Bergen said.

"But the Levant is a relatively obscure word in English -- in English, we refer to Syria. Of course, the Levant is larger than Syria," Bergen said.

"We believe this is the most accurate translation of the group's name and reflects its aspirations to rule over a broad swath of the Middle East," said John Daniszewski, vice president and senior managing editor for international news for The Associated Press, according to an AP blog post.

Al-Sham is a reference to a region that stretches from Turkey through Syria to Egypt and includes the Palestinian territories, Jordan and Lebanon, according to Rashid Khalidi, a Columbia University professor and expert on Syrian history.

Part of the confusion stems from the fact that al-Sham has many meanings in Arabic.

Khalidi said: "How you translate 'al-Sham' determines whether you have an 'L' or an 'S' in English. It's the same word in Arabic. How you translate the term into English determines if you're of the 'ISIL' camp or the 'ISIS' camp. The Levant, which can extend from northern Egypt to Greece, is not as precise."

On the United States government's use of ISIL, Khalidi surmised: "Maybe because you don't want to give the dignity of the name that they give themselves."

Nawaf Obaid, a visiting fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University, said via email that ISIL is preferable in English "to make it clear to a Western audience."

Levant denotes Syria and Lebanon in Arabic, "so better to stick to ISIL and clarify that it's the same as ISIS, but a more accurate translation from the Arabic," he said.

ISIS

ISIS is an English translation of the acronym in Arabic for Al-Dawla Al-Islamiya fi al-Iraq wa al-Sham, or the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham.

The organization has said its goal is to form an Islamic state, or caliphate, over the entire region, stretching from Turkey through Syria to Egypt and including the Palestinian territories, Jordan and Lebanon.

Some think ISIS flows better as a word in English. It also happens to be the name of one of a goddess of ancient Egypt.

CNN has been referring to the organization as ISIS, shorthand for the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

Arabic speakers say al-Sham can be translated to mean the Levant, Syria, greater Syria, and even Damascus.

Islamic State

The jihadists like to refer to themselves simply as the Islamic State, a term more accurately reflecting the organization's aspirations of creating a caliphate across national borders.

They prefer to be known either as the Islamic State -- al-Dawla al-Islamiya in Arabic -- or just the State, al-Dawla. That is what they call themselves in online videos.

DAIISH

Finally, a lesser-known acronym to Western readers: DAIISH. It is the straight Arabic shorthand for the group known as: al-Dawla al-Islamiya fi Iraq wa al-Sham, commonly used in the Arab world and among many Arab media outlets and politicians.

When people in the Arab world, use the term DAIISH, it's derogatory, according to Columbia's Khalidi.

"Those who disagree with them, call them DAIISH," Khalidi said, adding that the jihadists have objected to the name.

 

※出典

http://goo.gl/MQrpRt

 

The Middle East’s Maze of Alliances

 

NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE          www.nationalreview.com       

 
September 11, 2014 12:00 AM

 
The Middle East’s Maze of Alliances


It’s increasingly difficult to navigate the web of transitory enemies and allies in the region.

By Victor Davis Hanson

Try figuring out the maze of enemies, allies, and neutrals in the Middle East.

In 2012, the Obama administration was on the verge of bombing the forces of Syrian president Bashar Assad. For a few weeks, he was public enemy No. 1 because he had used chemical weapons on his own people and because he was responsible for many of the deaths in the Syrian civil war, with a casualty count that is now close to 200,000.

After Obama’s red lines turned pink, we forgot about Syria. Then the Islamic State showed up with beheadings, crucifixions, rapes, and mass murders through a huge swath of Iraq and Syria.

Now the United States is bombing the Islamic State. Sometimes Obama says that he is still seeking a strategy against the jihadist group. Sometimes he wants to reduce it to a manageable problem. And sometimes he says that he wants to degrade or even destroy it.

The Islamic State is still trying to overthrow Assad. If the Obama administration is now bombing the Islamic State, is it then helping Assad? Or when America did not bomb Assad, did it help the Islamic State? Which of the two should Obama bomb ― or both, or neither?

Iran is steadily on the way to acquiring a nuclear bomb. Yet for now it is arming the Kurds, dependable U.S. allies in the region who are fighting for their lives against the Islamic State and need American help. As Iran aids the Kurds, Syrians, and Iraqis in the battle against the evil Islamic State, is Teheran becoming a friend, enemy, or neither? Will Iran’s temporary help mean that it will delay or hasten its efforts to get a bomb? Just as Iran sent help to the Kurds, it missed yet another U.N. deadline to come clean on nuclear enrichment.

