The region is experiencing the largest and fastest arms race in the world, and it's going nuclear, writes Stuart Reigeluth The balance of power is shifting in the Middle East. Iran is the great winner of the US occupation of Iraq, and Persian power has been incrementally extending into Syria and the Gulf countries. Congruently, Israeli influence appears to have diminished since the failure of the Camp David II negotiations in 2000 between Israel and the Palestinians. That same year, Israel withdrew unilaterally from South Lebanon, a last resort gesture repeated in the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2005. The Lebanese Hizbullah and the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) went from being Islamic militias to elected state actors, both strongly supported by Iran. Meanwhile, Arab "moderates" maintained a call for comprehensive peace with Israel via the 22- member Arab League initiative in Beirut in 2002, revived in Riyadh in 2007. Israel did not answer. In this region where security is synonymous with stability, the present arms race is nothing new, but now there will soon be two nuclear powers. Besides doomsday scenarios of apocalyptic warfare, the answer to how this protracted conflict will continue and possibly end can be found in its origins. CONFLICT PAST AND PRESENT: In the Book of Judges, the Bible relates how Samson, an Israelite warrior endowed with supernatural power, was enticed by Delilah, a Philistine woman, to reveal the secret of his strength. When she shaves his locks, the Philistines capture and blind him. In his final rage for revenge, Samson pushes over two pillars and topples a temple in Gaza, killing himself and thousands of Philistines. This was the first act of suicide-sacrifice. Then, the Philistines had iron weapons and prevented the Israelites from having blacksmiths for they were afraid that the Hebrews would make swords or spears (Samuel I, 13:19). Now, Israel has the technological edge over its Arab-Muslim neighbours, and works to prevent them from acquiring the means to compete militarily. As Iran contests Israel's regional hegemony, a new war of deterrence is developing by proxies again, but with much higher stakes. Based on the precedent of Samson's sacrifice in Gaza, Israel called its nuclear programme the "Samson Option", developed to deter principally and possibly destroy the enemy, but also potentially to self- annihilate. Israel's rise to regional hegemony was the result of Zionism's adroit ability to acquire superpower support, both prior to and after the Holocaust of World War II -- a tragedy that embedded strong sympathies for the Jews in the Western psyche. Simultaneously, European colonial powers appointed Arab strongmen to secure access to the lucrative energy resource of oil. As European colonialism gasped and Arab nationalism surged, a bipolar world emerged in which US and Soviet spheres of influence clashed at fault- lines such as the Middle East and across Central Asia: the 19th century "Great Game" between Tsarist Russia and Victorian Britain for control of natural resources prolonged into the 20th century between capitalist US and communist Soviet allies and proxies. Israel became the most powerful US ally in the Middle East; an alliance reinforced by the events of 11 September 2001, and a new Cold War emerged with a "Green Curtain" stretching across the Arab-Muslim world and surrounding an increasingly irascible and irresponsive Iran. The current Western standoff with Iran is about maintaining Israel's nuclear supremacy in the region. In 1949, shortly after self-proclaiming statehood, Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, launched a nuclear programme that the United States did not endorse. However, during the last vestiges of European colonialism, France and Great Britain attempted to recuperate a toehold in the Middle East and wanted to punish the pan-Arab leader of Egypt, Gamal Abdel-Nasser, for nationalising the Suez Canal in 1952. In 1954, France agreed to help Israel develop nuclear power. In the process, an alliance was built to stop Nasser and other radical regimes, and in 1956 Israel invaded the Sinai Peninsula along with France and Great Britain. The trilateral invasion was rapidly revoked by the Soviet and US superpowers, but Israel won nuclear research information and material promises for its participation. France sent hundreds of technicians plus a 24-megawatt nuclear reactor it helped build in 1958 in Dimona, located in the Negev Desert. Israel concealed its nuclear development programme from the US by saying that the Dimona reactor was a textile factory, a water-pumping station and then a desalination plant. By the mid-1960s, Israel was extracting plutonium and even contemplated a nuclear test on its Arab neighbours prior to the June 1967 war. The test was averted, but terminal deterrence -- the original conception of the "Samson Option" -- was established. Israel now has an estimated arsenal of 200 nuclear warheads. THE RACE BEGINS: As with Samson, Israel's military strength has become a liability rather than an asset because it has instigated nuclear and arms build-up by its neighbours. Largely responding to Israel's nuclear power, as well as to openings in Iraq and the Arabian/Persian Gulf, Iran has used the argument that if they