http://www.newsmax.com/Headline/israel-iran-korea-nukes/2013/04/12/id/499262?s=al&promo_code=1322F-1
Analysts fear a dramatic advance in North Korea’s nuclear missile technology, revealed inadvertently during a Congressional hearing Thursday, will quickly find its way to Iran — forcing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to fast-track a long-contemplated attack against Tehran’s nuclear-enrichment facilities.
Pentagon officials are playing down a U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency assessment that North Korea probably has the ability to miniaturize a nuclear weapon and place it on an ICBM. U.S. officials say that miniaturization capability, if it exists, is untested and unreliable.
In February, North Korea detonated what is described as a “lighter, miniaturized atomic bomb.” At the time, there was speculation this could signal the Hermit Kingdom had developed a nuclear warhead that it could place on its long-range missiles. Pentagon officials, however, continued to insist North Korea was at least a year away from developing that capability.
Jerusalem Post defense analyst Yaakov Katz, author of “Israel vs. Iran: The Shadow War,” tells Newsmax that U.S. and Israeli intelligence officials have generally agreed that it would take Iran six to 12 months to build a nuclear device once it tried to break out and enrich its material from the 20-percent to the 90-percent level required. Beyond that, intelligence experts have projected, it would then take Iran another year or two to produce a miniaturized warhead that could be installed on a missile.
Now, Katz says, the time lag between reaching nuclear capability and Iran’s ability to arm a missile with a nuclear warhead appears to have vanished. That means Thursday’s revelation could reduce Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s nonmilitary options against Iran, forcing the Jewish state to step up its timetable for attacking the Persian nation should it acquire enough enriched uranium to be a significant threat.
“If the North Koreans are much more advanced than we assumed, then that could mean that when the Iranians surge to move forward, that the whole time frame would change also,” Katz tells Newsmax. “It would mean Israel and the West would have to revisit the time frames that they’ve put in for the Iranians, and that could be much shorter now — which means your window of opportunity [to attack] is also becoming smaller.”
Experts say Israel would have to assume that any North Korean miniaturization technology would soon find its way into the hands of Iran’s mullahs. In fact, it is possible Iranian technology enabled North Korea’s push to miniaturize its warheads — the step that makes them capable of being installed on an ICBM. There is widespread agreement in the intelligence community that the two embattled nations routinely exchange technology, and sometimes military hardware as well.
“That’s no secret,” says Katz. “There’s been a lot of cooperation between the Iranians and the North Koreans.”
He adds: “Israel has always made the assessment that whatever is going on in North Korea, you have to assume it’s also … taking place in Iran. So that technical cooperation is still working.”
Obama administration officials have been downplaying the immediate threat from North Korea, even as the Pentagon rushed a THAAD missile interceptor system, which had not been scheduled to enter service until 2015, to Guam to protect American interests. It also announced it would revive the Bush-era plan to add 14 more interceptors to the missile shield that protects America’s West Coast, which it had previously canceled.
The news that one U.S. intelligence agency believes North Korea already has achieved the ability to design nuclear-missile warheads was inadvertently disclosed by GOP Rep. Doug Lamborn of Colorado on Thursday during a hearing of the House Armed Services Committee. He was reading a portion of a classified document that had been erroneously marked declassified.
That disclosure means Israeli leaders must now assume the window between the moment Iran acquires nuclear capability, and the horrific moment when it could launch an attack on a major Israeli city such as Tel Aviv, would be a matter of months or weeks rather than years, experts say.
That North Korea has helped Iran bolster its missile technology is well established. In recent years, as Iranian technology surpassed that of North Korea, the technical assistance flowed the other way as well, sources say.
According to Heritage Foundation senior research fellow Bruce Klingner: “Clearly there has been a decades-long missile relationship, and it began with a one-way sale of missiles to Iran. … Over time it became a two-way, collaborative relationship.”
Klingner adds that a collaborative relationship between the two rogue nations on nuclear technology “is beyond question,” although much more difficult to assess due to its secretive nature.