Hamas just lost a war in Gaza against Israel. Then it began executing and maiming a number of its own people, some of them affiliated with Fatah, the ruling clique of the Palestinian Authority. During the war, Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian state, stayed neutral and called for calm. Did he wish Israel to destroy his rival, Hamas? Or did he wish Hamas to hurt his archenemy, Israel? Both? Neither?

What about the Gulf sheikdoms? In the old days, America was enraged that some of the Saudis slyly funneled cash to al-Qaeda and yet relieved that the Saudi government was deemed moderate and pro-Western. But as Iran gets closer to its nuclear holy grail, the Gulf kingdoms now seem to be in a de facto alliance with their hated adversary, Israel. Both Sunni monarchies and the Jewish state in near lockstep oppose the radical Iran/Syria/Hezbollah/Muslim Brotherhood/Hamas axis.

But don’t look for understandable Shiite--Sunni Muslim fault lines. In this anti-Saudi alliance, the Iranians and Hezbollah are Shiites. Yet their allies, the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, are Sunnis. The Syrian government is neither, being Alawite.

They all say they are against the Sunni-extremist Islamic State. So if they are enemies of the Sunni monarchies and enemies of the Islamic State, is the Islamic State then a friend to these Gulf shiekdoms?

Then there is Qatar, a Sunni Gulf monarchy at odds with all the other neighboring Sunni monarchies. It is sort of friendly with the Iranians, Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah and Hamas ― all adversaries of the U.S. Why, then, is Qatar the host of CENTCOM, the biggest American military base in the entire Middle East?

Is Egypt any simpler? During the Arab Spring, the Obama administration helped to ease former president and kleptocrat Hosni Mubarak out of power. Then it supported both the democratic elections and the radical Muslim Brotherhood that won them. Later, the administration said little when a military junta displaced the radical Muslim Brotherhood, which was subverting the new constitution. America was against military strongmen before it was for them, and for Islamists before it was against them.

President Obama and Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Recep Erdogan were said to have a special friendship. But based on what? Erdogan is strangling democracy in Turkey. He is a big supporter of Hamas and at times a fan of Iran. A NATO ally, Turkey recently refused to let U.S. rescue teams use its territory to stage a rescue mission of American hostages ― two of them eventually beheaded ― in Syria.

Ostensibly, America supports moderate pro-Western consensual governments that protect human rights and hold elections, or at least do not oppress their own. But there are almost no such nations in the Middle East except Israel. Yet the Obama administration has grown ever more distant from the Jewish state over the last six years.

What is the U.S. to do? Leave the Middle East alone, allowing terrorists to build a petrol-fueled staging base for another 9/11?

About the best choice is to support without qualification the only two pro-American and constitutional groups in the Middle East, the Israelis and Kurds.

Otherwise, in such a tribal quagmire, apparently there are only transitory interests that come and go.

― Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Savior Generals. You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com. (c) 2014 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

※出典

【 The Middle East’s Maze of Alliances】 Victor Davis Hanson

http://goo.gl/L9Ipa4

中東における同盟関係の迷路

中東の領域内での転変する敵と味方の網の目をすり抜けることはますます困難になっている。

ビクター・デービス・ハンソン

中東における敵、同盟国と中立派の間の入組んだ迷路を解く図式を考えてほしい。

2012年に、オバマ政権は、シリアの大統領バッシャール・アサドの軍隊を爆撃する寸前だった。
数週間の間、アサドは彼自身の国民に対して化学兵器を使ったので、そして、シリアの内戦における死の多くに対して、現在約20万人に及ぶとされるる犠牲者数に、アサドに責任があるという理由で、彼は社会の第一の敵だった。

オバマの危険な赤信号がピンク色に変ったあと、我々はシリアについて忘れていた。それから、イラクとシリアの広大な地域を通して、イスラム国が、斬首、磔、強姦と大量殺人とともに姿を現してきた。

現 在、アメリカ合衆国はイスラム国を爆撃している。ある時はオバマは言う。彼はまだジハードの戦士集団に対して戦略を模索していると。ある時は、オバマは言 う。彼はそれを制御可能な問題にまで切りつめたいと言う。そしてある時は、彼は、それを解体するか、あるいは破壊さえしたいと言う。

