by B. R. GOWANI
Last month, CNN’s GPS (Global Public Square) of Fareed Zakaria had Israel’s Defense Minister Ehud Barak as a guest. As expected, the subject of Iran and its nuclear program came up. Barak repeated the same hawkish line, as has been adopted by so many others who are itching for a war against that country. It was the usual rubbish about how dangerous Iran is, not just to Israel but to the whole world.
Barak also disagreed with Zakaria about MAD. (MAD or Mutually Assured Destruction is a situation where two hostile parties with a capability to destroy each other will avoid any military action because destruction of both parties is guaranteed.) It worked very well between the two super powers, the USSR and the US, who were able to survive the Cold War.
In one of his earlier programs, Zakaria had toyed with the idea of MAD by suggesting that even if Iran were to acquire nuclear weapons, it will not be inclined to use them against Israel because that country is a nuclear power already. So then it would work as a detente between Iran and Israel.
But Zakaria never raised the question with Barak as to why he is so insistent on neutralizing Iran’s nuclear program (which has not yet produced any nuclear weapon) whereas his own country is sitting on a pile of nuclear weapons.
But then that act would have amounted to committing a blasphemy. And the punishment would be a beheading-not Zakaria’s but that of GPS.
(Yesterday, CNN’s founder Ted Anderson, now no longer with CNN, was on CNN’s Pierce Morgan Show. He was asked about Iran’s nuclear program. Anderson said a very good thing: The world should be nuclear free. He was honest. He said why can’t Iran have a couple of nuclear weapons when Israel has over a hundred of them.)
B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com