Will NATO's 60th Anniversary Be Its Last?

If you think the Afghan War is increasingly unpopular in the United States, try Europe. A recent German Marshall Fund poll offered these figures on the question of the "share of population who want to reduce or withdraw troops" from that country: Romania, 71%; Poland, 68%; United Kingdom, 60%; Germany, 57%; Italy, 55%; Spain, 54%; France, 51%; Netherlands, 50%. When NATO took on its initial reconstruction role in Afghanistan -- a show of support for the U.S. and a pledge to help clean up its post-invasion mess -- it seemed a major step in the expansion of an alliance with the word "Atlantic" prominently in its name. It also represented something else seldom commented on: the long-term inability of junior partner Europe -- former French President Charles de Gaulle excepted -- to say "no" to whatever Washington desired.

Of course, a number of European countries, possibly fearing the worst, placed restrictions on their Afghan expeditionary forces that were meant to keep them out of the thick of fighting and, in some cases, restrict them to the north of Afghanistan where Pashtuns were relatively few and the Taliban weak to nonexistent. So much for hoping against hope. The war has slowly spread northwards and headlines like last weekend's "Seven NATO soldiers die in Afghanistan" have grown ever more common. Lurking behind rising European popular dissatisfaction over the alliance's Afghan albatross lie bigger questions: When will the Europeans finally say that "no," and what will that mean for NATO? These are questions co-director of the invaluable Foreign Policy in Focus website and TomDispatch regular John Feffer addresses on his return from a recent trip across the Atlantic. Tom

Afghanistan: NATO's Graveyard?

Is the Transatlantic Alliance Doomed?
By John Feffer

Celebrating its 60th birthday this year, NATO is looking peaked and significantly worse for wear. Aggressive and ineffectual, the organization shows signs of premature senility. Despite the smiles and reassuring rhetoric at its annual summits, its internal politics have become fractious to the point of dysfunction. Perhaps like any sexagenarian in this age of health-care crises and economic malaise, the transatlantic alliance is simply anxious about its future.

Frankly, it should be.

The painful truth is that NATO may be suffering from a terminal illness. Its current mission in Afghanistan, the alliance's most significant and far-flung muscle-flexing to date, might be its last. Afghanistan has been the graveyard of many an imperial power from the ancient Macedonians to the Soviets. It now seems to be eyeing its next victim.

For NATO, this year should have been a celebration, not a dirge. After suffering a transatlantic rift of epic proportions during the Bush years, the alliance thrilled to the election of Barack Obama and his politics of conciliation. The new American administration swore it would shift troops from Iraq to Afghanistan to give NATO more of what it wanted to fight "the right war." Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton both promised to push the "reset button" on U.S.-Russian relations, potentially removing one of the greatest obstacles to NATO's health and well-being. And in a final flourish for the alliance's diamond jubilee, France agreed to return to the fold, reintegrating into NATO after 43 years of standoffishness.

But hold those celebrations. Afghanistan has an uncanny ability to spoil anybody's best-laid plans. At the April 2009 NATO summit in Strasbourg, Obama failed to get the troop reinforcements he wanted from his European allies. The NATO powers, in any case, have attached so many strings and caveats to the troops they are supplying -- Germany has kept its soldiers away from the conflict-ridden south, most contingents have complex rules limiting combat operations, Canada will be pulling out in 2011 -- that NATO's mission resembles Gulliver tied down by the Lilliputians.

The real nail in NATO's coffin, however, has been its stunning lack of success on the ground. The Taliban has, in fact, not only increased its hold over large parts of southern Afghanistan, but spread north as well. Most embarrassingly for NATO, a recent surge of alliance troops seems only to have made the Taliban stronger. Nearly eight years of alternating destruction (air bombardment, over 100,000 troops on the ground) and reconstruction ($38 billion in economic assistance appropriated by the U.S. Congress since 2001) have all come up desperately short. A new counterinsurgency campaign doesn't look any more promising. What was once billed as the most powerful military alliance in history has been thwarted by an irregular set of militias and guerrilla groups without the backing of a major power in one of the poorest countries on Earth.

Worse yet, the Afghan operation has become a serious political liability for many NATO members. European politicians fear the kind of electoral backlash that ousted Britain's Tony Blair and Spain's Jose Maria Aznar when the Iraq War went south. Despite enthusiasm for Obama, European public opinion is, by increasingly large margins, in favor of reducing or withdrawing troops from Afghanistan (55% of West Europeans and 69% of East Europeans according to a recent German Marshall Fund poll). Mounting combat fatalities, a rising civilian casualty count, and devastating snafus like the recent bombing of two fuel trucks stolen by the Taliban in Kunduz Province that killed many civilians have only strengthened anti-war feeling.

Meanwhile, in the United States, both elite and public opinion is turning against the war. With the American economy still reeling from recession, President Obama faces a guns-vs-butter dilemma that threatens to wreck his domestic agenda as surely as the Vietnam War deep-sixed Lyndon Johnson's Great Society reforms of the 1960s. No surprise then that the president is ambivalent about following his top general's request to send yet more U.S. troops to fight in what the press now calls "Obama's War."

Not so long ago, pundits were calling for a global NATO that would expand its power and membership to include U.S. partners in Asia and elsewhere. This hubris has given way to despair and discord. Although the United States still holds out hope for a NATO that focuses on global threats like terrorism and nuclear proliferation, other alliance members would prefer to refocus on the traditional mission of defending Europe. Add in disagreements between the United States and its allies over how to approach the Afghan situation and NATO begins to look more like a rugby scrum than a military alliance.

NATO officials are now scrambling to sort things out, in part by calling the allies together to debate a new Afghan strategy before the year ends. Meanwhile, NATO's Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen is preparing a new "strategic concept" that would recode the organization's operating system for the next summit in Lisbon in 2010.

It might be too little, too late. Some U.S. officials are fed up with what they consider European dilly-dallying about Afghanistan. "We have been very much disappointed by the performance of many if not most of our allies," Robert E. Hunter, the U.S. ambassador to NATO during the Clinton administration, recently said in testimony before Congress. "Indeed, there are elements within the U.S. government that are beginning to wonder about the continued value of the NATO Alliance."

As for the Europeans, they are building up their own independent military capabilities -- and will continue to do so whether or not NATO gets its act together. The question is: Will the Afghan War eventually push the United States and Europe toward an amicable divorce? If so, the military campaign that was to give NATO a new lease on life and turn it into a global military force will have proven to be its ultimate undoing.

Near-Death Experiences

This is NATO's second brush with death since the collective security organization was founded in 1949 to counter the Soviet Union. Although it didn't fire a shot during its entire Cold War existence, NATO did fulfill its mission: to keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down, according to the infamous catechism of Lord Ismay, NATO's first secretary general.

When the Cold War ended and the Warsaw Pact vanished, NATO was suddenly an organization without a mission. During the early 1990s, it cast around for new portfolios -- environmental work, humanitarian missions, anything. It needed a raison d'être fast. After all, the conflict-prevention mission of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe spoke more directly to the post-Cold War temperament, and transatlantic publics were eager for their peace dividends. NATO was seen as a pillar of the old world order at a time when even President George H.W. Bush seemed prepared to accept something radically new (though he settled, of course, for a rough approximation of the status quo ante).

Tragedy proved NATO's salvation. The organization got a second wind when Yugoslavia disintegrated into warring states and European governments did little to prevent the bloodletting in the Balkans. The United States belatedly turned to NATO in 1995 to fly a few bombing missions against Serbian forces during the Bosnian conflict. Then, in 1999, responding to fears of Serbian escalation in Kosovo, NATO engaged in its first-ever war. During the 77-day conflict, the alliance conducted 38,000 air sorties against Serbian targets that resulted in considerable "collateral" damage including Serbian civilians, Albanian refugees, and, famously, the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. Although no NATO personnel died during these combat operations, the alliance acquired a reputation as the gang that couldn't shoot straight.

As if the Balkans weren't rationale enough, NATO also fell back on an old directive: to keep Russia out. Eastern Europe's persistent fear of its former overlord injected new purpose into the organization. Although Russia's leaders believed that Washington had promised not to expand NATO into Eastern Europe, the alliance did just that -- and with gusto. First, it established a kind of alliance halfway house in 1994 that it dubbed the Partnership for Peace; then, in 1999, NATO accepted the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland as members; and five years after that, it expanded into the former Soviet Union by absorbing the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia along with Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. Russia has, to put it mildly, been less than thrilled by NATO's eastward leap and then creep. Meanwhile, wary of Russia's military campaigns in Chechnya, Georgia, and Moldova as well as its energy power plays against countries to its west, the Eastern Europeans have eagerly huddled beneath the NATO "umbrella."

As it happens, neither the Balkan tragedies nor the putative Russian threat proved to be unalloyed blessings for the alliance. The Balkan campaigns created enormous stress for its military command, and only the brevity of the air war over Kosovo saved it from popular repudiation across Europe. The expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe, meanwhile, made consensus within an already unwieldy institution more difficult.

The once central focus of NATO -- a commitment to the collective defense of any member under attack -- was, by now, looking ever less workable. Western European countries appeared anything but enthusiastic about the idea of defending the former Soviet bloc states against a prospective Russian attack. And despite promises to station troops in Central and Eastern Europe, the United States left its new NATO allies in the lurch. "While they are loath to say it publicly, [Central and Eastern European] leaders have told me that they are no longer certain NATO is capable of coming to their rescue if there were a crisis involving Russia," wrote Ronald Asmus, former deputy assistant secretary of state in the Clinton administration. "They no longer believe that the political solidarity exists or that NATO's creaky machinery would take the needed steps."

On the eve of September 11th, a decade after the end of the Cold War, NATO had become an overstretched alliance with an ill-defined but expansive mission and a collection of member states increasingly at odds with each other. When the United States prepared to attack Afghanistan and then Iraq, the Bush administration simply bypassed NATO, constructing its own ad hoc coalitions "of the willing." (Only in 2003 did the Bush administration turn to NATO to shoulder some of the local burden.) There could have been no greater vote of no-confidence in the institution.

The Afghan Test Case

Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. troop presence in Europe has been plummeting. From a Cold War peak of several hundred thousand, it had dropped to around 44,000 by 2007. Reductions to the 30,000-level or even lower have been discussed. With U.S. forces stretched to the limit elsewhere in the world and U.S. strategists fixated on the energy heartlands of the Middle East and Central Asia, the European theater of operations has been (and remains) the obvious place for force reductions.