have the bomb, then why not us? With the façade of developing nuclear energy for civilian purposes, Iran has launched an ambitious uranium enrichment programme, which President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad publicly expanded from 3,500 operational centrifuges to a projected 9,000 at the Natanz nuclear plant. Experts agree that this amount of centrifuges is beyond what is needed for civilian purposes. Islamic Iran began its nuclear programme in 1985, modelling its development on Pakistan's P-1 centrifuge design, and subsequently developed its own new IR-2 (Iranian second generation) centrifuges with updated technology. An estimated 1,200 IR-2s are needed to make one nuclear weapon. It is an irony of power politics that the United States endorsed exploring a nuclear project in Iran under the Shah, and helped overthrow Mossadegh's democratic government in 1952 to install a regional strongman. The Shah died in exile and the nuclear project eventually backfired. Though Iran is estimated to be a few years away from being able to make nuclear weapons, the Persian potential has caused a ripple effect across the region. The race is on: Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Libya, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and others, all seek the same nuclear standing. While pre- emptive strikes or arms deals are usually used for containment, the US already signed a nuclear energy deal with Bahrain in March 2008, following France's bilateral accord with the UAE in January 2008 to provide a four billion euro nuclear reactor for the Emirates civilian energy programme. A month later, the state- owned French company, Areva, signed separate agreements for 84 million euros to assist with energy for the largest man-made island project in Dubai. The UAE also agreed to allow a permanent French military base near Abu Dhabi comprising of an initial 500 troops. Endorsing so openly the US enterprise in the Middle East, France appears to be replacing Great Britain as the primary transatlantic ally. Apart from its "surge" to 165,000 troops in Iraq, the US also has an additional 40,000 troops in other bases around the Gulf, namely in Qatar, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. Convinced by the United States that Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait was an imminent territorial threat to the holiest lands of Islam, Saudi Arabia accepted the US offer to defend the kingdom against Saddam Hussein. The US military presence at the very heart of the Dar Al-Islam (House of Islam) increased foreign access to oil and control of the OPEC cartel, and revived comparisons to the Crusader occupation, capitalised on by the renegade Saud relative, Osama Bin Laden, culminating 10 years later in the Pentagon and World Trade Center attacks of 11 September 2001. Fearful of the overflow from the 2003 US-led war on Iraq and to show allegiance to the war on terror, Saudi Arabia moved to erect an electric fence around the perimeter of its kingdom to thwart the passage of insurgents as well as to crush any internal dissent. As before, billion dollar portions of the colossal oil revenues are invested in buying US military material to protect the regime from Islamic groups. Tremendous arms deals are being struck in parallel to the nuclear race. Both of which go back some decades. TRADING POLITICS FOR ARMS: Regardless of how useful fighter jets may be for combating insurgents, the projected sale in 2006 of 72 Eurofighter Typhoon jets to Saudi Arabia by the British company BAE Systems seemed unprecedented. Reaching 15 billion euros, this was but the latest part of the Al-Yamamah deal pending from Thatcher's era in the 1980s. In December 2006, former UK prime minister Tony Blair said arming Saudi Arabia was in the national security interest because "innocent British lives were at risk", and pressured the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) to drop charges for the sale of Hawk and Tornado jets plus other military material in 1985 to Saudi Arabia, the largest British arms deal ever of $86 billion. Blair's veto of the SFO was also a first in British history, but in April 2008, the case for allegations of bribery by BAE was opened again. Saudi Prince Bandar, former ambassador to the United States and son of the Crown Prince Sultan, is suspected of embezzling an Airbus plane in connection to the deal, plus $2 billion used to buy property in the US. As BAE, affiliated to the British Defence Ministry, tried to escape the corruption allegations, the US became suspicious, blocked the deal and detained BAE officials. Mega-multinational companies have not taken over, yet. And if they do, then the US would rather use their own to maintain monopoly over the arms trade in the Middle East. Selling weapons is not only incredibly lucrative, it creates military interoperability between US forces and those of the purchasing country. These business transactions are accompanied by a logistical maintenance and training package that ensure a 10-20 year relationship that helps build bilateral accords to reinforce regional alliances. This explains the $20 billion US arms deal with "moderate" Sunni Arab states announced in August 2007. Saudi Arabia gets the largest portion, but Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, and