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An inconvenient truth

Wednesday, 30th April 2008

The Spectator on the Israeli airstrike on a Syrian nuclear facility

In its 6 October 2007 edition, The Spectator reported on Israel’s air-strike on Syria exactly a month before. We noted that the 6 September raid ‘may have saved the world from a devastating threat’ and revealed that a senior British ministerial source had told us that: ‘If people had known how close we came to world war three that day there’d have been mass panic.’

The article provoked scepticism in certain quarters. In the New Yorker, Seymour Hersh, the veteran American journalist, sneered that our coverage was ‘overheated’. But information declassified by the Bush administration last week — under pressure from Congress, it should be stressed — suggests that it is Hersh’s temperature controls, rather than The Spectator’s, which need adjusting.

In a briefing to Congress badgered out of the administration after seven months of evasion, the CIA — basing its conclusions on video, satellite images and other visual evidence — said that what the Israelis had hit was a plutonium-producing reactor that the Syrians had been building with North Korean expertise. To be clear, this means that North Korea was — and probably still is — happy to share its nuclear knowledge with other rogue states.

Some still refuse to believe the evidence presented. To them, the denials from Damascus carry more weight than the briefings from Washington. After the debacle of Iraq, the British dossiers and Colin Powell’s notorious briefing to the UN Security Council, it is understandable that there is public scepticism about the reliability of Western intelligence. But it is dangerous when scepticism conspires with wishful thinking: and it is wishful thinking to imagine that, because the threat of WMD in Iraq was exaggerated, no such threat can exist anywhere else.

The geopolitical context is, in any case, very different. In the case of Iraq, the intelligence served the Bush administration’s strategic and political purpose: regime change in Baghdad. In the Syrian case, the remaining objectives of the administration are jeopardised by this disclosure. The White House is eager — recklessly eager, indeed — to cut a deal with North Korea and the revelation that Pyongyang has been engaged in apparent open-market proliferation makes that task appreciably harder.

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Ed Smithe

May 1st, 2008 2:31pm

Given the inability of US intelligence to locate a supposed nuclear facility that was on the shores of a major river running through Syria (a facility that can be found rather easily on Google Maps) should give one pause before declaring the new US analysis "a slam dunk." Moreover, as has been reported in Washington, CIA officials have, on the record, completely mischaracterized the ability and the timeframe of that same facility to produce fissionable material. As you might have written, 'only a fool' would discount these troubling turns in this rather bizarre case.

Of the serious observers out there, I don't know of anyone who underplays the threat that these rogue states pose to the US and its allies. That threat, or rather risk, does not however exist in a vacuum. Currently, the US is bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan. al Qaeda operates with ease out of the Western Provinces of a nuclear armed nation that could, at any moment, collapse. And yet, the lesson that you choose to take from all of this is that Iran and Syria are the most pressing issues of the day.

Unfortunately, we in the US do not possess unlimited power. Because of the choices (both political and military) that we have made over the last seven years, there is very little flexibility left to realistically contemplate your so-called "last resort."

Perhaps this is a good lesson for you and others to learn, that in this rather troubling world that we live in, to borrow a phrase from Mr. Jagger, 'you can't always get what you want.'