Why Don't Israel And Iran Hand In Their Nuclear Jigsaws Together?

Donald Trump, we are told, is looking for a way to end the war with Iran. Most objective commentators agree by now with what Hot Press concluded much sooner: that the US president made a stupid, unforced error in buying into, and acting on the basis of, the claims, made by the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, that murdering the Iranian Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, and a football team’s worth of other Iranian leaders along with him in one nasty fell swoop, would be enough to spark an uprising or otherwise lead to regime change in Teheran.

Over three months later, you have to ask: how wrong can you be?

It is worth remembering the circumstances of what was a supremely sneaky, murderous attack. The Iranians were involved in what they considered good faith negotiations with the United States at the time. Implicit in negotiations of that kind is that everyone involved – on either side – can, as long as negotiations continue, consider themselves safe from attack by the other side.

If the negotiations break down completely then that safety catch can be deemed unlocked. But to action a plot to murder key figures who are central to the decision-making, and therefore to the ongoing negotiations, while the talks are still alive, is a heinous act of treachery, dishonesty and brazen opportunism. This is what Netanyahu proposed. This is what Donald Trump and his minions agreed. It is what the governments of Israel and the United States jointly carried out.

Doing so exposed Donald Trump as a liar, a fraud and a thug. Which shouldn’t really be news to anyone – but, in fairness, this is at a completely different level to claiming that you were never friends with Jeffrey Epstein. At this level of international diplomacy, trust is absolutely vital.

No one in the world can ever trust Donald Trump again.

Trump and Netanyahu

DISCREDITED REGIME

I am looking at a story posted on the website of ABC News, on Sunday 1 March this year. At the top, there is a photo montage with the heads of nine men, all of whom were already dead by then.

“The strikes on Iran have killed many of the nation’s most senior military, intelligence and security leaders, according to the IDF,” the caption said.

Further down the page is another graphic. Here there are eleven pictures. Above each one, reversed out of a red block, is the word “KILLED.”

The word should have been MURDERED.

The names of those who had been assassinated in cold blood by the Israeli attackers and their co-conspirators in the CIA, are all there: Supreme leader, Ali Khamenei; Ali Shamkhani; Mohammad Shirazi; Mohammad Pakpour; Abdorahim Mousavi; Azia Nasirzadeh; Hossein Jabal Amelian; Reza Mozaffari-Nia; Saleh Asadi; Ali Larijani and Gholamreza Soleimani.

The list of dead had been provided, in a moment of odious, triumphalist boasting, by the Israeli army – which has been involved, as we know, in the mass slaughter of an estimated 72,500 people in Gaza since the brutal and indefensible butchery carried out by Hamas, in Israel, on 7 October 2023. The real number of dead in Gaza is likely to be considerably higher, with some independent estimates suggesting that it is already over 100,000.

To remind people of the unconscionable scale of the horror-show over which Netanyahu has presided, that number includes at least 560 humanitarian aid workers, among whom are 391 employees of UNRWA; and 270 journalists and media workers. The number of injured is impossible to calculate, but what is clear from UN reports is that Gaza is now home to the highest number of child amputees in the world.

• Aid, including food, has repeatedly been denied entry into Gaza.
• People have been deliberately starved to death.
• Their homes have been systematically destroyed.
• Their land has been bombed and rendered infertile.
• Their hospitals have been levelled.
• Their schools have been demolished.
• Nearly 1.9million people have been displaced.

As ever, the most vulnerable have been the hardest hit. And, as if that weren’t bad enough, the houses and villages and lands belonging to Palestinians in the West Bank are being stolen from them, with increasing violence and impunity – and with the knowing collusion and strong-arm support of the Israeli army, and the Israeli state.

All of this utterly cynical, immoral, pre-planned ethnic cleansing has been carried out as a matter of policy by the Israeli government, with clear genocidal intent.

They want to turn Gaza into a Middle Eastern Riviera. It is an obscenity.

And this is the brutal, discredited, bloody-handed regime with which Donald Trump and the United States of America have been involved in what is, demonstrably, a partnership-in-evil, and that has now plunged the world into even greater chaos by launching a war of choice against Iran.

OVER-WEENING HUBRIS

Over three months later, the original smirking sense of Israeli supremacism, when they named the casualties among the Iranian top brass, seems all the more odious and reprehensible. For a start, rather than crumbling, the Iranian regime has demonstrated a level of resilience that has completely bamboozled Donald Trump and everyone else involved in what now increasingly looks like a futile, self-defeating attack.

In footballing terms, they may have gone two goals down in the first five minutes, but the Iranians have since shown that they have far more in their locker than Israel pretended – and than Trump’s CIA, who were centrally involved in the attack, assumed.

The Iranians have repeatedly hit US bases in the region, at a huge cost to the Americans. No one is allowed to access relevant satellite imagery of the damaged bases, but a BBC report last week confirmed that at least 20 – and perhaps up to 28 – US military bases across eight countries have been successfully attacked by Iran, causing tens (or more likely hundreds) of millions of dollars of damage.