One example of that cooperation: A February 2010 diplomatic cable released by the WikiLeaks organization revealed that Iran had obtained 19 advanced North Korean missiles with a Russian design known as R-27. The R-27 was initially used aboard Soviet submarines to launch nuclear missiles. At the time, analysts predicted the acquisition of the R-27 would enable Iran to reverse-engineer a new class of missiles with greater range and payloads.
“Every once in a while, you hear reports a North Korean scientist has popped up in Iran or vice versa,” Human Events senior writer John Hayward tells Newsmax.
“We have been assuming … we’ll know the exact moment when Iran has everything it needs to make a devastating weapon,” Hayward adds. “But it seems from today’s news we don’t really have that confidence anymore. We don’t know where either Iran or North Korea really is.”
Intelligence experts have decried the dearth of U.S. “humint,” or human intelligence, from North Korea. As for Iran, Israeli intelligence is believed to have both human and electronic intelligence sources. While North Korea’s capabilities are often opaque, Katz says intelligence officers in Israel and the West have “always been quite confident” that they will know almost immediately should Iran try to break out and enrich its uranium to be nuclear-weapons capable. And so far that has not occurred.
In his September speech to the United Nations, Netanyahu spoke of a “red line” that Iran must not be allowed to cross. He also stressed that time was already running out to rein in Iran’s nuclear activities.
“Each day, that point is getting closer,” he said. “That’s why I speak today with such a sense of urgency. And that’s why everyone should have a sense of urgency. … The relevant question is not when Iran will get the bomb. The relevant question is at what stage can we no longer stop Iran from getting the bomb.”
Thursday’s revelation hardly marked the first time national-security experts have underestimated the Hermit Kingdom’s nuclear progress. Just months before the CIA announced in January 1994 that North Korea probably had developed nuclear weapons, U.S. diplomats were negotiating with North Korea in the belief there was still time to reach an agreement.
Now, U.S. analysts appear once again to have underestimated its capabilities.
Before the DIA analysis was revealed, Michael A. Dodge of the conservative Heritage Foundation told Newsmax: “North Korea has demonstrated the basic technology to hit the U.S.; the question is whether they can miniaturize the nukes to put on the missiles. We think we have some time before they can do that, but in the past we have had a tendency to underestimate the North Korean threat.”
Hayward of Human Events doubts Israel would take action against Iran while the U.S. national security apparatus is on tenterhooks over North Korea. But he says the news that North Korea may have mastered the ability to miniaturize its nuclear weapons and put them on a ballistic missile has moved up Netanyahu’s red line for unilaterally launching an attack on Iran’s nuclear-enrichment facilities.
“He believes that ‘moderate confidence’ assessment, and he has said many times they can’t afford to take risks. That was the whole point of that speech where he drew the bomb on that piece of paper at the U.N. He was busy explaining: ‘We can’t gamble;
we can’t suppose they’re years away when they’re not. We have to stop this before it crosses a certain point.’
“And if you’ll remember, that ‘certain point’ was basically getting things that are small enough to be assembled in locations that are almost impossible to strike, and then getting them into ballistic missiles. It’s not just the missile capability. It’s the fact that once you get there, it becomes very difficult to stop the process. So I think he may see that red line being right on top of him.”
In December, North Korea launched a Unha-3 missile that placed an object into orbit. U.S. officials have estimated the range of that missile at some 6,200 miles, sufficient to threaten Guam, Hawaii, Alaska, and the U.S. West Coast. The Musudan missiles North Korea is expected to launch in coming days have a much shorter range, about 2,500 miles. But that still puts Japan and Guam well within range. The United states has 28,000 military personnel in South Korea; 40,000 in Japan; and Guam, a U.S. territory, has a population of approximately 160,000. It also hosts major U.S. Navy and Air Force bases.
In recent days the administration has responded to the North Korean threat by rushing advanced radar systems and anti-missile capabilities to the Pacific theater, and decided to beef up its missile interceptor capability on the West Coast.