the five emirates also get their share for the next 10 years. These massive arms deals came in preparation to the Annapolis conference (November 2007), which propounded to advance Israeli-Palestinian peace. Concerns for Israel's qualitative military advantage spurred the US to increase its military package to Israel by 25 per cent to $30 billion over the next 10 years. Israel maintains its regional military hegemony, and the US can continue to buttress its Sunni allies with new technology such as the Joint Direct Attack Munitions kits (JDAMs) to Saudi Arabia, which can provide satellite-guided weapons for the F-15 Strike Eagle jets purchased from the US in the 1990s. As both US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates repeated in Jeddah: "There is nothing new here". They were correct about the arms deals, and nuclear power aspirations. Dependence on natural gas and petrol has become more expensive as prices continue to rise to unprecedented levels after the 2003 war on Iraq. Egypt, for example, is seeking to diversify its energy sources and has created a higher council for energy to explore how to obtain 20 per cent of its energy from renewable sources, such as solar, wind and nuclear energy. Since the 1940s, Egyptian scientists have explored how to develop nuclear potential, particularly at the research centre in Inshas, just north of Cairo. Inshas was also where Arab heads of state met in May 1946 and resolved that Palestine must remain Arab and that Zionism constituted a threat to Palestine and other Arab states. Zionism won the 1948 Palestine War, and in 1967 Israel obliterated neighbouring Arab armies and terminated Nasser's pan-Arab movement, thus postponing Egypt's nuclear aspirations. However, now, Russia is the primary tender providing fuel to Egypt to restart its power plant. Russia also agreed in 2005 to supply low-enriched uranium fuel for the light-water nuclear reactor near Bushehr in southern Iran for the next 10 years. REGIONAL ASYMMETRY: Iran's nuclear development programme is perceived as an existential threat to Israel, and has not been stopped by diplomacy. A US proposal to internationalise and turn Iran's enrichment activities into a multilateral programme has gone unanswered, and High Representative of the EU Javier Solana failed to negotiate a cessation of Iran's uranium enrichment programme. The EU is not taken seriously in power politics because the Europeans are perceived in the Middle East as implementing US foreign policy. From the two civilian European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) missions in the Palestinian territories, for border management (EUBAM-Rafah) and for police reform (EUPOL-COPPS), to the rule of law mission in Iraq (EUJUST-LEX), to another police reform mission in Afghanistan (EUPOL- Afghanistan), the soft EU security sector reform strategy is conveniently complementing hard US military power. As a prelude to where these synergies are headed, battalions of Palestinian presidential guards and national security forces are being trained at the Jordan International Police Training College (JIPTC), east of Amman -- the same base used by the United States to train the Iraqi police. And solidifying US influence with EU corroboration across the region from the Mediterranean to the Arabian/Persian Gulf and beyond is but an introduction to the report due out at the time of writing (June 2008) about how Israel-Palestine can fit into a regional security structure. The report in question is under the supervision of General James Jones, former supreme allied commander of NATO for Europe, who also co-chaired the Afghanistan Study Group Report and was appointed in the immediate aftermath of Annapolis by Secretary Rice as US special envoy for Middle East security. However, the EU's position alongside the US has mollified Israeli and neo-con policies. In Lebanon, leading EU member states such as Spain and Italy avoided placing the mandate of the strengthened UNIFIL-2 under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, which would have granted them permission to fire at will and to disarm Lebanese militias by force. Marking points for Europe, UNIFIL-2 ended the Israeli naval siege of Lebanon and helped calm the south. The few arms the US sent the Lebanese Armed Forces were positive in that Lebanon needs to acquire the ability to enforce its sovereignty, but US pressure on Prime Minister Fouad Al-Siniora to dismiss the head security officer at the Beirut airport and to dismantle Hizbullah's telecommunications system was a clear affront aimed at disarming the Shia politico-militant group, which responded in May 2008 by taking over Beirut and other parts of Lebanon, just as Hamas took over Gaza in June 2007 when the US backed attempts by Fatah's strongman, Mohamed Dahlan, to control the border crossings of the Strip. Parallels between Palestine and Lebanon abound: both Islamic movements have called for reconciliation with their secular counterparts to form national unity governments; both have been denied and branded as Iranian proxies; both claimed victory for firing rockets relentlessly during Israeli onslaughts, and both won democratic representation in their respective elections. Both are rearming and upgrading their missiles: Hizbullah has longer range Fajr