In a statement, Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, insisted that the Middle East is no longer a safe place for US bases.

Mojtaba Khamenei

It is certainly an expensive one.

On 30 April, CNN reported that the Pentagon had given $25billion as the cost of the attack on Iran so far. “The real cost estimate,” a  US source stated at the time, “is closer to $40-50 billion, when accounting for the cost of re-building US military installations and replacing destroyed assets.”

But that is probably only the half of it – or even less.

How much has Israel spent? And where is that money – or where are those bombs – coming from? The US has been footing the bill for Israeli recklessness for years. Doubtless, to one extent or another, it is going to have to do so again.

In any event, Iran War Cost Tracker puts the true figure of US expenditure to date at well over $104billion – and rising at the rate of $41,666,667 every hour the war continues. To say that it is an astonishing waste of money is like characterising a vicious tropical downpour as a drop of rain. Apart entirely from the human cost, with a planet on the edge of climate catastrophe, it is immoral in the extreme.

And on top of all that, there is the fact that trade all over the world, including in the US, has been very badly damaged. Prices, as a result, have been rising, heaping thousands directly onto the annual household bills of individuals and families that really can’t afford to pay more.

It is time for American people to know: you are personally paying, out of your own hard-earned cash, for an act of colossal stupidity, over-weening hubris and narcissistic empire-building by the lying, thieving cartoon figure you elected as President.

No wonder Donald Trump is swearing down the phone at Netanyahu, who has admitted, probably under pressure from Trump, that he, Mossad and the Israeli army underestimated Iran’s ability to choke the Strait of Hormuz. In fact, of course, they underestimated Iran in just about every way – and that failure has cost the world trillions.

So when and how are they going to pay?

AN ELEGANT SOLUTION

Given all of the above, it has been deeply embarrassing to see the mealy-mouthed, half-arsed responses from so many other world leaders, especially in Europe. Instead of naming the entire fiasco for what it is, they all nod along to the bullying mantra from Trump that “Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.”

This is a line that I have never understood.

I fully accept the desirability of nuclear non-proliferation. But why is it okay for Russia to have nuclear weapons and not Iran? Why is it okay for the US to have nuclear weapons and not Iran?

Or more to the point, in this instance, why is it okay for Israel to have nuclear weapons and not Iran?

It makes no sense whatsoever. The Iranian regime is despicable in innumerable ways. The abuse of human rights there is vicious. The treatment of women is abominable. The imposition of religious law is vile. To help bring it to an end could only be a good thing – as long as it is achieved democratically from within.

But the Israeli state’s capacity for evil is at least as great as, or greater than, Iran’s. They have carried out – and are still carrying out – a genocidal, ecocidal war of mass murder and wanton, pre-meditated destruction against Palestinians. They are also applying the same blueprint to their attacks on Lebanon. There is, it seems, no murderous militaristic thuggishness of which they are incapable.

They treat Palestinians as sub-humans. They operate an apartheid system in Israel itself. And – like a mirror-image of extremist Islam – they believe absolutely in their innate supremacism – that they are the chosen people, who exist in a special covenant with “God”.

No matter how you scrutinise it, there is no logic to Benjamin Netanyahu’s government having nuclear weapons ahead of Iran, Iraq, or anywhere else.

The pretext for continuing the war on Iran is that they have to agree to cease all enrichment of uranium, and either hand over the 60% enriched uranium which they hold or possibly – by agreement – downgrade it to 20% enrichment or below. Essentially, the demand is that Iran should abandon all ambitions ever to have a nuclear weapon.

Well, if this really is the ultimate sticking point, here’s a plan.

Israel is one of just five countries not to have signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Against that backdrop, it is currently estimated that Israel has – probably with US assistance –  created a stockpile of at least 90 nuclear weapons.

While one potential equitable solution is that Iran would be allowed to create an equivalent nuclear arsenal, the opposite approach is a far better option – which is that Israel would be required, under a new treaty with its Middle Eastern neighbours, to dismantle its nuclear capability, surrender its 90 war heads and accept that it too must end all nuclear enrichment beyond the level required to create nuclear energy.

If people are genuinely looking for a solution, this is one that makes sense for Iran – and for the world.

Looking at what the Israeli government and the Israeli army have been doing in their genocidal campaign in Gaza – and all of the lies, deceptions and weasel excuses trumped up to minimise it, or justify its excesses – they are the people you would trust least in the world, alongside ISIS, the Taliban and Vladimir Putin’s Russia, not to press the nuclear button and cause irreparable damage to the earth itself and to its 6 billion inhabitants.

It is an elegant solution, as well as an equitable one. Maybe the EU can be the ones to sponsor it?

The world needs to end the dangerous drift towards war – and towards catastrophe – now. This could be the best possible place to start, not least because it would put the spotlight firmly on Israel and force a complete re-evaluation of the murderous regime there, and its place on the world stage...

Over to you, Kaja Callas. As EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, this is your baby…

Kaja Callas