Says Klingner: “I think the Obama administration’s reversal on the missile interceptor programs was the administration getting caught flat-footed apparently, supposedly by the long-standing North Korean nuclear and missile threat. … They based it on a sudden, unexpected acceleration of the Korean missile threat. Well, it was not.”
In fact, Klingner tells Newsmax, a 2001 intelligence assessment predicted that by 2015, at the current rate of progress, the United States would face an ICBM threat from North Korea.
Former U.S. ambassador to North Korea Christopher Hill, meanwhile, told Fox News on Friday that the Pentagon’s insistence that North Korea has yet to test the accuracy of its nuclear-missile technology is largely irrelevant. Whether the DIA’s projection, which is made with “moderate” rather than “high” confidence, is accurate now misses the larger point, he says.
“Sooner or later that report is going to be correct, so the same old question is, what are we going to do about it? … We’ve got to make very clear that we are not going to accept this,” Hill said.
He added that North Korea’s bellicose missile launches and nuclear-arms development must now be the No. 1 diplomatic issue between the United States and China.
What does the US believe regarding North Korea - contrast the State Department vs Defense Intelligence Agency views....
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/13/world/asia/contrasting-views-on-north-korea-underscore-sensitivities-and-lack-of-evidence.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Another perspective....... Who is the rogue here ?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/09/nuclear-us-rogue-state-iran-north-korea
Israel May Fast-Track Plans to Attack Iran
Friday, 12 Apr 2013 04:49 PM
Pentagon officials are playing down a U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency assessment that North Korea probably has the ability to miniaturize a nuclear weapon and place it on an ICBM. U.S. officials say that miniaturization capability, if it exists, is untested and unreliable.
In February, North Korea detonated what is described as a “lighter, miniaturized atomic bomb.” At the time, there was speculation this could signal the Hermit Kingdom had developed a nuclear warhead that it could place on its long-range missiles. Pentagon officials, however, continued to insist North Korea was at least a year away from developing that capability.
Jerusalem Post defense analyst Yaakov Katz, author of “Israel vs. Iran: The Shadow War,” tells Newsmax that U.S. and Israeli intelligence officials have generally agreed that it would take Iran six to 12 months to build a nuclear device once it tried to break out and enrich its material from the 20-percent to the 90-percent level required. Beyond that, intelligence experts have projected, it would then take Iran another year or two to produce a miniaturized warhead that could be installed on a missile.
Now, Katz says, the time lag between reaching nuclear capability and Iran’s ability to arm a missile with a nuclear warhead appears to have vanished. That means Thursday’s revelation could reduce Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s nonmilitary options against Iran, forcing the Jewish state to step up its timetable for attacking the Persian nation should it acquire enough enriched uranium to be a significant threat.
“If the North Koreans are much more advanced than we assumed, then that could mean that when the Iranians surge to move forward, that the whole time frame would change also,” Katz tells Newsmax. “It would mean Israel and the West would have to revisit the time frames that they’ve put in for the Iranians, and that could be much shorter now — which means your window of opportunity [to attack] is also becoming smaller.”
Experts say Israel would have to assume that any North Korean miniaturization technology would soon find its way into the hands of Iran’s mullahs. In fact, it is possible Iranian technology enabled North Korea’s push to miniaturize its warheads — the step that makes them capable of being installed on an ICBM. There is widespread agreement in the intelligence community that the two embattled nations routinely exchange technology, and sometimes military hardware as well.
“That’s no secret,” says Katz. “There’s been a lot of cooperation between the Iranians and the North Koreans.”
He adds: “Israel has always made the assessment that whatever is going on in North Korea, you have to assume it’s also … taking place in Iran. So that technical cooperation is still working.”
Obama administration officials have been downplaying the immediate threat from North Korea, even as the Pentagon rushed a THAAD missile interceptor system, which had not been scheduled to enter service until 2015, to Guam to protect American interests. It also announced it would revive the Bush-era plan to add 14 more interceptors to the missile shield that protects America’s West Coast, which it had previously canceled.
