Arabs Go Nuclear

There's a lot of talk these days about President Bush scrambling for a win in the Middle East to improve the prospects for his legacy--hence Condi Rice's tour of the region last week. As things look now, it's not a pretty sight: Osama's still on the loose; the Taliban is regaining ground in Afghanistan; post-Saddam Iraq is lurching into civil war; Israel-Palestine is hopelessly deadlocked; Lebanon is stirring fresh fears of civil war there. Of course the U.S. can't be blamed for everything, but Bush's presidency has been intensely focused on making the Greater Middle East a better place and it's hard to find any positive results. When the big achievement of an American secretary of state's tour is just an announcement that two Middle East adversaries (Olmert and Abbas) will hold a meeting at an unspecified time and place in the future, you know you're in trouble.
Looking back in a few years, history may curse Bush's eight-year presidency for a Middle East disaster that makes all the others pale in comparison: a nuclear arms race out of control. It's not that Bush is oblivious to the danger. The problem is that he believes that superior American power can eliminate the nuclear proliferation threat in the Middle East, while thus far the record shows that American power can't bring calm to a single Baghdad neighborhood.
The Middle East nuclear arms race is rooted in the Arab-Israeli conflict that the Bush administration--despite its promotion of the Road Map-- has preferred to settle by diktat rather than through negotiations. Israel acquired the bomb first, out of a sense of insecurity, and Bush's failure to drive the peace process has made other nations increasingly anxious to have nuclear weapons if Israel has them. True, American chest-thrusting helped convince Gadhafi to abandon his nuke program, but Iran is another matter. Rather than find a way to engage Iran after the Islamic Republic supported U.S. efforts against the Taliban, Bush lumped the mullahs into the "axis of evil" along with Iraq and North Korea. If bullying Tehran had worked we could rest easier, but Bush's destruction of Saddam's regime has in fact been a bonanza for Iranian influence throughout the region.
The turning point occurred last summer in the Lebanon war. The Iranian-backed Hamas and Hizballah groups provoked Israel, which in turn pummeled Lebanon for more than a month without any intervention from the Bush administration. Feeling isolated by a rising Iranian/Shiite threat and an American government ambivalent about diplomatic solutions, the Arabs started looking for nukes. Peaceful nukes, mind you, but once you have enrichment capability, you can build a bomb, too.
The interesting--and worrying-- thing is that the talk is coming from a new generation of Arab leaders, whose policies will go a long way toward shaping the Middle East of 20-30 years from now. Gamal Mubarak, viewed by many as being groomed to succeed his father in Egypt, the most populous Arab country, announced the resurrection of Egypt's nuclear program at the ruling party's conference last fall. Now in an interview with Haaretz comes the revelation from King Abdullah II that Jordan, too, is seeking a nuclear program. "The rules have changed on the nuclear subject throughout the whole region," Abdullah says. "...After [the] summer, everybody's going for nuclear programs."

By Scott MacLeod/Cairo