CHENEY TO ISRAEL: THANKS FOR DESTROYING IRAQI REACTOR; WILL U.S. TAKE 10 YEARS TO ACCEPT ISRAELI STANCE ON PEACE?

(Washington, D.C.): This week, U.S.
Defense Secretary Dick Cheney once again
displayed the courage and vision for
which he became justifiably famous in the
course of the Desert Shield/Desert Storm
operations. During a speech before the
Jewish Institute for National Security
Affairs (JINSA) on 28 October 1991, this
distinguished former member of the Center
for Security Policy’s Board of Advisors
made diplomatic history.

In a breathtaking departure from the
United States’ official condemnation of
Israel’s brilliant 1981 attack on the
Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak,
Secretary Cheney addressed himself to
David Ivry, the current Director
General of the Israeli Ministry of
Defense and commander of the Israeli
Air Force at the time, saying: “Let
me tonight in front of this group thank
my good friend David Ivry for the action
Israel took in 1981 with respect to the
[Osirak] reactor.” He added:
“There were many times during the
course of the build-up in the Gulf and
the subsequent conflict that I gave
thanks for the bold and dramatic action
that had been taken [by Israel] some ten
years before.”

Each passing day, with its new
revelations of the breadth and
aggressiveness of Saddam Hussein’s
nuclear weapons acquisition effort,
powerfully underscores the Secretary of
Defense’s concerns. Indeed, it is now
obvious to everyone what Israel contended
all along: Had Osirak been allowed to
come on line as planned, the Butcher of
Baghdad would long ago have secured
fissionable material for use in atomic or
thermonuclear devices. Were he to have
done so, subsequent history might well
have been substantially different.

At the time of the attack, of course,
the State Department prevailed on a
Reagan Administration otherwise quite
committed to the strategic relationship
with Israel to repudiate the attack.
While President Reagan personally
regarded it as a brilliant military
maneuver, he nonetheless acceded to the
demands of U.S. embassies throughout the
Arab world and joined the hysterical
rhetorical assault on Israel in the
United Nations and elsewhere. It
detracts in no way from the significance
— or the praiseworthiness — of
Secretary Cheney’s remark to note that
such a reversal of the American stance on
the Osirak raid is long overdue.

Unfortunately, the United States is
once again assailing the Jewish state for
a policy Israel regards as central to its
security — construction of settlements
in the “occupied” territories
and resistance to demands for the return
of those territories to Arabs long
committed to Israel’s destruction. The
Center for Security Policy believes that
it would tragic indeed if, as a result of
U.S. criticism and coercion, Israel were
now to abandon a prudent security policy
only to discover ten years later — or
possibly far sooner — that the
United States was wrong again.

Ironically, this point was made
forcefully at the JINSA dinner by the
woman who was ordered to criticize and
cast the U.S. vote against Israel in the
United Nations in the aftermath of the
attack on the Osirak reactor. Ambassador
Jeane Kirkpatrick, another member of the
Center’s Board of Advisors, put it
characteristically eloquently and
directly: “[Israel’s] margin
for security is as narrow as the country
itself.”