The news that one U.S. intelligence agency believes North Korea already has achieved the ability to design nuclear-missile warheads was inadvertently disclosed by GOP Rep. Doug Lamborn of Colorado on Thursday during a hearing of the House Armed Services Committee. He was reading a portion of a classified document that had been erroneously marked declassified.
That disclosure means Israeli leaders must now assume the window between the moment Iran acquires nuclear capability, and the horrific moment when it could launch an attack on a major Israeli city such as Tel Aviv, would be a matter of months or weeks rather than years, experts say.
That North Korea has helped Iran bolster its missile technology is well established. In recent years, as Iranian technology surpassed that of North Korea, the technical assistance flowed the other way as well, sources say.
According to Heritage Foundation senior research fellow Bruce Klingner: “Clearly there has been a decades-long missile relationship, and it began with a one-way sale of missiles to Iran. … Over time it became a two-way, collaborative relationship.”
Klingner adds that a collaborative relationship between the two rogue nations on nuclear technology “is beyond question,” although much more difficult to assess due to its secretive nature.
One example of that cooperation: A February 2010 diplomatic cable released by the WikiLeaks organization revealed that Iran had obtained 19 advanced North Korean missiles with a Russian design known as R-27. The R-27 was initially used aboard Soviet submarines to launch nuclear missiles. At the time, analysts predicted the acquisition of the R-27 would enable Iran to reverse-engineer a new class of missiles with greater range and payloads.
“Every once in a while, you hear reports a North Korean scientist has popped up in Iran or vice versa,” Human Events senior writer John Hayward tells Newsmax.
“We have been assuming … we’ll know the exact moment when Iran has everything it needs to make a devastating weapon,” Hayward adds. “But it seems from today’s news we don’t really have that confidence anymore. We don’t know where either Iran or North Korea really is.”
Intelligence experts have decried the dearth of U.S. “humint,” or human intelligence, from North Korea. As for Iran, Israeli intelligence is believed to have both human and electronic intelligence sources. While North Korea’s capabilities are often opaque, Katz says intelligence officers in Israel and the West have “always been quite confident” that they will know almost immediately should Iran try to break out and enrich its uranium to be nuclear-weapons capable. And so far that has not occurred.
In his September speech to the United Nations, Netanyahu spoke of a “red line” that Iran must not be allowed to cross. He also stressed that time was already running out to rein in Iran’s nuclear activities.
“Each day, that point is getting closer,” he said. “That’s why I speak today with such a sense of urgency. And that’s why everyone should have a sense of urgency. … The relevant question is not when Iran will get the bomb. The relevant question is at what stage can we no longer stop Iran from getting the bomb.”
Thursday’s revelation hardly marked the first time national-security experts have underestimated the Hermit Kingdom’s nuclear progress. Just months before the CIA announced in January 1994 that North Korea probably had developed nuclear weapons, U.S. diplomats were negotiating with North Korea in the belief there was still time to reach an agreement.
Now, U.S. analysts appear once again to have underestimated its capabilities.
Before the DIA analysis was revealed, Michael A. Dodge of the conservative Heritage Foundation told Newsmax: “North Korea has demonstrated the basic technology to hit the U.S.; the question is whether they can miniaturize the nukes to put on the missiles. We think we have some time before they can do that, but in the past we have had a tendency to underestimate the North Korean threat.”
Hayward of Human Events doubts Israel would take action against Iran while the U.S. national security apparatus is on tenterhooks over North Korea. But he says the news that North Korea may have mastered the ability to miniaturize its nuclear weapons and put them on a ballistic missile has moved up Netanyahu’s red line for unilaterally launching an attack on Iran’s nuclear-enrichment facilities.
“He believes that ‘moderate confidence’ assessment, and he has said many times they can’t afford to take risks. That was the whole point of that speech where he drew the bomb on that piece of paper at the U.N. He was busy explaining: ‘We can’t gamble;
we can’t suppose they’re years away when they’re not. We have to stop this before it crosses a certain point.’
“And if you’ll remember, that ‘certain point’ was basically getting things that are small enough to be assembled in locations that are almost impossible to strike, and then getting them into ballistic missiles. It’s not just the missile capability. It’s the fact that once you get there, it becomes very difficult to stop the process. So I think he may see that red line being right on top of him.”
