There's a few lines in Jackson Browne's song, Men in the Shadows, that came to mind this week, when President Barak Obama insisted in Geneva that Iran has 'two weeks' to let IAEA Inspectors have "unfetted access" to their second uranium enrichment plant, and that US patience was "not unlimited."
"You might ask what it takes to rememberWasn't that the rhetoric used in the lead up (or was it 'set-up') to the occupation and destruction of Iraq?
When you know that you've seen it before
Where a government lies to a people
And a country is drifting to war"
Browne's song goes on to say:
"They sell us every thing from youth to religionWhile Iran has agreed to cooperate with IAEA inspectors, Israel has pointedly refused. And I don't hear the US President demanding Israel sign the Non-Poliferation Treaty and cooperate with the IAEA. Why is that?
The same time they sell us our wars
I want to know who the men in the shadows are
I want to hear somebody asking them why
They can be counted on to tell us who our enemies are"
The Irish Times gave prominence last week to Israel's refusal to comply with the IAEA. Mark Weiss writes,
ISRAEL HAS rejected the call by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and open up its atomic sites to international inspection.
The nuclear watchdog, meeting yesterday in Vienna, adopted a resolution expressing concern about “Israeli nuclear capabilities” and called on agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei to work on the issue.
The motion was adopted by 49 votes to 45, with 16 abstentions. Russia and China, both permanent members of the UN security council, voted in favour.
But David Danieli, deputy director of Israel’s atomic energy commission, said Israel deplored the vote for singling it out while many of its neighbours remained hostile to its existence. “Israel will not co-operate in any matter with this resolution which is only aiming at reinforcing political hostilities and lines of division in the Middle East region,” he said.
Israel is one of only three countries along with India and Pakistan, which is not a signatory to the NPT. According to foreign media reports, the Jewish state is widely believed to possess several hundred nuclear warheads, as well as the means to deliver them.
Under a decades-old policy of “nuclear ambiguity” Israel has never confirmed nor denied processing atomic weapons, maintaining that the country “will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons in the Middle East”.
The vote was a setback not only for Israel but also for the US and other western backers of the Jewish state. They had lobbied for debate on the issue without a vote.
Iranian ambassador Ali Asghar Soltanieh told reporters the passage of the resolution was “very good news and a triumph for the oppressed nation of Palestine”.
Western states said it was unfair and counterproductive to isolate one member state. They said an IAEA resolution passed on Thursday, urging all Middle East nations to forswear atomic bombs, included Israel and made Friday’s proposal superfluous.
Arab nations said Israel had brought the resolution on itself by having never signed the 40-year-old NPT.
Before the vote, US ambassador Glyn Davies said the resolution was “redundant . . . Such an approach is highly politicised and does not address the complexities at play regarding crucial nuclear-related issues in the Middle East”."unfair and counterproductive to isolate one member"? Precisely. Why Iran and not Israel or India?
"Highly politicised"? Indeed, except it is the US Administration doing it.
The Guardian's former Middle East editor, Brian Whitaker, now an editor on the Guardian's Comment is Free website, suggests "This smells of a propaganda stunt by western intelligence agencies"
Time will tell.