イ スラム国は依然としてアサドを転覆しようとしている。もし現在オバマ政権が、イスラム国家を爆撃するなら、それはアサドを支援することになるのか？あるい は、アメリカはアサドを爆撃しない場合は、それはイスラム国を助けることになるのか？オバマは両者のうちのどれを爆撃すべきなのか? あるいは両方とも爆撃するのか、それともいずれも爆撃しないのか？

イ ランは、核爆弾を着実に手に入れる途上にある。それでも、今のところは、イランはクルド人(彼らはイスラム国に対して自分たちの命を守るためにために戦っ ており、アメリカの援助を必要としている地域の信頼できる米国同盟国である)を武装させている。邪悪なイスラム国との戦いにおいて イランがクルド人、シリア人とイラク人を援助するとき、テヘランは友となるのか、敵になるのか、あるいはそのどちらでもないのか?イランの一時的な援助 は、イランが核爆弾を手に入れる努力を遅らせることになるのか、急がせることを意味するのか?  イランがクルド人に援助を送ったちょうどその時、イランは核の濃縮に関して白状すべきさらにもう一つの国連最終期限をまぬかれた。

ハ マスは、イスラエルに対してガザでの戦争に負けたばかりである。その後、ハマスは何人かの彼らの仲間の人々(彼らの一部はファタハに、パレスチナ自治政府 の支配する派閥に属していた)を処刑したり、不具にし始めた。戦争の間は、マフムド・アッバス(パレスチナ国家の大統領)は中立の立場にとどまって、平静 を呼びかけていた。イスラエルがアッバスのライバルであるハマスを滅ぼすことを彼は望んだか?あるいは、彼はハマスが彼の宿敵であるイスラエルを痛めつけ ることを望んだか?両方ともか?いずれでもないか?

湾 岸首長国などについてはどうか?昔日においては、サウジの一部がこっそりアルカイダに現金を注ぎ込んでいることに、アメリカは切歯扼腕してきた。そして、 なおサウジアラビアの政府が穏健で親西側であると思って安心している。しかし、イランが核の聖杯に近づくにつれて湾岸の王国は、今では嫌われものの敵、イ スラエルと事実上の同盟関係にあると思われる。スンニ派の君主制とユダヤ人国家は、共同歩調を取って、急進的なイラン/シリア/ヒズボラ/イスラム教徒兄 弟団/ハマスの枢軸に反対している。

しかし、シーア 派 ― スンニ派イスラム教のわかりやすい断絶を利用しようともとめてはいけない。この反サウジアラビアの提携では、イラン人とヒズボラは、シーア派である。それ でも、彼らの盟友(イスラム兄弟団とハマス)は、スンニ派だ。そして、シリア政府はアラウィー派でそのどちらでもない。

彼らは皆スンニ派の過激派イスラム国に反対であると言う。それなら、彼らがスンニ派の君主制の敵であり、イスラム国の敵であるならば、イスラム国は、これらの湾岸の首長国にとって友人なのだろうか？

そ れから、カタール（すべての他の近隣のスンニ派の君主制と争っているスンニ派の湾岸の君主国）がある。カタールは、イラン人、イスラム兄弟団、ヒズボラと ハマス──米国のすべての敵とある種の友好関係にある。それなら、なぜ、カタールはCENTCOM(Central Command　中央指令)、中東で最大規模のアメリカ軍基地の接待役なのか？

エ ジプトは、いくらかはより単純だろうか?アラブ春の間に、オバマ政権は、前大統領で泥棒政治家ホスニ・ムバラクが権力を失ってゆくのを助けた。それから、 オバマ政権は、民主選挙とそこで勝利した急進的なイスラム兄弟団の両方を支持した。後になって暫定軍事政権が急進的なイスラム兄弟団を排除したとき、オバ マ政権はほとんど何も言わなかった。暫定軍事政権は新しい憲法を覆した。アメリカが軍事独裁者を支持する以前には、アメリカは軍事独裁者に反対していた。 そして、イスラム教徒に反対してある前には、アメリカはイスラム教徒のために存在した。

オ バマ大統領とトルコのTayyip Recep エルドアン首相は、特別な友情があると言われていた。しかし、何に基づいてそう言うのか?エルドアンは、トルコで民主主義を窒息させている。彼は、ハマス の有力な支持者であり、時にはイランの味方である。NATO同盟者であるトルコは最近に、合衆国の救助隊がシリアのアメリカ人人質の救出作戦を行う段階で その領土を使わせることを拒否した。──結局は 彼ら二人は首を切られたが──　