Washington will certainly continue to maintain key military bases in the United Kingdom, Italy, and Germany and has been setting up new ones in Bulgaria, Romania, and Kosovo (that just happen to be closer to the energy resources of Eurasia and the Middle East). Turkey and possibly the Balkans are slated to become important locations for a more advanced version of the missile defense system that President Obama recently canceled for Poland and the Czech Republic, bases which once figured prominently in the Bush administration's plans for Europe. In sum, U.S. forces and resources once available to NATO's European operations have been rapidly dwindling.

At the same time, in the Bush years Washington chose to push the alliance to expand beyond its traditional focus on Europe and think global, focusing on terrorism, piracy, nuclear proliferation, and other international threats. In this way, the United States imagined that it might be able to place some of the financial burden for its own self-appointed global mission on its European allies. The Afghan War and reconstruction effort, an out-of-area operation with global significance, was clearly to be the test case for Washington's version of a new and improved NATO.

On the other hand, the newest members of the alliance from Eastern and Central Europe wanted the focus to remain on threats to Europe itself (that is, to them). They continued to be purely Russia-focused. The leadership in Poland and the Czech Republic, in particular, were eager for the recently canceled missile defense bases not because they particularly believed in, or cared about, missile defense per se, or feared a future Iranian first strike, but because they were eager for proof of Washington's willingness to counter Moscow. For these Europe Firsters, Afghanistan has been nothing but a distraction from the essential mission of keeping the Russian bear at arm's length.

This, then, is the tug of war within NATO: between the Europe First faction and the Go Global faction. Oddly, both sides appear on the verge of falling into the mud. Now that the Obama administration is making nice with Russia, the Europe Firsters don't have a threat to stand on. For the Go Global faction, meanwhile, victory within NATO requires victory within Afghanistan, which is why, in 2007, future AfPak czar Richard Holbrooke declared that "Afghanistan represents the ultimate test for NATO."

If Afghanistan is the test, then NATO is flunking. The Taliban has made a steady comeback since its rout in 2001. More American soldiers, as well as more soldiers from the other coalition partners, have already died in 2009 than in any of the previous eight years. The number of civilian casualties -- 2008 was a record year and 2009 will likely break that record -- fly in the face of NATO's "responsibility to protect" guidelines. There aren't anywhere near the number of troops necessary for an effective counterinsurgency campaign, if such a thing were even possible in distant Afghanistan, and what troops are there have proven ill-trained for "hearts and minds" work. Nor are there sufficient Afghan troops trained, almost eight years after the initial invasion of that country, to "Afghanize" the NATO side of the conflict. As for the grander projects of democracy promotion and nation-building, Afghanistan's rudimentary economy remains heavily dependent on opium poppy production and its political system suffers from rampant corruption of which the irregularities of the most recent presidential election represent only the tip of the malfeasance.

No wonder, then, that the Europeans are thinking seriously about how to get out. After a suicide attack in Kabul killed six Italian paratroopers in mid-September, for instance, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi announced that "we must bring our boys home as soon as possible." The war also suddenly became a major issue in Germany on the eve of national elections when a German commander called in U.S. air strikes on those two stolen fuel trucks in Kunduz. The attack, which killed an unknown number of Afghan civilians, has driven home to the German public that its mission in Afghanistan qualifies as neither a humanitarian nor a stabilization effort, and anti-war sentiment is rising accordingly. Moreover, the bombing has caused an unusual upsurge in bickering between Germany and the United States over responsibility for the incident and overall strategy. Just over the summer, the British lost 40 soldiers in the conflict, and a majority of Britons now want their troops withdrawn right away, which is likely to mean that the government's reported decision to send yet another 1,000 troops to Afghanistan will go down very poorly indeed with the voters.

How can NATO go global when it can't even pass its first major test in Afghanistan? "It is of course possible that NATO can survive Afghanistan even in the absence of total success: it depends on the extent of its failure," Danish security analysts Jens Ringsmose and Sten Rynning have written. "What seems certain is that failure in the Hindu Kush will constitute a serious blow to global NATO."

With NATO having to downscale, like the rest of us in these recessionary times, forget the notion that the alliance should mount out-of-area operations, argues former U.S. diplomat David T. Jones for the conservative think tank Foreign Policy Research Institute. "Aggression, terrorism, piracy, and human rights debacles need be addressed, but NATO is not the hammer for these nails. The United States needs to be more discerning about using this stiletto to chop wood. A 'coalition of the willing' is a tarnished term, but NATO is verging on becoming a coalition of the unwilling."

"NATO often seems to be an organization that is permanently in crisis, but it always seems to bounce back," argues Ian Davis of NATO Watch. "This is partly because collective defense/security solutions continue to make sense, not least to: prevent a renationalization of defense in Europe; to lock-in U.S. administrations (as far as possible) to multilateral and law-based approaches; and to provide sufficient security guarantees to enable nuclear disarmament to proceed, and for likely recessionary conventional disarmament to take place without causing instability." But will these workaday goals be enough to keep the institution afloat?

Fine-Tuning the Prime Directive

In 2010, NATO will update its prime directive for the first time in a decade, and the Go Global faction will battle with the Europe Firsters for the driver's seat. Neither group is likely to gain enough power within the organization to steer it alone. Undoubtedly, a compromise will emerge. For instance, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former U.S. national security adviser and consummate geopolitician, argues in a recent Foreign Affairs essay that NATO should focus on building security relationships with the world. In this scenario, NATO emerges as more of a grand facilitator than a robust fighting force. If, on the other hand, Afghanistan truly takes the fight out of NATO, the more radical proposals of the Citizens Declaration of Alliance Security, which calls for a more defensive military posture at lower levels of spending, while restricting out-of-area operations to U.N.-authorized missions, might come into play.

All institutions have a strong survival instinct, if only to continue providing salaries to their employees. NATO will surely outlive its strategic planning process, its failures in Afghanistan, and its adjustment to new global threats. But it may survive in name only. If it shrinks to the role of grand facilitator or U.N. handmaiden, it will have effectively ceased to be a transatlantic collective security organization. The United States will then lean toward ad hoc coalitions to achieve its military objectives, while Europe build ups its independent military power.

Initially, Europe began to beef up its collective military capabilities to acquire a voice in the international community commensurate with its economic power, as well as to send a not-so-subtle message to the unilateralist Bush administration. Today, the European Union maintains two rapid-deployment battle groups of 1,500 soldiers each and expects, in the near future, to pull together another 10 or so battle groups from existing national armies. These forces have already conducted missions in more than 20 countries. Europe's military-industrial complex, meanwhile, is trying to push up military budgets and aggressively market European arms in overseas markets. All of this still represents a far cry from what NATO commands, but a signal is certainly being sent: if the United States thinks it can go it alone -- or simply dragoon the alliance into its own version of a global mission -- Europe will have options.

Even at 60, NATO hasn't quite proven that it can live on its own in a sustainable and responsible manner. Indeed, it is still struggling with a Hamlet-like identity crisis: to attack or not to attack. The Afghan war has only underscored this central paradox. If the alliance doesn't engage in military operations, everyone questions its ultimate purpose. But if it does go to war -- and the war is unsuccessful -- everyone questions its ultimate efficacy.

Damned if it does and damned if it doesn't, NATO will limp along much as the British and Soviet empires did after their misadventures in Central Asia. These were, after all, dead empires walking. NATO may be in this category as well. It just doesn't know it yet.

John Feffer is the co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies and writes its regular World Beat column. His past essays, including those for Tomdispatch.com, can be read at his website.

Copyright 2009 John Feffer

Israel Crosses the Threshold

By Avner Cohen and William Burr | © 2006 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

In September 9, 1969, a big brown envelope was delivered to the Oval Office on behalf of CIA Director Richard Helms; on it he had written "For and to be opened only by: The President, The White House." [1]

Chicago Mob Chosen President

The precise contents of the envelope are still unknown, but evidence suggests it was the latest intelligence on one of Washington's most secretive foreign policy matters: Israel's nuclear program.

The material was so sensitive that the nation's spymaster was unwilling to share it with anybody but President Richard Nixon himself. [2]

The now-empty envelope is kept inside a two-folder set labeled "NSSM 40," held by the Nixon Presidential Materials Project at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. (NSSM is the acronym for National Security Study Memorandum, a series of policy studies produced by the national security bureaucracy for the Nixon White House). The NSSM 40 files are almost bare; save for a handful of administrative notes, they contain mostly "withdrawal sheets" for the many documents that remain classified.

But with the aid of recently declassified documents, as well as interviews with some of the key figures during that era, we now know that NSSM 40 was the Nixon administration's effort to grapple with the policy implications of a nuclear-armed Israel.

These documents offer unprecedented insight into the tense deliberations within the White House in 1969--a crucial juncture in history when international ratification of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) was uncertain, and when U.S. policy makers feared that a Mideast conflagration could lead to superpower conflict. The ramifications of the Nixon administration's decisions are still felt today.

Israel's nuclear program began more than 10 years before the big brown envelope landed on Nixon's desk. In 1958, Israel secretly initiated construction work at what was to become the Dimona nuclear research site. It wasn't until December 1960 that the United States identified what the facility was for. Months afterward, the CIA estimated that Israel could produce nuclear weapons within the decade.

The discovery presented a difficult challenge for U.S. policy makers: Only 15 years after the Holocaust, in an era when nuclear nonproliferation norms did not yet exist, Israel's founders believed they had a compelling case for acquiring nuclear weapons. From the U.S. perspective, Israel was a small, friendly state, albeit one outside the boundaries of formal U.S. alliance or security guarantees, surrounded by much larger enemies vowing to destroy it. Most significantly, Israel enjoyed unique domestic support in America. If the United States was unwilling to officially guarantee Israel's borders, how could it deny Israel the ultimate defense?

Yet, government officials also saw the Israeli nuclear program as a potential threat to U.S. interests. President John F. Kennedy feared that without decisive international action to curb nuclear proliferation, a world of 20-30 nuclear weapon states would be inevitable within a decade or two. Israel was at the divide between the uncontrolled nuclear proliferation of the past and the emerging nonproliferation prohibition. If the United States could not influence small Israel to not go nuclear, how could it persuade the Germans and other nations to not acquire the bomb?