Katyusha missiles with Tel Aviv in its sights, while Hamas now has upgraded its home-made Qassam rockets to Grad-level, with higher precision to hit Ashkelon and beyond for the first time in the spring of 2008. Both Islamic movements, the Shia Hizbullah and the Sunni Hamas, share a common willingness to die for their cause: death at the price of ending Israeli occupation in Palestine and Lebanon, not to mention Islamic groups waged against US military presence in Iraq. Israel's inability to win these asymmetric battles with popular resistance groups has led to new US arms shipments. After the 2006 Israeli war on Lebanon, the Hebrew state launched a five-year military improvement plan. Costing $60 billion, the "Tefen 2012" project will modernise and replenish existing Israeli army stocks with hundreds of Stryker combat vehicles, squadrons of new F-35 Join Strike Fighters, several Littoral Combat warships, as well as more missiles and Merkava tanks. Additionally, while the US-funded Arrow system is meant to intercept long-range ballistic missiles from Iran, Israel is also developing medium-to-short range defence systems called "David's Sling" and "Iron Cap" to intercept Fajr-Katyushas from Lebanon and Grad-Qassams from Gaza. Israel, like Egypt, also continues to receive free excess defence articles (EDA), surplus US weapons, and has surpassed Great Britain as the fourth largest arms exporter in the world with main markets in China and India. As the "David's Sling" allusion insinuates, Israel is under attack from a Philistine-like Goliath, which justifies pre-emptive measure to strike its foes. Similar to summer 2006, when the Israelis attempted to annihilate Hizbullah, they also struck at Syria to eliminate its secret nuclear reactor in September 2007. Israel was once again amassing troops along the Golan Heights, but Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made known to Damascus through the Arab League that Israel would downscale its forces. The following day, the Israel air force raided the code-named "Al-Kibar" nuclear plant in northern Syria, supposedly provided with North Korean material and in collaboration with AQ Khan who created Pakistan's nuclear weapons. Despite probable propaganda, the goal appeared the same as when Israel bombed Iraq's Osirak plant in 1981: thwart possible nuclear parity. In 2004, Israel refused to disclose its nuclear capacity to the International Atomic Energy Agency, but in 2006, Olmert implicitly admitted that Israel has nuclear arms and that Iran's manoeuvring is intended to acquire the same capacity. As Iran continues to be sanctioned for its nuclear development activities, in April 2008, Israel signed another nuclear agreement with the United States to upgrade safety and technology at Dimona. Previous to the Israeli strike in northern Syria, President Ahmadinejad visited Damascus in July 2007 resulting in a supposed $1 billion arms deal from Tehran to Syria, which included surface-to-surface missiles, as well as anti-tank and anti-aircraft systems from Russia and North Korea. Fearing the veracity of this shipment, or attempting to break the "Shia Crescent", Olmert opened peace talks with Syria via Turkey in May 2008. But peace will not annul or even diminish Iran's regional influence. It is simply too late. Iran already occupies parts of Iraq, plus three UAE islands, enjoys strong economic ties with the Arab Gulf and Syria, and supports Hizbullah and Hamas as stingers against Israel. As the respective take-overs of Lebanon and Gaza depicted, the reshuffling of political power in the Middle East, massive arms injections, US army troops stationed in Afghanistan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and US Navy ships in the Mediterranean and outside Iran's territorial waters are throwing oil on the fire but will not deter Persian power. Based on its use of pre-emptive war, Israel may very well be the first to drop the bomb. Remember Samson: "The dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life." (Judges, 16:30) WANT TO KNOW MORE? For an Israeli account of its "deep existential insecurity" and how having nuclear power does not eradicate that feeling, see David Grossman, Lion's Honey: The Myth of Samson. For evidence that the current president of Israel, Shimon Peres, proposed a nuclear test to restore a higher degree of deterrence with Israel's neighbours, and how Israel even considered using the West Bank for more nuclear reactors, see Tom Segev, 1967, Israel, the War, and the Year that Transformed the Middle East. On the synergies between US foreign policy to "divide and rule" in the Middle East and Israel's regional hegemony, see Jonathan Cook, Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East. For insights into US strategy to bulk Israel while buttressing "moderate" Arab allies against Iran's nuclear "extremism", see "Chain Reaction: Avoiding a Nuclear Arms Race in the Middle East", a report to the Committee on Foreign Relations of the US Senate. For a convincing argument on reviving disarmament and preventing proliferation, see Weapons of Terror, Freeing the World of Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Arms, by the Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission. A version of this article will be published in Foreign Policy Edición Española.