人 権を保護して選挙を開くか、少なくとも彼ら自身の国民を圧迫しない穏やかな親西欧の、共感性のある政府を、表向きはアメリカは、支持してきた。しかし、そ のような国は、イスラエル以外はほとんど中東にはない。それでも、オバマ政権は、この六年の間つねにユダヤ人の国から距離を置くようになった。

アメリカは何をなすべきか？中東を孤独に置き去りにすべきか？もう一つの9/11テロのために、テロリストたちが石油で勢いづいた中継基地を建設することを許したままで。

最良の選択については、中東で唯一の二つの親米的で立憲的な集団、イスラエルとクルドを、無条件に支援することだ。
 
さもなければ、中東のような部族の沼地においては、見せかけの、右往左往する一時的な利益だけがあるだけだ。


──── ビクター・デービス・ハンソンは、フーバー研究所とスタンフォード大学所属の古典学者で歴史家。近著『救世主の将軍たち』の著者。 author@victorhanson.comに電子メールを送れば連絡をとることができる。(c) 2014　トリビューン・メディア・サービス社

＞＞＜＜

NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE          www.nationalreview.com        

 
September 11, 2014 12:00 AM

 
The Middle East’s Maze of Alliances

中東における同盟関係の迷路


It’s increasingly difficult to navigate the web of transitory enemies and allies in the region.

中東の領域内での一時的な敵と味方の網の目をすり抜けることはますます困難になっている。

By Victor Davis Hanson
ビクター・デービス・ハンソン

Try figuring out the maze of enemies, allies, and neutrals in the Middle East.

中東における敵、同盟国と中立派の間の入組んだ迷路を解く図式を考えてほしい。

In 2012, the Obama administration was on the verge of bombing the forces of Syrian president Bashar Assad. For a few weeks, he was public enemy No. 1 because he had used chemical weapons on his own people and because he was responsible for many of the deaths in the Syrian civil war, with a casualty count that is now close to 200,000.

2012年に、オバマ政権は、シリアの大統領バッシャール・アサドの軍隊を爆撃する寸前だった。
数週間の間、アサドは彼自身の国民に対して化学兵器を使ったので、そして、シリアの内戦における死の多くに対して、現在約20万人に及ぶとされるる犠牲者数に、アサドに責任があるという理由で、彼は社会の第一の敵だった。

After Obama’s red lines turned pink, we forgot about Syria. Then the Islamic State showed up with beheadings, crucifixions, rapes, and mass murders through a huge swath of Iraq and Syria.

オバマの危険な赤信号がピンク色に変ったあと、我々はシリアについて忘れていた。それから、イラクとシリアの広大な地域を通して、イスラム国が、斬首、磔、強姦と大量殺人とともに姿を現してきた。

Now the United States is bombing the Islamic State. Sometimes Obama says that he is still seeking a strategy against the jihadist group. Sometimes he wants to reduce it to a manageable problem. And sometimes he says that he wants to degrade or even destroy it.

現在、アメリカ合衆国はイスラム国を爆撃している。ある時はオバマは言う。彼はまだジハードの戦士集団に対して戦略を模索していると。ある時は、オバマは言う。彼はそれを制御可能な問題にまで切りつめたいと言う。そしてある時は、彼は、それを解体するか、あるいは破壊さえしたいと言う。

The Islamic State is still trying to overthrow Assad. If the Obama administration is now bombing the Islamic State, is it then helping Assad? Or when America did not bomb Assad, did it help the Islamic State? Which of the two should Obama bomb ― or both, or neither?

イスラム国は依然としてアサドを転覆しようとしている。もし現在オバマ政権が、イスラム国家を爆撃するなら、それはアサドを支援することになるのか？あるいは、アメリカはアサドを爆撃しない場合は、それはイスラム国を助けることになるのか？オバマは両者のうちのどれを爆撃すべきなのか? あるいは両方とも爆撃するのか、それともいずれも爆撃しないのか？

Iran is steadily on the way to acquiring a nuclear bomb. Yet for now it is arming the Kurds, dependable U.S. allies in the region who are fighting for their lives against the Islamic State and need American help. As Iran aids the Kurds, Syrians, and Iraqis in the battle against the evil Islamic State, is Teheran becoming a friend, enemy, or neither? Will Iran’s temporary help mean that it will delay or hasten its efforts to get a bomb? Just as Iran sent help to the Kurds, it missed yet another U.N. deadline to come clean on nuclear enrichment.