In June of 1963, David Ben-Gurion resigned as Prime Minister of Israel, citing “personal reasons.” With Ben-Gurion’s resignation, JFK was left without an Israeli government with which he could negotiate. Researchers believe, however, that Ben-Gurion retired to focus on the upcoming November assassination of JFK in order to supervise the Mossad hit team as it practiced in the Negev near his kibbutz. On November 22, 1963 JFK was assassinated by elements of the Mossad gangs under Yitzchak Rabin's supervision who was in Dallas on November 22, 1963. (According to Leah Rabin's autobiography, her husband Yitzchak was in Dallas on November 22, 1963.). By the time a new government was formed, the Kennedy threat to dismantle Israel's nuclear capability had been eliminated. The death of JFK would leave room for two conniving Zionist puppets Lyndon Johnson and head of CIA George W. Bush who were far more sympathetic to the goals of the Zionist state. Some JFK researchers point fingers to crypto-Jew James Jesus Angleton as the man who was most likely the mastermind & coordinator behind the assassination. His mother was a Mexican Jewish woman. Angleton also manned the CIA's Israel desk for many years.

The Kennedy and Johnson administrations fashioned a complex scheme of annual inspections at Dimona to assure that Israel would not develop nuclear weapons. But the Israelis were adept at concealing their activities. By late 1966, Israel had reached the nuclear threshold, although it decided not to conduct an atomic test.

By the time Prime Minister Levi Eshkol visited President Lyndon B. Johnson in January 1968, the official State Department view was that despite Israel's growing nuclear weapons potential, it had "not embarked on a program to produce a nuclear weapon." [3] That assessment, however, eroded in the months ahead.

In November 1968, Paul Warnke, the assistant secretary of defense for international security, was engaged in intense negotiations with Israeli ambassador (and future prime minister) Yitzhak Rabin. At issue was a forthcoming sale of F-4 Phantom aircraft to Israel. The NPT had already been completed and submitted to states for their signature. U.S. officials believed that the F-4 deal provided leverage that would be America's last best chance to get Israel to sign the NPT.

Yet it was clear that the two negotiators came to the table with completely different mindsets. Israel had previously pledged not to be the first country to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East. But how does one define "introduce"? For Warnke, the physical presence of nuclear weapons entailed the act of introduction. Rabin, however, argued that for nuclear weapons to be introduced, they needed to be tested and publicly declared. By these criteria, he argued, Israel had remained faithful to its pledge. [4] When Warnke heard Rabin's interpretation, as he told one of the authors years later, he realized that Israel had already acquired the bomb. [5]

The question of what to do about the Israeli bomb would fall to Nixon when he came to office three months later. From the outset, however, it was clear that his administration had different views than his Democratic predecessors. The Nixon team was initially quite skeptical about the effectiveness and desirability of the NPT. Morton Halperin, who served on the National Security Council (NSC) staff during the early Nixon administration, recalls the sense of anxiety among arms control professionals over whether the new president would support ratification of the treaty. When he and his NSC associate Spurgeon Keeny went to lobby National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger on the matter, they were bluntly told that any country with major security problems would try to get the bomb and the United States should not interfere. [6] Meanwhile, Israeli officials were heartened. Rabin noted in his memoirs that he recognized that a Republican administration would be more sympathetic to Israel's security needs--including, presumably, the nuclear field--than the Johnson administration. [7]

While Nixon and Kissinger may have been initially inclined to accommodate Israel's nuclear ambitions, they would have to find ways to manage senior State Department and Pentagon officials whose perspectives differed. Documents prepared between February and April 1969 reveal a great sense of urgency about Israel's nuclear progress. Henry Owen, chairman of the State Department's Policy Planning Council, wrote in February to Secretary of State William Rogers, "Intelligence indicates that Israel is rapidly developing a capability to produce and deploy nuclear weapons, and to deliver them by surface-to-surface missile or a plane. Recognizing the adverse repercussions of the disclosure, the Israelis are likely to work on their nuclear program clandestinely till they are ready to decide whether to deploy the weapons." [8] That same month, Defense Secretary Melvin Laird advised Rogers, Kissinger, and CIA Director Helms that he also believed that Israel had made significant progress on its nuclear and missile programs and "may have both this year." [9] The next month, he wrote that he had received additional evidence that enhanced his earlier assessment. [10]

In early April, Joseph Sisco, assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern and South Asian affairs, echoed Laird's intelligence assessment, but he was even more specific: He saw little "doubt that the green light has been given to Israeli technicians to develop the capability to build a bomb at short notice." It was possible, Sisco opined, that Israel would follow a "last wire" concept, "whereby all the components for a weapon are at hand, awaiting only final assembly and testing." [11]

The intelligence that led senior officials to these dire conclusions remains classified. However, today we know of many telltale signs that revealed Israel was on the brink. Among the known evidence was the purchase of huge quantities of uranium (such as the 1968 Plumbat affair involving a shipment of large quantities of yellowcake diverted from Belgium to Israel). Also telling was information about nuclear-related aerial exercises and the advanced development (and preparation for deployment) of the Jericho missile, an Israeli version of the French-made MD-620 ballistic missile. Still, it is clear that the intelligence was partial and inconclusive. U.S. officials were uncertain as to whether Israel was only days or even hours away from possessing fully assembled and deliverable nuclear weapons.

Yet, the policy implications alarmed senior officials. As Laird wrote in late March, these "developments were not in the United States' interests and should, if at all possible, be stopped." [12] Sisco was not sure when or how Israel would "choose to display a nuclear weapon," but he agreed that a nuclear-armed Israel would have "far-reaching and even dangerous implications" for the United States, such as increased Arab-Israeli tensions (with a greater danger of a U.S.-Soviet confrontation), growing Arab disillusionment with the peace process, and encouragement of further nuclear proliferation in the Arab world and elsewhere. [13]

Although Sisco shared Laird's sense of urgency, they parted ways on what to do about it. Laird believed the United States should take measures, both carrots and sticks, to stop Israel from further nuclearization. Sisco was more dubious--some would say realistic--about what the Nixon administration could or should do about it. If the United States told Israel in unequivocal terms that its nuclear ambitions "would cause a fundamental change in the U.S.-Israel relationship," Sisco concluded that such an exchange would require open pressure and spark extraordinary domestic political controversy. And "halfway measures" such as using weapons deliveries "as leverage" would be "futile and probably counterproductive." [14] As it turned out, differences between Defense and State would lessen as the White House initiated the NSSM 40 exercise.

It's unclear exactly what prompted Kissinger to initiate NSSM 40, but we do know that he issued it on or about April 10, 1969. Quite likely, the memos from Laird and Sisco triggered a greater sense of urgency at the White House. Moreover, it is evident that Kissinger asked the national security bureaucracy for a review of policy options toward Israel's nuclear program. NSC staffers Halperin and Harold Saunders played a key role in drafting NSSM 40 for Kissinger to sign. [15]

NSSM 40, and the documents and deliberations that it generated, were all classified Top Secret/Nodis ("no distribution" without the permission of authorized officials) and distributed to a tiny group of senior officials at NSC, State, Defense, and the CIA. Significantly, neither the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA), with its responsibility for nuclear proliferation issues, nor the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), which conducted the visits at Dimona, were involved in NSSM 40, probably because Nixon did not trust their respective chiefs Gerard C. Smith and Glenn Seaborg (a holdover from the Kennedy and Johnson administrations). [16]

Sometime after issuing NSSM 40, a Kissinger-chaired Senior Review Group (SRG) took the issue in hand. Participation was restricted to a few senior officials, including Elliot Richardson (undersecretary of state), David Packard (deputy secretary of defense), Gen. Earle Wheeler (chairman of the Joint Chiefs), and Helms. Halperin recalls that he was to attend an SRG meeting on NSSM 40 until Kissinger prevented that, telling him that he could not have "two Jewish people" from the NSC on such a sensitive committee. [17]

The one available report of an SRG meeting on NSSM 40 suggests that the bureaucracy was willing to exert some pressure to halt the Israeli nuclear program, although Kissinger voiced his reservations. During the meeting on June 26, 1969, Packard suggested that if Israel "signs the NPT and gives appropriate assurances on not deploying nuclear weapons, we could live with a secret research and development program."

The apparent inconsistency of having both very advanced, secret R and D along with NPT commitments did not produce any demurs; others in the review group accepted the approach, seeking assurances that Israel would agree "not to carry forward any further development in the [nuclear] weapons field." That is, Washington should seek an assurance that Israel would not "develop a nuclear explosive device." [18]

How much pressure the United States should exert remained open. Kissinger wanted to "avoid direct confrontation," while Richardson was willing to exert pressure if a probe to determine Israeli intentions showed that assurances would not be forthcoming. In such circumstances, the United States could tell the Israelis that deliveries of the F-4s would "have to be reconsidered." As to the missile issue, there was less than full agreement. Some suggested pressing Israel to dismantle its missiles, others proposed an agreement not to deploy missiles but to store them away. (The CIA representative, Gen. Robert Cushman, noted that Israel already had "11 missiles and would have between 25 to 30 by the end of 1970, 10, reportedly, with nuclear warheads.")

The meeting ended with a general agreement to prepare an "issues" paper for Nixon that would spell out the U.S. options. Several days later, a six-page memo (whose authorship is unclear) titled "The Issues for Decision" was prepared for the president. The memo does not bear Nixon's initials on the decision lines, but other evidence, especially the record of a July 29 meeting with Rabin, indicates that he approved the course of action it proposed. [19]

The recommendations began with the premise that Nixon should authorize a major effort to keep nuclear weapons from being introduced into the Middle East: Dismissing "unrealistic" options such as pushing Israel to give up its weapons program, it "will be our stated purpose . . . to stop Israel from assembling completed explosive devices." Moreover, the United States would ask Israel to sign and ratify the NPT by the end of the year and to privately reaffirm its non-introduction pledge, interpreting "introduction" to mean physical possession of nuclear weapons.

A key issue was how to reach those objectives. There was broad consensus within the SRG, including Kissinger, on this point: The two deputies, Richardson and Packard, should summon Rabin and--in reference to an Israeli request to advance the delivery of the F-4s to August 1969--make the point that, while reviewing the details of the F-4 sale, the United States wanted "to tie up loose ends." This was a diplomatic way for the United States to say it first wanted to nail down the precise meaning of Israel's non-introduction pledge. There was much less agreement as to how much, and how explicitly, the United States should use the F-4 sale as leverage: "The issue is whether we are prepared to imply--and to carry out if necessary--the threat not to deliver the Phantoms if Israel does not comply with our request" [underlined in the original].