In December, North Korea launched a Unha-3 missile that placed an object into orbit. U.S. officials have estimated the range of that missile at some 6,200 miles, sufficient to threaten Guam, Hawaii, Alaska, and the U.S. West Coast. The Musudan missiles North Korea is expected to launch in coming days have a much shorter range, about 2,500 miles. But that still puts Japan and Guam well within range. The United states has 28,000 military personnel in South Korea; 40,000 in Japan; and Guam, a U.S. territory, has a population of approximately 160,000. It also hosts major U.S. Navy and Air Force bases.
In recent days the administration has responded to the North Korean threat by rushing advanced radar systems and anti-missile capabilities to the Pacific theater, and decided to beef up its missile interceptor capability on the West Coast.
Says Klingner: “I think the Obama administration’s reversal on the missile interceptor programs was the administration getting caught flat-footed apparently, supposedly by the long-standing North Korean nuclear and missile threat. … They based it on a sudden, unexpected acceleration of the Korean missile threat. Well, it was not.”
In fact, Klingner tells Newsmax, a 2001 intelligence assessment predicted that by 2015, at the current rate of progress, the United States would face an ICBM threat from North Korea.
Former U.S. ambassador to North Korea Christopher Hill, meanwhile, told Fox News on Friday that the Pentagon’s insistence that North Korea has yet to test the accuracy of its nuclear-missile technology is largely irrelevant. Whether the DIA’s projection, which is made with “moderate” rather than “high” confidence, is accurate now misses the larger point, he says.
“Sooner or later that report is going to be correct, so the same old question is, what are we going to do about it? … We’ve got to make very clear that we are not going to accept this,” Hill said.
He added that North Korea’s bellicose missile launches and nuclear-arms development must now be the No. 1 diplomatic issue between the United States and China.
What does the US believe regarding North Korea - contrast the State Department vs Defense Intelligence Agency views....
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/13/world/asia/contrasting-views-on-north-korea-underscore-sensitivities-and-lack-of-evidence.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Contrasting Views on North Korea Underscore Sensitivities and Lack of Evidence
By DAVID E. SANGER and ERIC SCHMITT
Published: April 12, 2013
WASHINGTON — On the hawkish end is the Pentagon’s intelligence arm, the Defense Intelligence Agency, which fears that North Koreacould threaten American troops with a nuclear weapon on a crude missile. On the skeptical end is the State Department, which has more doubts about Pyongyang’s capabilities. And somewhere in the middle is the Central Intelligence Agency.
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Those contrasting views are vying with one another in the intelligence community, and a hint of those differences came into rare public view on Thursday when an assessment by the Defense Intelligence Agency that it has “moderate confidence” that North Korea has the ability to shrink a nuclear weapon and fit it into a missile warhead surfaced at a Congressional hearing. That conclusion was disputed by James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, who issued a statement later in the day saying that it did not reflect “the consensus” of the nation’s intelligence community.
The contradictory statements and sudden round of finger-pointing seemed to underscore once again the difficulty of obtaining reliable information — and making educated guesses — about one of the world’s most closed societies. But it also highlighted the sensitivity surrounding intelligence estimates in the wake of the highly publicized intelligence failures leading up to the Iraq war, and some subsequent failures involving North Korea.
“The situation is that there is so little direct evidence that I don’t think it’s possible to come to a firm conclusion on whether or not they currently have a nuclear warhead that can be delivered by missile,” said Gary Samore, who until early this year served as President Obama’s coordinator for weapons of mass destruction, “or how far away they are from getting there.”
Mr. Samore, now at Harvard’s Belfer Center, added that when it comes to arming the North’s Nodong missiles — which can hit South Korea and American troops there, but not beyond — with a nuclear warhead, “the best you can say is that they might have.”
A decade ago the Defense Intelligence Agency was among the most aggressive in pressing the case that Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program. It was famously deceived by information provided by an insider code-named “Curveball.”