イランは、核爆弾を着実に手に入れる途上にある。それでも、今のところは、イランはクルド人(彼らはイスラム国に対して自分たちの命を守るためにために戦っており、アメリカの援助を必要としている地域の信頼できる米国同盟国である)を武装させている。邪悪なイスラム国との戦いにおいて イランがクルド人、シリア人とイラク人を援助するとき、テヘランは友となるのか、敵になるのか、あるいはそのどちらでもないのか?イランの一時的な援助は、イランが核爆弾を手に入れる努力を遅らせることになるのか、急がせることを意味するのか?  イランがクルド人に援助を送ったちょうどその時、イランは核の濃縮に関して白状すべきさらにもう一つの国連最終期限をまぬかれた。


Hamas just lost a war in Gaza against Israel. Then it began executing and maiming a number of its own people, some of them affiliated with Fatah, the ruling clique of the Palestinian Authority. During the war, Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian state, stayed neutral and called for calm. Did he wish Israel to destroy his rival, Hamas? Or did he wish Hamas to hurt his archenemy, Israel? Both? Neither?

ハマスは、イスラエルに対してガザでの戦争に負けたばかりである。その後、ハマスは何人かの彼らの仲間の人々(彼らの一部はファタハに、パレスチナ自治政府の支配する派閥に属していた)を処刑したり、不具にし始めた。戦争の間は、マフムド・アッバス(パレスチナ国家の大統領)は中立の立場にとどまって、平静を呼びかけていた。イスラエルがアッバスのライバルであるハマスを滅ぼすことを彼は望んだか?あるいは、彼はハマスが彼の宿敵であるイスラエルを痛めつけることを望んだか?両方ともか?いずれでもないか?



What about the Gulf sheikdoms? In the old days, America was enraged that some of the Saudis slyly funneled cash to al-Qaeda and yet relieved that the Saudi government was deemed moderate and pro-Western. But as Iran gets closer to its nuclear holy grail, the Gulf kingdoms now seem to be in a de facto alliance with their hated adversary, Israel. Both Sunni monarchies and the Jewish state in near lockstep oppose the radical Iran/Syria/Hezbollah/Muslim Brotherhood/Hamas axis.


湾岸首長国などについてはどうか?昔日においては、サウジの一部がこっそりアルカイダに現金を注ぎ込んでいることに、アメリカは切歯扼腕してきた。そして、なおサウジアラビアの政府が穏健で親西側であると思って安心している。しかし、イランが核の聖杯に近づくにつれて湾岸の王国は、今では嫌われものの敵、イスラエルと事実上の同盟関係にあると思われる。スンニ派の君主制とユダヤ人国家は、共同歩調を取って、急進的なイラン/シリア/ヒズボラ/イスラム教徒兄弟団/ハマスの枢軸に反対している。



But don’t look for understandable Shiite--Sunni Muslim fault lines. In this anti-Saudi alliance, the Iranians and Hezbollah are Shiites. Yet their allies, the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, are Sunnis. The Syrian government is neither, being Alawite.

しかし、シーア派 ― スンニ派イスラム教のわかりやすい断絶を利用しようともとめてはいけない。この反サウジアラビアの提携では、イラン人とヒズボラは、シーア派である。それでも、彼らの盟友(イスラム兄弟団とハマス)は、スンニ派だ。そして、シリア政府はアラウィー派でそのどちらでもない。


They all say they are against the Sunni-extremist Islamic State. So if they are enemies of the Sunni monarchies and enemies of the Islamic State, is the Islamic State then a friend to these Gulf shiekdoms?

彼らは皆スンニ派の過激派イスラム国に反対であると言う。それなら、彼らがスンニ派の君主制の敵であり、イスラム国の敵であるならば、イスラム国は、これらの湾岸の首長国にとって友人なのだろうか？


Then there is Qatar, a Sunni Gulf monarchy at odds with all the other neighboring Sunni monarchies. It is sort of friendly with the Iranians, Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah and Hamas ― all adversaries of the U.S. Why, then, is Qatar the host of CENTCOM, the biggest American military base in the entire Middle East?