By mid-July Nixon had decided that he was "leery" of using the Phantoms as leverage, which meant that when Richardson and Packard met with Rabin on July 29, 1969, the idea of a probe that would involve some form of pressure had been torpedoed. [20] While Richardson and Packard emphasized the "seriousness" with which they viewed the nuclear problem, they had no big stick to support their rhetoric, except to the extent of implying a loose linkage by rebuffing Rabin's request for an August (one-month advance) delivery of the F-4s.

Richardson read a long talking paper expressing "deep concern" over the Israeli program--which would be a "tragedy for the Middle East and a direct threat to United States national security"--and Israel's troubling delay in signing the NPT. He then posed three issues for Rabin to respond to: the status of Israel's NPT deliberations; assurances that "non-introduction" actually meant "non-possession" of nuclear weapons; and assurances that Israel would not produce or deploy the Jericho missile for three years.

Rabin avoided any factual statements on any aspect of the nuclear program. On the NPT, he stated that the issue is still "under study" and that he was unauthorized to comment further. He refused to make any assurances or even express agreement with anything Richardson said regarding the definition of non-introduction. Alluding to the U.S. inspection visits to Dimona, however, Rabin pointed out that the United States had a unique arrangement that did not exist with other U.S. allies, which allowed Washington "a close look at what Israel is doing in the nuclear field." In this context, he claimed, "Everything seemed to be working as agreed." But Richardson did make the general point that the "Dimona visits do not obviate our concern about nuclear weapons, missiles, and the NPT."

The meeting ended with Richardson reiterating the seriousness with which the United States viewed the Israeli nuclear program. Rabin promised to convey the message to his government, but no deadline was given for a reply. Richardson notified Rogers (who was in Asia), Kissinger, and Sisco that the first step of the NSSM 40 exercise was complete. U.S. Amb. Walworth Barbour in Tel Aviv, who apparently was not conversant with the NSSM, was told only about Rabin's request to advance the delivery of the F-4s. [21]

Richardson had hoped for a démarche on Israel after one week, but the White House evidently did not support that. Whether Rabin realized that or not, he did not provide responses to the questions he had been asked. Indeed, when Richardson brought up the matter in late August, Rabin invoked a reason for a delay: Upcoming elections made the nuclear question a "difficult subject for his government." Prime Minister Golda Meir would have to address it when she met with Nixon in late September. [22]

Perhaps the most mysterious event of this tale (perhaps even of the entire Nixon administration's history) was Nixon's one-on-one meeting with Meir in the Oval Office on September 26, 1969. Kissinger was in a meeting with Rabin and Rogers at the same time and apparently remained only partially informed about the details of the talk with Meir, even after Nixon debriefed him. Senior officials with a need to know would never find out what happened. [23] Nixon later told Barbour that he dictated a record of the meeting, but if that record exists, it has not yet surfaced. [24] Nevertheless, some clues about the meeting are available that exemplified Nixon's inclination against a determined effort to roll back Israel's nuclear ambitions.

In the days before Meir's visit, the State Department produced an updated intelligence assessment suggesting that it was too late to push the Israelis to accept "non-possession" of nuclear weapons as the meaning of "non-introduction." Background papers prepared by the State Department for the meeting with Meir, including an intelligence update with clearance by all the relevant agencies (including the CIA, the Pentagon, and even the ACDA and the AEC), suggested that the horse was already out of the barn: "Israel might very well now have a nuclear bomb" and certainly "already had the technical ability and material resources to produce weapon-grade material for a number of weapons." If that was true, it meant that events had overtaken the NSSM 40 exercise; Israel most likely possessed nuclear weapons, a development that senior State and Defense officials had wanted to contain. [25]

Intelligence agencies also confirmed that Israel already possessed several prototypes of the MD-620 and could test-fire the Jericho. U.S. intelligence even had evidence that "several sites providing operational launch capabilities" were already complete. This meant that the demand that Israel neither deploy nor produce the Jericho was also already moot.

For the State Department, a nuclear Israel endangered U.S. interests, not least because if Israel "were to become known as a nuclear power, the United States would, however unjustly, be held responsible in the eyes of the great majority of the world community." The State Department advised Nixon to press Meir for assurances that "Israel would not possess nuclear weapons, would sign the NPT, and would not deploy missiles." [26] Whether he tried that--or even whether he shared the State Department's sense of danger--is unknown. Subsequent actions indicate that he did not.

In later years Meir never discussed the substance of her private conversation with Nixon, saying only, "I could not quote him then, and I will not quote him now." [27] Yet, we know that since the early 1960s, she always thought that "Israel should tell the United States the truth [on the nuclear issue] and explain why." [28] In his memoirs, Rabin indicated that the discussions between Nixon and Meir were highly sensitive; the understandings reached were informal and not recorded. [29] Some of the understandings concerned issues of procedure and communication, such as setting up direct channels between their offices to bypass their foreign policy bureaucracies. Naturally, the most sensitive and substantive understanding dealt with the nuclear issue.

Even without a record of this mysterious private meeting, informed speculation is possible. It is likely that Nixon started with a plea for honesty and openness on this most sensitive issue, as was appropriate to these two allies. Meir, in turn, probably acknowledged--in a tacit or explicit form--that Israel already had reached a weapons capability, which would have meant that pressing Israel to equate "non-introduction" with "non-possession" would be absurd. (Years later, Nixon told CNN's Larry King that he knew for certain that Israel had the bomb, but he wouldn't reveal his source.) [30] It is also possible that Meir assured Nixon that Israel thought of nuclear weapons as a truly last-resort option, a way to provide her Holocaust-haunted nation with a psychological sense of existential deterrence.

Subsequent memoranda from Kissinger to Nixon provide a limited sense of what Kissinger thought happened at the meeting. He noted that the president had emphasized to the prime minister that "our primary concern was that the Israeli [government] make no visible introduction of nuclear weapons or undertake a nuclear test program." In other words, Nixon had pressed her to abide by Rabin's interpretation that the "introduction of nuclear weapons" would mean a nuclear test or a formal declaration. Thus, Israel would be committed to maintaining full secrecy over its nuclear activities, keeping their status ambiguous and uncertain. Meir also confirmed that the NPT issue would not be settled until after the elections and that missiles would not be deployed "for at least three years." [31]

Soon after Meir departed Washington, Rabin informally provided replies to all three of Richardson's questions and asked whether they were satisfactory in light of the discussion between Meir and Nixon. In an October 7, 1969, memo, Kissinger reported the questions and answers as follows:

"Q: Would the Israelis assure us that they would not 'possess' nuclear weapons? A: Israel will not become a nuclear power.

"Q: Would they be willing to affirm that they would not deploy strategic missiles? A: They will not deploy strategic missiles until at least 1972.

"Q: Would they be willing to sign the NPT? A: The NPT will be considered by the new government." [32]

The next day Kissinger signed a six-page memo to Nixon analyzing the meaning and the policy implications of Rabin's replies and proposing recommendations for the U.S. reaction. In his cover memorandum, Kissinger wrote that his paper was "much longer than the one-page analysis I had promised you, but this issue is so sensitive and has been held to such a limited group of individuals that I believe that it is essential that you be presented with all nuances of the problem." [33]

On Rabin's first reply, Kissinger admitted that he did not understand why Israel preferred to define its assurance in terms of not being a nuclear power, while leaving the issue of nuclear possession untouched. "When I asked [Rabin] how a nation could become a nuclear power without 'possessing' nuclear weapons, he simply said they 'prefer' their formulation." Kissinger's bottom line was that as vague as Rabin's response was, Nixon should accept it as a private Israeli commitment to language derived from the NPT because it sounded like an assurance roughly corresponding to Article 2 of the treaty, where non-nuclear states agree not to "manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons."

Nixon approved that recommendation as well as the next, on the missile issue. Kissinger would tell the Israelis that their response was acceptable, provided they agreed to further discussion of the subject with the United States in 1971 or prior to a decision to deploy the Jericho.

Regarding the NPT issue, Kissinger showed his uncertainty about the exact content of the Nixon-Meir meeting by observing, "Mrs. Meir may have made some commitment to you privately that would give this statement significance." His recommendation, which Nixon approved, was to tell Rabin that the president wishes that Meir make "a vigorous personal effort to win cabinet approval" of the NPT. Kissinger finally suggested that on this complex issue, Nixon should have the "opportunity for second thoughts," and that this should be known to the Israelis. Interestingly, Nixon left this recommendation unmarked.

After Kissinger communicated with Rabin, the ambassador met formally with Richardson on October 15 and officially replied to the three questions that he had been asked on July 29. [34] Rabin's formal answers substantially repeated what he told Kissinger, except that regarding "introduction," Rabin declared that it meant the "transformation from a non-nuclear weapons country into a nuclear weapons country." The strong language that Packard and Richardson had used in July had no impact; Israel rejected any language that touched upon possession.

When Kissinger briefed Nixon, he strained to find positive significance in Rabin's language defining "introduction" because he believed it paralleled the NPT's distinction between nuclear weapon and non-nuclear weapon states. That would allow Washington to be on record that it had Israel's assurances that it would remain a non-nuclear weapon state as defined in the NPT. Such assurances "would put on our internal record a rationale for standing down"; that is, they would effectively end the debate and discussion within the administration on pressuring Israel. Washington, Kissinger advised, had pushed the Israeli nuclear issue "as far as we constructively can." For Kissinger, for all practical purposes, the debate was over. [35]

While members of the SRG still raised the possibility of renewed pressure on Israel to sign the NPT, Kissinger waited for Jerusalem's formal response to the U.S. query on the treaty. On February 23, 1970, Rabin went alone to see Kissinger at his office. He came to inform him that Richardson had just called him in about the NPT, and he wanted the president to know that, in light of the conversation Nixon had with Meir in September, "Israel has no intention to sign the NPT." Rabin, Kissinger wrote, "wanted also to make sure there was no misapprehension at the White House about Israel's current intentions." He also sought an assurance that Washington would not establish any linkage between the NPT and arms sales to Israel. Kissinger ended his memo with one sentence: "I was noncommittal and told him that his message would be transmitted to the president." [36]

And with that, the decade-long U.S. effort to curb Israel's nuclear program ended. That enterprise was replaced by highest-level understandings that have governed Israel's nuclear conduct ever since.