But the differences between this case and Iraq are considerable. There is no argument that the North can build a modest bomb — its most recent test is believed to have yielded an explosion of 6 to 10 kilotons, less than what the United States dropped on Hiroshima. But there does not appear to be clear evidence of its work on miniaturizing that bomb.
An administration official said that including an unclassified passage in a largely classified seven-page assessment of North Korean capabilities by the Defense Intelligence Agency was “clearly a human error.” But he would not describe how it happened, nor would Defense Department officials say how that single conclusion ended up in the open, especially if it lacked the context of much more detailed reports.
In his statement, the famously press-shy Mr. Clapper said, “North Korea has not yet demonstrated the full range of capabilities necessary for a nuclear armed missile.”
On Friday morning, a Republican member of Congress said “demonstrated” was the crucial phrase: North Korea has never conducted a test of a warhead, showing that it could be precisely targeted or that it could survive the heat and forces of re-entry into the atmosphere. But he said that there is “a consensus building” among rival intelligence agencies that “If they are not there, they are close to there.” Differences among the assessments, he added, “are not huge.”
The last time the differences among intelligence agencies came into such sharp relief was 10 years ago this spring, when the Bush administration sought to explain why it had dismissed the dissenting opinions of parts of the intelligence community over Iraq’s nonconventional weapons.
The Defense Intelligence Agency’s conclusion was clearly an assessment that the Obama administration was not eager to share with the world. Officials said that at a moment when there were troubles with Iran and Syria, to say nothing of the rest of the Arab world, there was little desire to rekindle the North Korean crisis. That is especially true because North Korea has not demonstrated any capability to place its weapons on a missile, meaning that all the intelligence assessments were based on analysis, not discoveries.
But that effort came undone when a staff member on a House Armed Services subcommittee that oversees nuclear issues read a copy of the agency’s classified report, as part of his regular staff work, according to two people briefed on the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the internal communications between Congress and the Pentagon.
The staff member noticed an important one-paragraph conclusion that was labeled “unclassified,” and went to the Defense Intelligence Agency’s legislative affairs liaison, who confirmed it. The staff member then alerted an influential member of the subcommittee, Representative Doug Lamborn, a fourth-term Republican of Colorado and a co-chairman of the House’s missile defense caucus, who decided to ask Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, about the report’s conclusion at a budget hearing on Thursday. “It’s important to have all the facts on the table,” Mr. Lamborn said in a telephone interview Friday, adding that he had no misgivings about asking his question in a public hearing.
Republicans in Congress have led efforts to increase money for missile defense, and Mr. Lamborn said that he raised the issue largely because the Obama administration proposed this week in its annual budget submission to reduce financing for missile defenses by more than $500 million.
Given the agency’s responsibility for protecting American forces, it is not surprising that the Defense Intelligence Agency has been the most aggressive in arguing that North Korea is on the verge of marrying the products of its nuclear and missile programs. Two years ago, Lt. Gen. Ronald L. Burgess Jr., then the head of the agency, edged up to a similar conclusion, but with several caveats.
In testimony to Congress, he said, “The North may now have several plutonium-based nuclear warheads that it can deliver by ballistic missiles, and aircraft, as well as by unconventional means.” The last two in his list were important: it would require no new technology to devise a weapon to fit on a plane or a donkey cart.
The hardest task, experts say, would be for North Korea to design a warhead for an intercontinental missile. That warhead would go through the huge heat and stress of leaving, then re-entering the atmosphere. The North would have to design a warhead durable enough to keep from burning up, or breaking up, on re-entry. That is why other agencies are more skeptical.
Another perspective....... Who is the rogue here ?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/09/nuclear-us-rogue-state-iran-north-korea
In this nuclear standoff, it's the US that's the rogue state
The use of threats and isolation against Iran and North Korea is a bizarre, perilous way to conduct foreign relations
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'The alleged crises over North Korea and Iran are just not serious enough to warrant the classroom language of shunning and punishment.' Illustration by Belle Mellor
By coincidence two clashes over nuclear issues are hitting the headlines together. North Korea and Iran have both had sanctions imposed by foreign governments, and when they refuse to "behave properly" they are submitted to "isolation" and put in the corner until they are ready to say sorry and change their conduct. If not, corporal punishment will be administered, since they have been given fair warning by the enforcers that "all options are on the table".