それから、カタール（すべての他の近隣のスンニ派の君主制と争っているスンニ派の湾岸の君主国）がある。カタールは、イラン人、イスラム兄弟団、ヒズボラとハマス──米国のすべての敵とある種の友好関係にある。それなら、なぜ、カタールはCENTCOM(Central Command　中央指令)、中東で最大規模のアメリカ軍基地の接待役なのか？

Is Egypt any simpler? During the Arab Spring, the Obama administration helped to ease former president and kleptocrat Hosni Mubarak out of power. Then it supported both the democratic elections and the radical Muslim Brotherhood that won them. Later, the administration said little when a military junta displaced the radical Muslim Brotherhood, which was subverting the new constitution. America was against military strongmen before it was for them, and for Islamists before it was against them.

エジプトは、いくらかはより単純だろうか?アラブ春の間に、オバマ政権は、前大統領で泥棒政治家ホスニ・ムバラクが権力を失ってゆくのを助けた。それから、オバマ政権は、民主選挙とそこで勝利した急進的なイスラム兄弟団の両方を支持した。後になって暫定軍事政権が急進的なイスラム兄弟団を排除したとき、オバマ政権はほとんど何も言わなかった。暫定軍事政権は新しい憲法を覆した。アメリカが軍事独裁者を支持する以前には、アメリカは軍事独裁者に反対していた。そして、イスラム教徒に反対してある前には、アメリカはイスラム教徒のために存在した。



President Obama and Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Recep Erdogan were said to have a special friendship. But based on what? Erdogan is strangling democracy in Turkey. He is a big supporter of Hamas and at times a fan of Iran. A NATO ally, Turkey recently refused to let U.S. rescue teams use its territory to stage a rescue mission of American hostages ― two of them eventually beheaded ― in Syria.


オバマ大統領とトルコのTayyip Recep エルドアン首相は、特別な友情があると言われていた。
しかし、何に基づいてそう言うのか?エルドアンは、トルコで民主主義を窒息させている。
彼は、ハマスの有力な支持者であり、時にはイランの味方である。NATO同盟者であるトルコは最近に、合衆国の救助隊がシリアのアメリカ人人質の救出作戦を行う段階でその領土を使わせることを拒否した。──結局は 彼ら二人は首を切られたが──　


Ostensibly, America supports moderate pro-Western consensual governments that protect human rights and hold elections, or at least do not oppress their own. But there are almost no such nations in the Middle East except Israel. Yet the Obama administration has grown ever more distant from the Jewish state over the last six years.


人権を保護して選挙を開くか、少なくとも彼ら自身の国民を圧迫しない穏やかな親西欧の、共感性のある政府を、表向きはアメリカは、支持してきた。しかし、そのような国は、イスラエル以外はほとんど中東にはない。それでも、オバマ政権は、この六年の間つねにユダヤ人の国から距離を置くようになった。

What is the U.S. to do? Leave the Middle East alone, allowing terrorists to build a petrol-fueled staging base for another 9/11?

アメリカは何をなすべきか？中東を孤独に置き去りにすべきか？もう一つの9/11テロのために、テロリストたちが石油で勢いづいた中継基地を建設することを許したままで。

About the best choice is to support without qualification the only two pro-American and constitutional groups in the Middle East, the Israelis and Kurds.

最良の選択については、中東で唯一の二つの親米的で立憲的な集団、イスラエルとクルドを、無条件に支援することだ。
 
Otherwise, in such a tribal quagmire, apparently there are only transitory interests that come and go.

さもなければ、中東のような部族の沼地においては、見せかけの、右往左往する一時的な利益だけがあるだけだ。


― Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Savior Generals. You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com. (c) 2014 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

────ビクター・デービス・ハンソンは、フーバー研究所とスタンフォード大学所属の古典学者で歴史家。近著『救世主の将軍たち』の著者。
author@victorhanson.comに電子メールを送れば連絡をとることができる。(c) 2014　トリビューン・メディア・サービス社

NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE          www.nationalreview.com           PRINT

 

September 11, 2014 12:00 AM

 

The Middle East’s Maze of Alliances

It’s increasingly difficult to navigate the web of transitory enemies and allies in the region. By Victor Davis Hanson

Try figuring out the maze of enemies, allies, and neutrals in the Middle East.