That so little is known today about the tale of NSSM 40 is unsurprising. Dealing with Israel's nuclear ambitions was thornier for the Nixon administration than for its predecessors because it was forced to deal with the problem at the critical time when Israel appeared to be crossing the nuclear threshold. On top of that, Nixon and Kissinger lacked faith in the universality of nonproliferation--they differentiated between friends and foes.

Yet, even as Nixon and Kissinger enabled Israel to flout the NPT, NSSM 40 allowed them to create a "defensible record." [37] And, as was his typical modus operandi, Kissinger used NSSM 40 as a way to maintain control over key officials who wanted to take action on the problem. Not aware of the secret Nixon-Meir understanding, lower-level officials involved in the NSSM 40 exercise continued to believe that the Israeli nuclear issue was open and vainly tried to restart the inspection visits at Dimona.

Politically, the Nixon-Meir agreement allowed both leaders to continue with their old public policies without being forced to publicly acknowledge the new reality. As long as Israel kept the bomb in the basement--which meant keeping the program under full secrecy, making no test, declaration, or any other visible act of displaying capability or otherwise transforming its status--the United States could live with Israel's "non-introduction" pledge. A case in point: Even in a classified congressional hearing in 1975, the State Department refused to concur with the CIA estimate that Israel had the bomb. [38]

Over time, the tentative Nixon-Meir understanding became the solid foundation for a remarkable and dramatic deal, accompanied by a strict but tacit code of behavior to which both nations closely adhered. The deal created a "don't ask, don't tell" stance. And the United States gave Israel a degree of political cover in international forums such as the NPT review conferences. Secrecy, taboo, and non-acknowledgement became embedded within the U.S.-Israeli posture.

It is striking how much Israel has stuck to its part of the deal, at great expense and risk. To this day, all Israeli governments of the left and the right have been faithful in keeping secrecy over their nuclear weapons activities, making great efforts to assure that nothing would be visible, politically, technologically, militarily, or otherwise. Even during its darkest hours in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Israel was cautious not to make any public display in deed or word of its nuclear capability. [39]

Yet set against contemporary values of transparency and accountability, the Nixon-Meir deal of 1969 is now a striking and burdensome anomaly. Not only is Israel's nuclear posture of taboo and total secrecy anachronistic, it is inconsistent with, and costly to, the tenets of modern liberal democracy. At home and abroad Israel needs a better way to handle its nuclear affairs. The deal is also burdensome for the United States, not only because it is inconsistent with U.S. values of openness and accountability, but also because it provokes claims about double standards in its nuclear nonproliferation policy.

It is especially striking to compare the Nixon administration's stance toward Israel in 1969 with the way that Washington is trying to accommodate India in 2006. As problematic as the proposed nuclear deal with New Delhi is, it at least represents an effort to deal openly with the issue, rather than sweeping it under the rug. Without open acknowledgment of Israel's nuclear status, by Israel itself and by the rest of the world, such ideas as a nuclear-free Middle East, or even the inclusion of Israel in an updated NPT regime, cannot even be discussed properly. [40]

It is time for a new deal to replace the old Nixon-Meir understandings of 1969, with Israel telling the truth and in so doing finally normalizing its nuclear affairs.

Notes

The declassified documentary record that served as the primary source for this article is available on the National Security Archive website.

1. Nixon Presidential Materials Project (NPMP), National Security Council Files (NSCF), box H-146, NSSM 40, National Archives, College Park, Maryland. Unless otherwise indicated, all primary source documents cited in this article are from the National Archives.

2. National Intelligence Estimate, NIE 4-3-61, "Nuclear Weapons and Delivery Capabilities of Free World Countries Other than the U.S. and U.K.," September 21, 1961 (www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB155/index.htm).

3. "Israel: The Nuclear Issue and Sophisticated Weapons," December 31, 1967, State Department Records, Record Group 59 [RG 59], Subject-Numeric Files, 1967-1969 [SN 67-69], DEF 12. Some in the intelligence field believed, however, that such views were politically biased and that Israel was well under way to getting the bomb. Interview with Thomas L. Hughes, March 14, 2006, Chevy Chase, Maryland.

4. Avner Cohen, Israel and the Bomb (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), pp. 316-319.

5. Ibid. p. 319; Cohen, interview with Paul Warnke, Washington, D.C., May 21, 1996.

6. Interview with Morton Halperin, January 20, 2006, Washington, D.C.

7. Yitzhak Rabin, The Rabin Memoirs (Berkeley: University of California, 1996), pp. 131-134.

8. Henry Owen to Secretary of State William Rogers, "Impact on U.S. Policies of an Israeli Nuclear Weapons Capability," February 7, 1969, RG 59, SN 67-69, DEF 12 Isr.

9. Melvin Laird to Rogers et al., "Stopping the Introduction of Nuclear Weapons into the Middle East," March 17, 1969, NSCF, box 604, Israel vol. I.

10. Awareness of the trend is evident in documents prepared for the Rabin-Warnke talks in October 1968. See Briefing Memorandum from Amb. Parker T. Hart to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, "Issues to be Considered in Connection with Negotiations with Israel for F-4 Phantom Aircraft," October 15, 1968, SN 67-69, DEF 12-5 Isr.

Related:

11. Joseph Sisco to Rogers, "Israel's Nuclear Policy and Implications for the United States," April 3, 1969, SN 67-69, DEF 12 Isr.

12. Laird to Rogers et al., March 17, 1969.

13. Sisco to Rogers, April 13, 1969.

14. Ibid.

15. For the role of Halperin and Hal Saunders, see Saunders to Kissinger, April 4, 1969, NPMP, NSCF, box 604, Israel vol. I.

16. Nixon had consigned Glenn Seaborg to dealing with "technical" matters only, keeping him completely out of high policy issues. See Glenn Seaborg, Adventures in the Atomic Age: From Watts to Washington (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2001), pp. 213-217.

17. Interview with Halperin, January 20, 2006, Washington, D.C.

18. Rodger Davies to Granville Austin et al., "Review Group Consideration of Response to NSSM 40 June 26, 1969," June 30, 1969, RG 59, Top Secret Subject-Numeric Files, 1970-73, box 11, Pol Isr.

19. "The Issues for Decision," [July 1969], NPMP, NSCF, box 604, Israel vol. II. The document has no cover memos, annotations, or other indications that Nixon actually saw it or that Kissinger actually used it.

20. Telcon, Elliot Richardson and Henry Kissinger, July16, 1969, 5:55 p.m., NPMP, Henry A. Kissinger Telephone Conversation Transcripts, box 2; Richardson to Nixon, "Israel's Nuclear Program," with memorandum of conversation attached, August 1, 1969, NPMP, NSCF, box 604, Israel vol. II.

21. State Department cable 127273 to Tel Aviv, July 31, 1969, SN 67-69, DEF 12-5 Isr.

22. Richardson to Nixon, "Israel's Nuclear Program," August 28, 1969, SN 67-69, DEF 12-1 Isr.

23. Strikingly, also in October 1969, Nixon ordered a secret nuclear alert whose purposes were known only to a few officials at the White House and the Pentagon. See William Burr and Jeffrey Kimball, "Nixon's Nuclear Ploy," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, January/February 2003, pp. 28-37, 72-73.

24. Saunders to Kissinger, December 8, 1969, with Barbour letter to Sisco, November 19, 1969, NPMP, NSCF, box 605, Israel vol. III.

25. Rogers to Nixon, "Suggested Position for You to Take with Israeli Prime Minister Meir During Her Forthcoming Visit," September 18, 1969; Theodore L. Eliot to Henry Kissinger, "Briefing Book--Visit of Mrs. Golda Meir," September 19, 1969, enclosing "Background--Israel's Nuclear Weapon and Missile Programs," both in SN 67-69, Pol 7 Isr.

26. Rogers to Nixon, "Suggested Position for You to Take with Israeli Prime Minister Meir During Her Forthcoming Visit," September 18, 1969, SN 67-69, Pol 7 Isr.

27. Cohen, Israel and the Bomb, p. 336.

28. Ibid, p. 142 (footnote 8).

29. Rabin, The Rabin Memoirs, p. 155.

30. "An Evening with Former President Richard Nixon," Larry King Live, January 8, 1992, transcript no. 469.

31. Kissinger to Nixon, "Discussions with the Israelis on Nuclear Matters," October 7, 1969, and Kissinger to Nixon, "Israel's Nuclear Program," November 6, 1969, NPMP, NSCF, box 605, Israel vol. III.

32. Kissinger to Nixon, "Discussions with the Israelis on Nuclear Matters," October 7, 1969.

33. Kissinger to Nixon, October 8, 1969, enclosing "Rabin's Proposed Assurances on Israel Nuclear Policy," October 8, 1969, NPMP, NSCF, box 605, Israel vol. III.

34. Kissinger to Nixon, "Israel's Nuclear Program," November 6, 1969, with memcon attached.

35. Ibid.

36. Minutes, "Meeting of Special NSC Review Group on Israeli Assistance Requests," January 26, 1970, NPMP, NSC Institutional Files, box H-111, SRG Minutes Originals 1970 [5 of 5]; Memorandum of conversation, Kissinger and Rabin, February 23, 1970, NPMP, Henry A. Kissinger Office Files, box 134, Rabin/Kissinger 1969-1970 vol. I.

37. See "The Issues for Decision" [note 19]; Kissinger to Nixon, "Israeli Nuclear Program," November 6, 1969.

38. Memorandum from Atherton and Kratzer to Sisco, "Response to Congressional Questions on Israel's Nuclear Capabilities," October 15, 1975, RG 59, Records of Joseph Sisco, box 40, Israeli Nuclear Capability-1975.

39. Avner Cohen, "Nuclear Arms in Crisis Under Secrecy: Israel 1967 and 1973 Wars," in Peter Lavoy and Scott Sagan, eds., Planning the Unthinkable: How New Powers Will Use Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Weapons (Ithaca: Cornell University, 2000), pp. 104-124.

40. Avner Cohen and Thomas Graham Jr., "An NPT for Non-Members," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May/June 2004, pp. 40-44.

Avner Cohen is the author of Israel and the Bomb (1998) and a senior research fellow at the Center for International and Security Studies of the University of Maryland. William Burr is a senior analyst at the National Security Archive, George Washington University, where he directs the documentation project on U.S. nuclear weapons policy.

© 2006 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

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The Zionist Christian Crusaders

10 Ways the U.S. Military Has Shoved Christianity Down Muslims' Throats

By Chris Rodda | Talk To Action.
It's not just private religious organizations that act like Christian crusaders.