It's a bizarre way to run international relations, one we continue to follow at our peril. For one thing, it is riddled with hypocrisy, and not just because states that have hundreds of nuclear weapons are bullying states that have few or none. The hypocrisy is worse than that. If it is offensive for North Korea to talk of launching a nuclear strike at the United States (a threat that is empty because the country has no system to deliver the few nuclear weapons that it has), how is it less offensive for the US to warn Iran that it will be bombed if it fails to stop its nuclear research?
Both states would be resorting to force when dialogue is a long way from being exhausted. They would also be acting against international law. That is patently clear if North Korea ever managed to launch a nuclear strike against South Korea or the US, but the same is true of an altogether more feasible attack on Iran. There is no conceivable scenario under which the United Nations security council would authorise the United States, let alone Israel, to take military action, even if Iran were to tear up its long-standing statement that nuclear bombs are un-Islamic and produce one. So why does Washington go on with its illegal threats?
The underlying cause of most international tension is the unwillingness of powerful states to recognise that we live in a multipolar world. The idea of hegemony, often sanitised as "leadership", is unacceptable. In a post-colonial era there are multiple centres of authority, international influence and soft power, and we should rejoice when new or old states, individually or collectively, have the courage and ability to challenge another state's ambition to be a superpower. States will always make common cause or "coalitions of the willing" on specific issues, but interests fluctuate and priorities change – and we should junk the cold war-style system of military alliances and ideological or sectarian camps.
Let us go further and drop the figment of an "international community", at least in its current western definition as "the United States and its friends". By the same token, let's correct the myopia around isolation. When the leaders of 120 nations travelled to Tehran to ratify Iran's presidency of the Non-Aligned Movement last August, it was risible to hear US officials still talking of Iran being "a rogue state".
In Washington and Whitehall it may seem self-evident that the international community should arm the opposition to Syria's President Assad, but that is not the view of the world's largest democracy, India, or of the most democratic African and Latin American states, South Africa and Brazil. When their leaders convened with Russia and China (in the new Brics coalition) in Durban last month, they "re-affirmed our opposition to any further militarisation of the conflict" and called for a political settlement.
Of course, the non-aligned and Brics summits were barely covered by the US media in its news or comment columns, the normal technique of reality suppression used by American opinion-formers and policy-makers. Rami Khouri, the distinguished US-trained Lebanese writer, calls it "professionally criminal". After a month in the US recently, he found that coverage of Iran was based on "assumptions, fears, concerns, accusations and expectations almost never supported by factual and credible evidence". In as much as these distortions build public support for a military attack on Iran, he finds it as culpable as the media's role in the runup to the attack on Iraq a decade ago.
The alleged crises over North Korea and Iran are just not serious enough to warrant the classroom language of shunning and punishment. Dialogue and respect for other people's positions are the better course. Discuss everything as a package rather than dangle incentives one by one like sweets.
Ironically, it was Iran at the recent talks with security council members that suggested a roadmap with a clear end state: the acceptance of Iran's right to enrich uranium like any other signatory of the non-proliferation treaty. In other words, the issue is primarily a matter of national dignity and sovereignty. Meanwhile, the US declined to promise to lift all sanctions whatever Iran does.
On Korea the best approach is also comprehensive. This would mean trying to reach the full-scale peace treaty that was never concluded when the war ended 60 years ago. North Korea wants a treaty as a sign, like Iran, that the US accepts it as a legitimate state. Steps towards one were agreed in 2007 and a few positive moves followed. But they collapsed when the mentality of suspicion and sanctions revived under the pressure of electoral politics in Seoul and Washington and the arrival of an inexperienced new leader in Pyongyang. It is not too late to drop the self-defeating language of "rogue states" beyond the pale of the "international community" and try again.
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