Clinton Legacy Watch #45: Making the Middle East Safe For Nuclear War?

(Washing ton, D.C.): The apparent failure yesterday of President Clinton’s latest effort to come to closure with Syria’s dictator, Hafez Assad, on the terms for restarting — if not for concluding — direct Israeli-Syrian negotiations amounts to a stay of execution, not a commutation of sentence. It is predictable that Assad, as cunning as he is ruthless, appreciates that his negotiating position is likely to improve as the clock runs out on Mr. Clinton’s presidency. The decrepit Syrian may ultimately pass on a deal with his abiding enemy, Israel, but if he actually wants one he will wait until it has been sweetened considerably.

At What Price ‘Peace’?

That being the case, no one should be under any illusion: There is no time for further deferring serious thought and debate about the price that will ultimately have to be paid by the United States, to say nothing of Israel, for Mr. Clinton’s Middle East legacy. An important contribution toward that debate has recently been made by an impressive array of national security experts who have issued the attached memorandum to the Congress under the sponsorship of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA).

Particularly noteworthy is the warning offered by these experts against one particularly insidious form of bakshish President Clinton seems prepared to offer Assad: materiel assistance for Syria’s armed forces. “It appears that Syria is seeking a qualitative improvement in its military forces for purposes that are unlikely to advance Western interests in general, or American interests in particular. As American military professionals, we strongly oppose the rehabilitation of Syrian military capabilities — whether directly or through the provision of economic assistance that permits the Syrian government to spend its own limited resources on military equipment.”

The Next Shoe to Drop?

If a report in the 27 March edition of the Sunday Times of London is accurate, there may be even greater danger associated with Mr. Clinton’s efforts to lubricate Israel’s surrender of the Golan Heights. According to an article headlined “Israeli Plan for Golan Nuclear Shield,” the paper says the Barak government plans to place neutron land mines — reduced-blast nuclear devices designed to kill with intense radiation — as a means of protecting Israel from attack once Syria can again use the Heights as an invasion route.

[Israeli] military sources say that although the Israeli government will not acknowledge it — Israel does not admit it is a nuclear power — portable, low-yield neutron bombs have been perfected over the past two decades at a factory in the west of the country….Israel, fearing a repeat of Syria’s invasion in 1973, has demanded that any deal include the withdrawal of all of Assad’s tank units north to the Damascus basin, but military strategists concede that even if that were implemented, a Syrian rapid invasion force could be at the new Israeli border within 12 hours….[Israel’s neutron weapons] apparently [have] a yield of 250 tonnes and could subject anyone within a radius of several hundred yards to a potentially lethal dose of radiation while leaving military vehicles beyond the point of impact largely intact.

The Bottom Line

Israel may well feel it needs nuclear landmines to provide a deterrent to renewed Syrian aggression once the strategic depth afforded by the Golan Heights is lost. It says volumes about the folly of a so-called “peace process” that would replace a secure and peaceable border with one that could precipitate a nuclear conflagration — and the inadvisability of continued American pressure to bring it about.