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation was founded in 2005 by Mikey Weinstein, a U.S. Air Force Academy graduate and Reagan administration White House counsel, after the harassment his own sons faced as Jewish cadets at the academy led him to discover that the fundamentalist Christian takeover of the Air Force Academy was far from an isolated problem.

It was a militarywide issue that needed to be confronted head on. But it quickly became apparent that MRFF's initial mission of protecting the rights of our men and women in uniform was only addressing part of the problem.

The evangelizing and proselytizing of Iraqi and Afghan Muslims by private religious organizations and U.S. military personnel also had to be exposed and stopped -- particularly the materials and media available via the Internet and television that could be used by Islamic extremists as propaganda for recruiting purposes.

When MRFF began exposing some of what we were finding on the Internet, Weinstein was contacted by two Bush administration national security officials, one civilian and one military, who confirmed that the kind of stuff we were exposing was, in fact, being used as fodder for propaganda, and they urged him to not stop what MRFF was doing.

The most astounding thing, as you'll see in the list below, is that it's not the private religious organizations that are most at fault in spreading the crusader message, but the U.S. military.

Top Ten Ways to Convince the Muslims We're On a Crusade

10. Have top U.S. military officers, Defense Department officials and politicians say we're in a religious war.

As many will remember, we couldn't have gotten off to a better start on winning hearts and minds when Lt. Gen. William "Jerry" Boykin, on his speaking tour of churches in 2003, publicly and in uniform proclaimed that the so-called war on terror was really a fight between Satan and Christians.

He made comments like, "We in the Army of God, in the House of God, the Kingdom of God have been raised for such a time as this," saying that George W. Bush, who had ignorantly called the war a crusade, was "in the White House because God put him there," and referring to the capture of Somali warlord Osman Atto, said, "I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol."

Speaking at a Rotary Club meeting in his hometown of Concord, N.C., in December 2006, one of Boykin's supporters, former Rep. Robin Hayes, R-N.C., pronounced that stability in Iraq ultimately depended on "spreading the message of Jesus Christ, the message of peace on earth, good will towards men. ... Everything depends on everyone learning about the birth of the savior."

While few are as overt in their comments as Boykin and Hayes, plenty of other representatives of our government have made it clear that they view the United States as a Christian nation and the war on terror as a spiritual battle, promoting the specious notion that victory in Iraq and Afghanistan is somehow necessary to preserve our own religious freedom here in America.

Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., in his remarks on the passage of H.R. 847, a 2007 resolution "recognizing the importance of Christmas and the Christian faith,'' said that "... American men and women in uniform are fighting a battle across the world so that all Americans might continue to freely exercise their faith ..."

The most recent Secretary of the Army, Pete Geren, in his commencement address at last year's West Point graduation, invoked the words of Thomas Jefferson, saying that Jefferson would understand the threat we face today -- tyranny in the name of religion. Geren quoted a few words from Jefferson's Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and then he said: "Two hundred years after Thomas Jefferson penned these words, your sons and daughters are fighting to protect our citizens and people around the world from zealots who would restrain, molest, burden and cause to suffer those who do not share their religious beliefs, deny us, whom they call infidels, our unalienable rights -- life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

Neither Franks or Geren, nor anyone else who has suggested the war in Iraq is essential to the protection of the religious freedom of "our citizens," has offered any explanation of how the outcome of this war could possibly affect the free exercise of religion by Americans.

While none were as widely publicized as those of Boykin, all of these statements, and many others like them, can easily be found on the Internet. Hayes' Rotary Club meeting remarks, for example, after being published in a few North Carolina newspapers, were reported on the blog B, and quickly spread through the blogosphere, turning a speech at a local Rotary Club meeting into a national story.

Retired Air Force Lt. Col. Rick Francona, when asked on MSNBC, "What's your reaction when you hear those words coming from a congressman," explained why comments like these were such a problem:

"Well, it's not helpful if this stuff gets back to the Iraqis, and of course in the days of the Internet and the blogosphere out there it's likely that it could. And you know our troops have enough problems over there just doing their jobs. Having to defend what a U.S. congressman might say, because you know, when you bring up the idea of proselytizing Christianity, to a lot of Muslims, that's very offensive. And if we can keep religion out of what we're trying to do over there, which is very difficult, it would be a lot easier for our troops. ... When you've got a congressman saying that the country -- they're not going to solve their problems until they follow the ways of the savior, it becomes very difficult for the troops to defend those remarks. ... If you're trying to be a unit trainer to, say, an Iraqi battalion, and the battalion religious adviser, the imam, would come in and say look what a congressman said, it just takes away from what we're trying to do."

9. Have top U.S. military officers appear in a video showing just how Christian the Pentagon is.

In addition to inadvertently providing propaganda material to our enemies, public endorsements of Christianity by U.S. military leaders can also cause concern among our Muslim allies.

When Air Force Maj. Gen. Pete Sutton decided in 2004 to appear in uniform at the Pentagon in the Campus Crusade for Christ's Christian Embassy promotional video, a video full of government officials and high-ranking military officers saying things like, "we're the aroma of Jesus Christ," he probably didn't give any thought to the potential ramifications of publicly endorsing this fundamentalist religious organization.

But, not long after appearing in this video, Sutton was assigned to the U.S. European Command in Ankara, Turkey, as chief of the office of defense cooperation. Here's what happened, according to the Department of Defense Inspector General's report on the Christian Embassy video investigation:

"Maj. Gen. Sutton testified that while in Turkey in his current duty position, his Turkish driver approached him with an article in the Turkish newspaper Sabah. That article featured a photograph of Maj. Gen. Sutton in uniform and described him as a member of a radical fundamentalist sect. The article in the online edition of Sabah also included still photographs taken from the Christian Embassy video.

"Maj. Gen. Sutton's duties in Ankara included establishing good relations with his counterparts on the Turkish general staff. Maj. Gen. Sutton testified that Turkey is a predominantly Muslim nation, with religious matters being kept strictly separate from matters of state. He said that when the article was published in Sabah, it caused his Turkish counterparts concern, and a number of Turkish general officers asked him to explain his participation in the video."

In addition to the Christian Embassy video, MRFF has uncovered a slew of other videos of uniformed military personnel endorsing fundamentalist Christian organizations and military ministries, many of which have missions that include proselytizing Muslims. These videos are easily found on the Internet, providing plenty of potential propaganda material for recruiting by Islamic extremists.

8. Plant crosses in Muslim lands and make sure they're big enough to be visible from really far away.

Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf recounted in his autobiography, It Doesn't Take a Hero, in 1990, when U.S. troops were deployed to Saudi Arabia for Operation Desert Shield, an attempt by a Christian missionary organization to use the military to proselytize Saudi Muslims led the Pentagon to issue strict guidelines on religious activities and displays of religion in the region.

It was left to the discretion of individual company commanders to determine how visible religious services should be, depending on their location's proximity to Saudi populations, and, in some cases, decisions not to display crucifixes or other religious symbols were made.

There were a few complaints about these decisions, but the majority of the troops complied, understanding that these decisions were being made for their own security. According to Schwarzkopf, even his request that chaplains refrain from wearing crosses on their uniforms was received an unexpectedly positive reaction, with the chaplains not only agreeing with the policy, but going a step further by calling themselves "morale officers" rather than chaplains.

But now, in Iraq and Afghanistan, Schwarzkopf's commonsense policies and priority of keeping the troops safe have been replaced by a flaunting of Christianity in these Muslim lands by troops and chaplains who feel that nothing comes before their right to exercise their religion, even if it means putting the safety of their fellow troops at risk.

Numerous reports and photos received by MRFF, like the one below, as well as photos posted on official military Web sites, show conspicuously displayed Christian symbols, such as large crosses, being erected on and around our military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan.

These large Christian murals were painted on the outside of the T-barriers surrounding the chapel on Forward Operating Base Warhorse in Iraq. In addition to being a highly visible display of Christianity to Iraqis on the base, these photos were posted on an official military Web site.

It is even more important that the Army regulation prohibiting displays of any particular religion on the grounds of an Army chapel, a regulation that protects the religious freedom of our soldiers by keeping chapels neutral and open to soldiers of all faiths, be strictly enforced on our bases in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But, as these and other photos collected by MRFF clearly show, violations of this regulation that probably wouldn't be tolerated on bases in the U.S. are not only tolerated but promoted on our bases in Muslim countries.

7. Paint crosses and Christian messages on military vehicles and drive them through Iraq.

For those Iraqis who may not see the overt displays of Christianity on and near our military bases in their country, there have been plenty of mobile Christian messages painted on tanks and other U.S. vehicles that patrol their streets.

The title of Jeff Sharlet's May 2009 Harper's magazine cover story, "Jesus Killed Mohammed: The Crusade for a Christian military," actually comes from one such vehicular message. "Jesus killed Mohammed" was painted in large red Arabic lettering on a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, drawing fire from nearly every doorway as it was driven through Samarra.

Other vehicles have sported everything from the Islamic crescent overlaid with the internationally recognized red circle and slash "No" sign to crosses hanging from gun barrels. The photo of the tank named "New Testament" was actually released by a military public relations office.

6. Make sure that our Christian soldiers and chaplains see the war as a way to fulfill the 'great commission.'

Iraq is crawling with missionaries and evangelists, civilian and military, who show little or no regard for laws or military regulations. Why? Because, in their opinion, the "great Commission" from Matthew 28:19 -- "Go and make disciples of all nations" -- trumps all man-made laws. It's hard to find a military ministry whose mission statement doesn't, in one way or another, include fulfilling the great commission.

Campus Crusade for Christ's Military Ministry, for example, whose goal is to transform our enlisted trainees and future officers into "government-paid missionaries for Christ," is present at all of our military's largest basic training facilities, as well as the military service academies and ROTC programs.

The "vision" of another organization, Military Missions Network, is "An expanding global network of kingdom-minded movements of evangelism and discipleship reaching the world through the military of the world."

Organizations like CCC's Military Ministry could not succeed in their goals without the sanction and aid of the military commanders who allow them to conduct their recruiting activities on their installations. And there is no shortage of military officers who not only condone but participate in and promote, these activities.

The Officers' Christian Fellowship, an organization of more than 15,000 officers and operating on virtually every U.S. military installation worldwide, which has frequently stated its mission to "create a spiritually transformed U.S. military, with ambassadors for Christ in uniform, empowered by the Holy Spirit," has partnered with Military Ministry.