 

In 2012, the Obama administration was on the verge of bombing the forces of Syrian president Bashar Assad. For a few weeks, he was public enemy No. 1 because he had used chemical weapons on his own people and because he was responsible for many of the deaths in the Syrian civil war, with a casualty count that is now close to 200,000.

 

After Obama’s red lines turned pink, we forgot about Syria. Then the Islamic State showed up with beheadings, crucifixions, rapes, and mass murders through a huge swath of Iraq and Syria.

 

Now the United States is bombing the Islamic State. Sometimes Obama says that he is still seeking a strategy against the jihadist group. Sometimes he wants to reduce it to a manageable problem. And sometimes he says that he wants to degrade or even destroy it.

 

The Islamic State is still trying to overthrow Assad. If the Obama administration is now bombing the Islamic State, is it then helping Assad? Or when America did not bomb Assad, did it help the Islamic State? Which of the two should Obama bomb — or both, or neither?

 

Iran is steadily on the way to acquiring a nuclear bomb. Yet for now it is arming the Kurds, dependable U.S. allies in the region who are fighting for their lives against the Islamic State and need American help. As Iran aids the Kurds, Syrians, and Iraqis in the battle against the evil Islamic State, is Teheran becoming a friend, enemy, or neither? Will Iran’s temporary help mean that it will delay or hasten its efforts to get a bomb? Just as Iran sent help to the Kurds, it missed yet another U.N. deadline to come clean on nuclear enrichment.

 

Hamas just lost a war in Gaza against Israel. Then it began executing and maiming a number of its own people, some of them affiliated with Fatah, the ruling clique of the Palestinian Authority. During the war, Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian state, stayed neutral and called for calm. Did he wish Israel to destroy his rival, Hamas? Or did he wish Hamas to hurt his archenemy, Israel? Both? Neither?

 

What about the Gulf sheikdoms? In the old days, America was enraged that some of the Saudis slyly funneled cash to al-Qaeda and yet relieved that the Saudi government was deemed moderate and pro-Western. But as Iran gets closer to its nuclear holy grail, the Gulf kingdoms now seem to be in a de facto alliance with their hated adversary, Israel. Both Sunni monarchies and the Jewish state in near lockstep oppose the radical Iran/Syria/Hezbollah/Muslim Brotherhood/Hamas axis.

 

But don’t look for understandable Shiite–Sunni Muslim fault lines. In this anti-Saudi alliance, the Iranians and Hezbollah are Shiites. Yet their allies, the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, are Sunnis. The Syrian government is neither, being Alawite.

 

They all say they are against the Sunni-extremist Islamic State. So if they are enemies of the Sunni monarchies and enemies of the Islamic State, is the Islamic State then a friend to these Gulf shiekdoms?

 

Then there is Qatar, a Sunni Gulf monarchy at odds with all the other neighboring Sunni monarchies. It is sort of friendly with the Iranians, Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah and Hamas — all adversaries of the U.S. Why, then, is Qatar the host of CENTCOM, the biggest American military base in the entire Middle East?

 

Is Egypt any simpler? During the Arab Spring, the Obama administration helped to ease former president and kleptocrat Hosni Mubarak out of power. Then it supported both the democratic elections and the radical Muslim Brotherhood that won them. Later, the administration said little when a military junta displaced the radical Muslim Brotherhood, which was subverting the new constitution. America was against military strongmen before it was for them, and for Islamists before it was against them.

 

President Obama and Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Recep Erdogan were said to have a special friendship. But based on what? Erdogan is strangling democracy in Turkey. He is a big supporter of Hamas and at times a fan of Iran. A NATO ally, Turkey recently refused to let U.S. rescue teams use its territory to stage a rescue mission of American hostages — two of them eventually beheaded — in Syria.

 

Ostensibly, America supports moderate pro-Western consensual governments that protect human rights and hold elections, or at least do not oppress their own. But there are almost no such nations in the Middle East except Israel. Yet the Obama administration has grown ever more distant from the Jewish state over the last six years.

 

What is the U.S. to do? Leave the Middle East alone, allowing terrorists to build a petrol-fueled staging base for another 9/11?

 

About the best choice is to support without qualification the only two pro-American and constitutional groups in the Middle East, the Israelis and Kurds.

 

Otherwise, in such a tribal quagmire, apparently there are only transitory interests that come and go.

 

— Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Savior Generals. You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com. © 2014 Tribune Media Services, Inc.