Oh lord, if this is true....

Ed Blanche, a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, writing in the Daily Star of Lebanon:

Western military analysts have long believed that Saudi Arabia was the Arab power most likely to take up the nuclear weapons option and in recent days there has been mounting speculation that Riyadh is moving in that direction. ... Nuclear proliferation by the Saudis and others and the "war on terrorism" is a dangerous mix.

That scenario has been given considerable weight by the hardening evidence that Iran has had a clandestine nuclear arms program for some years and that Israel’s newly acquired German-built submarines are being equipped with nuclear-tipped cruise missiles, greatly extending Israel’s nuclear reach. [And] Israel claims Libya is seeking nuclear know-how.

I recall reading a fair number of years ago in the dim days before the web - hell, before ARPANET - when reading actually meant holding pieces of paper in our hands, a survey of foreign policy analysts on where in the world the first truly nuclear war was most likely to occur. The strong consensus was the Middle East, with India-Pakistan second and a US-USSR war a distant third. Happily, thankfully, we have thus far escaped any empirical demonstration of the rightness or wrongness of their opinions, but the risk remains and now, it appears, grows and spreads: "It is not at all inconceivable," declares an independent analysis cited by Blanche, "that a Middle East with four, five or six nuclear-weapon states, including Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, will be the reality of the early 21st century."

Some of this risk arises from the spread of technology: "India and Pakistan, which took widely divergent routes to their bombs, have shown how hard it is to deny simple but effective nuclear weaponry even to relatively poor nations." ("Deadly Secrets," Scientific American, August 1998, no online link of which I'm aware) But much of it is due to political considerations, considerations which go beyond the oft-noted failure of the major nuclear powers to reach any effective agreement to limit and reduce their arsenals despite specific pledges to do so (such pledges being a cornerstone of efforts to get non-nuclear nations to adopt the Non-Proliferation Treaty). Blance writes that

There has been much speculation that Riyadh is seeking either nuclear technology or actual weapons from Pakistan, a nuclear power with whom it has had close ties for many years. Riyadh and Islamabad deny they have a nuclear pact, or are working toward one. The US State Department says that it has "not seen any information to substantiate" reports that the Saudis are trying to acquire nuclear weapons.

Yet a State Department study published in August 2002 reported that senior Saudi officials had discussed the prospect of nuclear arms cooperation with Pakistan. And in November 2002, a former US Defense Intelligence Agency official, Thomas Woodrow, said that Riyadh had been financing Islamabad’s nuclear and missile purchases from China.

Woodrow, a senior China analyst, wrote in a research paper that "Saudi Arabia has been involved in funding Pakistan’s missile and nuclear program purchases from China, which has resulted in Pakistan becoming a nuclear weapon-producing and proliferating state." He went on to note that Riyadh was "buying nuclear capability from China through a proxy state, with Pakistan serving as the cut-out." ...

Suspicions that the Saudis were funding Pakistan’s nuclear arms program have been around for years. Both governments have denied it, but the Saudis have had exceptional access to Pakistan’s maximum-security nuclear facilities for years. In 1999, Saudi Arabia’s powerful defense minister, Prince Sultan, was admitted to the uranium-enrichment plant and ballistic missile production facilities at Kahuta, near Islamabad shortly after Pakistan conducted nuclear tests. Woodrow said Sultan "may also have been present in Pakistan" during the test-launch that year of the nuclear-capable Ghauri missile.

Crown Prince Abdullah visited Pakistan on Oct. 18-19 amid considerable speculation that nuclear arms was high on his agenda.

What this means is that the US had clear evidence that the Saudis were not only helping the Pakistanis develop nuclear weapons but they were trying to obtain their own through them. Far more evidence, that is, than we had against Saddam Hussein. In the latter case, it was argued that the information we had, flimsy where it wasn't false, was still enough to justify bombing, attacking, invading, overthrowing, and occupying. In the former, it's, well, it's just not.

This is, let me be clear, not to advocate bombing Saudi Arabia. It is to point out yet again the hypocrisy of US policy and the lies we were told about Iraq and to suggest how ideological constraints can lead to ignoring reality. Back in May, 2002, I wrote to a friend

Now, I don't believe that even the people around Bush would knowingly allow September 11 to happen. But I do wonder how much a concern about offending the Saudis - which aggressive attention to al-Qaeda certainly could threaten to do - lead to a policy of handling things "carefully" which in turn lead to downplaying the potential (and in retrospect, obvious) threat.

I can only hope that my fear that this same sort of mistake is being repeated is unfounded.