Describing the duties of a CCC Military Ministry position at Lackland Air Force Base and Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, for example, the organization's Web site stated:

"Responsibilities include working with chaplains and military personnel to bring lost soldiers closer to Christ, build them in their faith and send them out into the world as government-paid missionaries."

Similar statements can be found for each of the Military Ministry's many divisions, like this one from their Valor ministry, which targets future officers in ROTC:

"The Valor ROTC cadet and midshipman ministry reaches our future military leaders at their initial entry points on college campuses, helps them grow in their faith, then sends them to their first duty assignments throughout the world as 'government-paid missionaries for Christ.' "

Scott Blum, a former CCC program director at the Air Force Academy, said in a promotional video filmed at the academy that CCC's purpose is to "make Jesus Christ the issue at the academy" and for the cadets to be "government-paid missionaries" by the time they leave.

A Military Ministry instruction manual uncovered by MRFF in 2007 couldn't be more clear that CCC's mission is not simply to provide Bible studies to allow Christians in the military to exercise their religion. The manual states flat out:

"We should never be satisfied with just having Bible studies of like-minded believers. We need to take seriously the great commission."

MRFF found all of the above quotes, as well as the video filmed at the Air Force Academy, on the Internet, which of course means that any Islamic extremist looking for recruiting tools could also find this proof that our military is being groomed to be a force of crusaders.

5. Post on the Internet photos of U.S. soldiers with their rifles and Bibles.

Turning our military into missionaries and crusaders naturally requires a good degree of indoctrination, and Military Ministry knows how to indoctrinate. Basic training installations and the military service academies are what they call "gateways" -- the places that young and vulnerable military personnel pass through early in their careers. The following explanation of its gateway strategy appeared on Military Ministry Web site in 2002:

"Young recruits are under great pressure as they enter the military at their initial training gateways. The demands of drill instructors push recruits and new cadets to the edge. This is why they are most open to the 'good news.' We target specific locations, like Lackland AFB and Fort Jackson [in South Carolina], where large numbers of military members transition early in their career. These sites are excellent locations to pursue our strategic goals."

Retired Army Maj. Gen. Bob Dees, the executive director of CCC's Military Ministry, said in the October 2005 issue of the organization's Life and Leadership newsletter:

"We must pursue our particular means for transforming the nation -- through the military. And the military may well be the most influential way to affect that spiritual superstructure. Militaries exercise, generally speaking, the most intensive and purposeful indoctrination program of citizens ..."

The indoctrination of basic trainees at Fort Jackson, the Army's largest basic-training installation, is a program called "God's Basic Training," in which the recruits are taught that "The Military = 'God's Ministers' " and that one of their responsibilities is "To punish those who do evil" as "God's servant, an angel of wrath."

Until being exposed by MRFF and taken down, the Fort Jackson CCC Military Ministry had a Web site containing not only its Bible-study materials, but numerous photos of trainees posing with their rifles and Bibles. This was not only allowed by battalion commander Lt. Col. Snodgrass, but there was a photo on the site of Snodgrass posing with the Military Ministry director and battalion chaplain.

This is from one of the group photos that were on the Fort Jackson Military Ministry Web site:

Obviously, no explanation is necessary to see the propaganda value of photos like this.

4. Invite virulently anti-Muslim speakers to lecture at our military colleges and service academies.

In June 2007, Brigitte Gabriel, founder of the American Congress for Truth and author of Because They Hate, delivered one of her typical anti-Muslim lectures at the Joint Forces Staff College.

In February 2008, Walid Shoebat, along with his fellow self-proclaimed ex-terrorists-turned-fundamentalist-Christians, appeared at the Air Force Academy's 50th annual academy assembly.

Gabriel's JFSC lecture, including the following quotes from the question-and-answer segment, was broadcast to the world on C-SPAN.

In answer to the question, "Should we resist Muslims who want to seek political office in this nation," Gabriel replied:

"Absolutely. If a Muslim who has -- who is -- a practicing Muslim who believes the word of the Quran to be the word of Allah, who abides by Islam, who goes to mosque and prays every Friday, who prays five times a day -- this practicing Muslim, who believes in the teachings of the Quran, cannot be a loyal citizen to the United States of America."

As part of her answer to this same question, Gabriel asserted that a Muslim's oath of office is meaningless:

"A Muslim is allowed to lie under any situation to make Islam, or for the benefit of Islam in the long run. A Muslim sworn to office can lay his hand on the Quran and say 'I swear that I'm telling the truth and nothing but the truth,' fully knowing that he is lying because the same Quran that he is swearing on justifies his lying in order to advance the cause of Islam.

"What is worrisome about that is when we are faced with war and a Muslim political official in office has to make a decision either in the interest of the United States, which is considered infidel according to the teachings of Islam, and our Constitution is uncompatible [sic] with Islam -- not compatible -- that Muslim in office will always have his loyalty to Islam."

Here's what Gabriel had to say about terrorists entering the U.S. from Mexico:

"Those al-Qaida members and Hezbollah members who are coming into the United States, they are immediately going from the Mexican border into the major cities where there is large Islamic concentration in the United States, such as 'Dearbornistan' Michigan ..."

And, on the Islamic community in the U.S. and racial profiling:

"We need to see more patriotism and less terrorism, and especially on the part of the Islamic community in this country, who are good at nothing but complaining about every single thing instead of standing up and working with us in fighting the enemy in our country."

Just as outrageous as Gabriel's JFSC lecture was the appearance of the "three ex-terrorists" at the Air Force Academy as featured speakers discussing "Dismantling Terrorism: Developing Actionable Solutions for Today's Plague of Violence." Shoebat, Zachariah Anani and Kamal Saleem are the three members of this traveling anti-Muslim sideshow. Their claims about their exploits as Muslim terrorists have long been questioned by academics and terrorism experts who have found a plethora of unlikelihoods and outright impossibilities in their stories.

Shoebat has also spoken at Tim LaHaye's Pre-Trib [Pre-Tribulation] Research Center conferences and John Hagee's Christians United for Israel events. Anani is a Lebanese-born Canadian citizen who claims to have killed 223 people while a Muslim terrorist. Saleem, under his real name, Khodor Shami, worked for Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network for 16 years, was hired by James Dobson's Focus on the Family in 2003, and founded Koome Ministries in 2006 to "expose the true agenda of [Muslims] who would deceive our nation and the free nations of the world."

Gabriel's anti-Muslim screed at the JFSC eventually ended up on YouTube, and articles about the ex-terrorists' Air Force Academy presentation, which included things like Shoebat's pronouncement that converting Muslims to Christianity was a good way to defeat terrorism, also ended up online, providing plenty of proof that the U.S. military's training includes teaching cadets, officers and senior NCOs that Islam is evil and must be stopped.

3. Have a Christian TV network broadcast to the world that the military is helping missionaries convert Muslims.

Travel the Road, a popular Christian reality TV series that airs on the Trinity Broadcasting Network, follows the travels of Will Decker and Tim Scott, two "extreme" missionaries who travel to remote, and often dangerous, parts of the world to fulfill their two-part mission to: 1. "Vigorously spread the gospel to people who are either cut off from active mission work, or have never heard the gospel," and 2. "Produce dynamic media content to display the life of missions, and thus, through these episodic series electrify a new generation to accomplish the great commission."

Season two of the series ended with three episodes filmed in Afghanistan. To film these episodes with the aid and participation of the Army, the TV show missionaries were permitted to be embedded with U.S. troops as "journalists." They stayed on U.S. military bases, traveled with a public-affairs unit and accompanied and filmed troops on patrols -- all for the purposes of evangelizing Afghan Muslims and producing a television show promoting Christianity.

The Department of Defense Public Affairs regulations violated by the military in its participation and assistance in producing this program are staggering, not to mention the regulations governing embedded journalists, the laws of Afghanistan and other military violations documented in the content of the program, which included an outrageous violation of the CENTCOM's General Order 1-A, which prohibits any proselytizing in the Middle Eastern theater of operations.

In complete disregard of this bedrock standing order, the Army facilitated the evangelizing of Afghans, which included the distribution of New Testaments in the Dari language, one of the two official languages of Afghanistan.

According to ABC News Nightline, which did a segment on the missionaries after MRFF exposed that the Army had allowed them to be embedded, "Decker and Scott said the military was aware of the purpose of their trip." In the interview Scott stated, "They knew what we were doing. We told them that we were born-again Christians, we're here doing ministry, we shoot for this TV station, and we want to embed and see what it was like."

As these video clips from the program show, the missionaries were able to just waltz into Afghanistan, without any of the advance approval and planning required for embedded journalists, and, within two days, be embedded with an Army unit.

Although the Army's participation in the Travel the Road program, which, according to a Travel the Road publication, is viewed by more than 3 million people worldwide, is the most incredible example of the stupidity of broadcasting to the world that the U.S. military was aiding missionaries who were trying to convert Muslims, it is far from the only example.

On Sept. 10, 2008, the Discovery Channel's Military Channel aired a two-hour program, "God's Soldier." Filmed at Forward Operating Base McHenry in Hawijah, Iraq, the program's credits say it was "produced with the full co-operation of the 2nd Infantry 27th Battalion 'Wolfhounds.' "

The co-producer of "God's Soldier" was Jerusalem Productions, a British production company whose "primary aim is to increase understanding and knowledge of the Christian religion and to promote Christian values, via the broadcast media, to as wide an audience as possible."

Bible-verse text captions appearing between segments of this two-hour program, which focused on a evangelical Christian chaplain, Capt. Charles Popov, included, "I did not come to bring peace, but the sword," and, "Put on the full armor of God so that when the day of evil comes, you may stand your ground."

This was one of Popov's prayers in a scene in which he was blessing a group of soldiers about to go out on a patrol:

"I pray that you would give them the ability to exterminate the enemy and to accomplish the task that they're been sent forth by God and country to do. In Christ's name I pray. Amen."

That prayer is followed by a scene in which Popov, sounding an awful lot like CCC Bible study, says to the soldiers:

"Every soldier should know Romans 13, that the government is set up by God, and the magistrate, or the one who wields the sword -- you have not swords but 50 cals and [unintelligible] like that -- does not yield it in vain, because the magistrate has been called, as you, to execute wrath upon those who do evil."

The scene that tops them all, however, is one in which Popov is setting up a nativity pageant for Christmas -- using the unit's Iraqi interpreters to play some of the roles. Popov describes this as some sort of cultural exchange, with U.S. troops recognizing Ramadan, and Muslim interpreters, in turn, celebrating Christmas.

