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November 28, 2001
Send to a Colleague
Let`s Be Nice to Saddam Hussein!
Memo To: Rich Lowry, National Review editor
From: Jude Wanniski
Re: Saddam's nuclear power plant
I see in the current National Review that you are continuing your
campaign to declare all-out war on Iraq as soon as possible to
destroy the regime of Saddam Hussein once and for all. This time you
make the case for counter-proliferation of nuclear weapons and reckon
we must start with Baghdad. Your "Delay or Die?" column is not only
vigorously argued, but replete with evidence that you have read a
great deal about the politics of the Middle East in general and Iraq
in particular. You know I disagree with you emphatically on Iraq --
even to the point of believing U.S. behavior toward the people of
Iraq over the last decade contributed to the political terrorism of
September 11. So let's put that aside and simply focus on the points
you make about nuclear proliferation -- about Saddam's attempts to
build a nuclear arsenal in the past and the likelihood he will
succeed if given enough time.
The point that got my attention in particular, Rich, is your mention of Khidir Hamza,
the Iraqi scientist who defected and wrote about Saddam's clandestine nuke program. He
wrote how Saddam used the presumption that just
because Iraq signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1968, and was being subjected to
inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency, that there was "a presumption
of innocence." You quote Hamza as writing: "Few of
Iraq's suppliers -- or the IAEA itself -- ever bothered to ask a simple question: Why
would Iraq, with the second-largest oil reserves in the world, want to generate
electricity by burning uranium?"
It is a good question: Why were people so stupid in 1981? Of course, you seem to say,
he was scheming even then to build an atomic bomb with which to terrorize his
neighbors! I must tell you, though, that in those years,
when the price of oil was $35 a barrel, it was conventional wisdom that the world was
rapidly running out of oil. You may be too young to remember, but in the 1970s, the
smartest people in the United States believed that
to be the case. Henry Kissinger, who was said to be the smartest man in the world,
thought so. President Gerald Ford thought so. President Jimmy Carter was sure that was
the case and he turned down the thermostat at the
White House to provide an example of conservation. The Club of Rome, which assembled
the leading Malthusian scientists of the day, concluded that Mother Earth had been
bountiful from the beginning of time up to this point
of history, but from now on would be stingy. I'd been hired by The Wall Street
Journal in January 1972 to write editorials and a year later, when OPEC quadrupled the
oil price, I wound up writing the energy editorials. I
f you check with Bob Bartley, he will assure you that we were the laughing stock of
the American Political Establishment. That's because we argued the price went up not
because oil became scarce, but because paper dollars
became too plentiful when President Richard Nixon left the gold standard in 1971.
The mania about everyone freezing in the dark unless we did something extended to the
Council on Foreign Relations and its chairman, David Rockefeller, chairman of Chase
Manhattan Bank and grandson of the Standard Oil Roc
kefeller. It was David who financed purchase of the coal fields of West Virginia that
would provide the energy alternative when the oil spigot ran dry. It was his brother
Nelson Rockefeller, President Ford's Vice Presiden
t, who became the most aggressive advocate of having Uncle Sam subsidize synthetic
fuels out of the West Virginia coal fields. This was in order to satisfy the
environmentalists that all that smelly coal would not pollute
the atmosphere. The Rockefellers also became supporters of the all the official
Greenie organizations, which also pushed synfuels, whereby the taxpayers would take
all that smelly coal off the hands of the Rockefellers.
It wasn't just Rocky. Phillips Petroleum bought up a zillion acres of lignite fields
in West Texas, knowing lignite is a good source of the uranium that would be needed to
fuel the nuclear power plants when the oil ran ou
t! It was an expensive hedge. They still have not touched the lignite as the world has
far more oil reserves today than it had back then. The supply-siders at the WSJournal
congratulated themselves on being right, but it
turns out that everyone hates an I-told-you-so.
Why did Iraq become a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty? You should ask
yourself, Rich. It is a good question. The only reason countries signed up, one after
another, is that if they promised to be good, the IAEA
would provide them with the technology necessary to build a nuclear power plant!!
Having signed the treaty in 1968 and rolling in dough in 1980, Iraq could hedge the
same way Iran did, selling expensive oil and buying che
ap power plants. What you may not realize, Rich, is that the power plant Iraq was
building in 1981 at Osiraq, just outside Baghdad, was not the kind of plant that would
produce fissile materials out of which atomic bombs
could be constructed. The French had built a similar plant for Israel, which never
signed the NPT because it did not need the technology. Israel used the plant to
produce power. It got the uranium for its weapons of mass
destruction from South Africa. The IAEA inspection of the Osiraq plant was on the
up-and-up. Then two months before it was going to be cranked up to send power into
Baghdad, Israel decided that it did not want Iraq to hav
e a nuclear power plant and bombed it to bits, without so much as a by-your-leave. The
whole world condemned Israel for this blatant act not-so-much of aggression as it was
political terrorism. I know my Jewish friends do
not like that kind of talk, but let's be honest. There were no apologies and Uncle
Sam sided with Israel in the UN Security Council so Israel did not even have to pay
for the damage and deaths. Not a brass farthing, an I
sraeli official announced.
Now it is true that after Osiraq, Saddam decided No-More-Mr. Nice Guy, and began his
clandestine project to match Israel bomb-for-bomb, just in case it came to that. It
was in this period, while Iraq warred with Iran, tha
t the IAEA was only shown the legitimate operations in Iraq. Since the end of the Gulf
War, though, after the UN inspectors learned about the clandestine program, the IAEA
protocols have been tightened. Nobody talks about
this openly, Rich, but if you check you will find that IAEA inspectors can go
anywhere they wish in Iran or Iraq, if they suspect a clandestine nuke program, and
they will be taken for a look-see. An IAEA team did such a
n inspection in Iraq early this year and has at least twice checked out suspicions in
Iran. It is easy to hide a chem/bio research facility, but because a nuke plant
requires so much infrastructure, so much electric power
, it is practically impossible to hide. In other words, it may not be necessary to
bomb the Islamic world to bits to be safe from atomic attack. Quite the opposite might
work. Maybe we can get Ariel Sharon, even at this l
ate date, to pony up the money to rebuild Osiraq. That would be a nice gesture,
wouldn't it?
*****
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