The stupidity of this is astounding. The U.S. soldiers participating in a Muslim religious observance are not risking death by doing so, but the Muslims, in a country where many consider converting to Christianity a death-penalty offense, are.

Broadcasting to the world via the Discovery Channel that Army personnel were putting Muslims in a Christmas pageant is absolute insanity and couldn't be a better recruiting tool for Islamic extremists.

2. Make sure Bibles and evangelizing materials sent to Muslim lands have official U.S. military emblems on them.

What better way to say to Muslims that the U.S. military is officially Christian than to have official U.S. military emblems stamped on hundreds of thousands of Bibles floating around Iraq and Afghanistan?

Over the past few years, MRFF has amassed quite a collection of military Bibles -- some produced by private organizations, and others officially authorized by the military -- prominently sporting the seals of the various branches of the military and other official military emblems.

The latest addition to the collection is a photo from an officer serving in Iraq, who e-mailed this photo of a Bible being distributed in Iraq with both the Multi-National Corps -- Iraq and I Corps seals imprinted on its cover.

And, it isn't just Bibles. Chief Warrant Officer Rene Llanos of the 101st Airborne Division, referring to a special military edition of a Bible study daily devotional published and donated by Bible Pathways Ministries, told Mission Network News that "the soldiers who are patrolling and walking the streets are taking along this copy, and they're using it to minister to the local residents," and that his "division is also getting ready to head toward Afghanistan, so there will be copies heading out with the soldiers."

Just like the many civilian missionaries who see the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as a window of opportunity to evangelize Muslims, Llanos said, "The soldiers are being placed in strategic places with a purpose. They're continuing to spread the Word."

This daily devotional being used by the 101st Airborne Division "to minister to the local residents," has military branch seals on its cover, giving the impression that it is an official military publication. And, while these logos are sometimes used without permission, and may have been on this particular book, the Iraqis and Afghans don't know that.

Then there are the Bibles sporting the military logos that actually were produced with the permission of the Pentagon, one of them designed by Pentagon chaplains. Revival Fires Ministries, "at the request of the chief chaplains of the Pentagon," has been shipping these Bibles to Iraq via military airlift since 2003, and, according to a ministry press release, this "full Bible is designed and authorized by the chief chaplains of the Pentagon."

The poster boy for promoting these Bibles is Navy chaplain Lt. Cmdr. Brian K. Waite, who has appeared in uniform at three of the annual camp meetings of Revival Fires founder Cecil Todd, and endorses the ministry, also in uniform, on the Web sites of Todd and his son, evangelist Tim Todd.

Just before becoming a Navy chaplain, Waite wrote a virulently anti-Muslim book in which he held that Islam itself is responsible for terrorism, and compared Islam, which he doesn't even consider a real religion, to Nazism.

Not long after his book came out, it was revealed that he had plagiarized much of the book and fabricated some of the endorsements on its cover. Not only does Cecil Todd clearly hold the same anti-Muslim views expressed by Waite, but so does Tim Todd. In fact, Waite's photo and endorsement of those Pentagon-endorsed military Bibles appeared right next to the following statement on Tim Todd's Web site:

"We must let the Muslims, the Hare Krishna's, the Hindu's, the Buddhist's and all other cults and false religions know, 'You are welcome to live in America ... but this is a Christian nation ... this is God's country! If you don't like our emphasis on Christ, prayer and the Holy Bible, you are free to leave anytime!'"

1. Send lots of Bibles in Arabic, Dari and Pashtu languages to convert the Muslims.

Worse than any English-language Bibles, even those stamped with official U.S. military emblems, are the countless thousands of Arabic, Dari and Pashtu Bibles making it into Iraq and Afghanistan, often with the help of U.S. military personnel.

In his autobiography, It Doesn't Take a Hero, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf recounted his run-in with Franklin Graham's organization, Samaritan's Purse -- an incident that made it clear that the Saudis' fears and complaints of Christian evangelizing were not unfounded. While some of the Saudis' fears, the general explained, had resulted from Iraqi propaganda about American troops disrespecting Islamic shrines, the attempt by Samaritan's Purse to get U.S. troops to distribute tens of thousands of Arabic-language New Testaments to Muslims was real:

"The Saudi concern about religious pollution seemed overblown to me but understandable, and on a few occasions I agreed they really did have a gripe. There was a fundamentalist Christian group in North Carolina called Samaritan's Purse that had the bright idea of sending unsolicited copies of the New Testament in Arabic to our troops. A little note with each book read: 'Enclosed is a copy of the New Testament in the Arab language. You may want to get a Saudi friend to help you to read it.' One day Khalid* handed me a copy. 'What is this all about?' he asked mildly. This time he didn't need to protest -- he knew how dismayed I'd be."

*King Fahd appointed Lt. Gen. Khalid Bin Sultan al-Saud as commander of Saudi Arabia's air defense forces as Schwarzkopf's counterpart.

This was the incident that, as mentioned above, led to the implementation of strict guidelines on religious activities of military personnel. As also mentioned above, the adherence to and enforcement of regulations clearly aren't what they were back then.

Converting Iraqis and Afghans is a pet project of numerous private organizations (some with the help of the military), as well as military personnel and military organizations. Some missionaries even take jobs with DoD contractors to gain access to Iraqis.

All have found ways to circumvent the prohibitions on sending religious materials contrary to Islam into the region. There are literally thousands of people involved, and hundreds of thousands of Arabic and other native-language Bibles, tracts, videos and audiocassettes have made it into Iraq and Afghanistan, along with Christian comic books, coloring books and other materials to evangelize Muslim children.

A recent Al-Jazeera English news report showed U.S. troops at Bagram airfield in Afghanistan discussing the distribution of Dari and Pashtu Bibles to the locals, a blatant violation of CENTCOM's General Order 1-A. The report showed stacks of these Bibles on the floor, so they were undeniably there, despite the regulations prohibiting the shipping to Iraq or Afghanistan of any bulk religious materials contrary to Islam.

In the Spring 2004 issue of Gatherings, the newsletter of the International Ministerial Fellowship, Army chaplain Capt. Steve Mickel described the evangelizing he was doing while passing out food in the predominantly Sunni village of Ad Dawr:

"I am able to give them tracts on how to be saved, printed in Arabic. I wish I had enough Arabic Bibles to give them as well. The issue of mailing Arabic Bibles into Iraq from the U.S. is difficult (given the current postal regulations prohibiting all religious materials contrary to Islam, except for personal use of the soldiers). But the hunger for the word of God in Iraq is very great, as I have witnessed firsthand."

Obviously, by citing the regulation prohibiting the materials he was passing out as something that was hindering his proselytizing, Mickel was admitting that he knew he was violating regulations.

Another Army chaplain, Lt. Col. Lyn Brown, in an article titled "Kingdom Building in Combat Boots," stated:

"But the most amazing thing is that I was constantly led to stop and talk with Iraqis working at the coalition provisional authority. I learned their names, became a part of their lives, and shared Jesus Christ by distributing DVDs and Arabic Bibles."

The private organizations sending Bibles in Arabic and other native languages into Iraq and Afghanistan are too many to count, and many boast of the help they get from military personnel to distribute these Bibles. Here are a few quotes from some of these organizations:

"OnlyOneCross.com recently sent a case of Arabic Bibles to a Brother who is working in a detention center in Iraq."

The Salvation Evangelistic Association, which has soldiers in Iraq that their ministry converted at Fort Leonard Wood, in Missouri, now has these soldiers distributing the Arabic Bibles for them:

"Many young men in training at Fort Leonard Wood were converted to Christ. The Lord led us on to preaching in Army camps in the U.S., Korea and the Philippines. We are now supplying Arabic Bibles for distribution by our troops in Iraq."

But, topping the stupidity list, is a lieutenant colonel who was being so stupid that a missionary had to tell him that he was putting his troops and other people in danger. The missionary was from Liberty Baptist Tabernacle, which had already shipped 20,000 Arabic "soul-winning booklets" into Iraq, with more on the way. This officer, who knew the missionary from the States, went to his hotel and offered to use his troops to protect the people who were attempting to convert the Muslims.

This is from the insane story of what this genius of an officer did to meet with the missionary, copied from the ministry's Web site:

"On another note, a dear Christian friend, that I had met some 10 years prior, who was a deacon of an independent Baptist church in Missouri was also in Iraq. I was totally unaware of this. He was in the Missouri National Guard and holds the rank of Lieutenant Colonial. Col. Koontze immediately contacted me when he found out I was in-country. He was made aware of my being in Baghdad by a pastor friend of his that he had spoken with in the States.

"Through his command intelligence office, he located the hotel I was staying at. When he came to the hotel, I was sitting outside with the other pastors on the hotel's terrace, waiting for Robert Lewis [Global Resource Group-Director], who was going to meet with us that afternoon. Col. Koontze must have had 15-20 soldiers with him; they literally blocked off the entire city block with tanks and humvees to secure the area. He then walked into the lobby asking if anyone could tell him where Pastor Furse was. As he was saying those words, he spotted me and immediately said, 'It's good to see you again Bro. Furse.'

"At first, I did not recognize him, until he took his helmet off. We spoke for about 20 minutes at one of the tables on the terrace of the hotel; all the while the tanks and humvees were being lined up and down the main street in front of the hotel. After renewing acquaintances, I had to tell him that it would probably be best if he and his unit left as soon as possible.

"The Iraqi people in the hotel and those on the street were to say the least, very concerned. I did not want to bring that much attention to the hotel; for fear that terrorists would target the area as well [over the previous four or five days, we had heard sporadic AK-47 gunfire going off just blocks away from the hotel]. Col. Koontze agreed fully with me on that assessment and ordered his unit to leave quietly and as quickly as possible."

There are also videos, like the one below from Soldiers Bible Ministry of a chaplain admitting that Swahili-language Bibles are being sent in to Iraq to evangelize the Ugandan workers employed by the U.S. military. In this video, Army chaplain Capt. Chris Rusack boasts about managing to get the Swahili Bibles into Iraq, in spite of the regulations prohibiting this. Referring to this shipment of Bibles, Rusack said:

"Actually, they're in Baghdad right now. Somehow, the enemy tried to get 'em hung up there. There was a threat they were gonna get shipped back to the States and all that. We prayed, and they're gonna be picked up in a couple of days. God raised someone up right there in Baghdad that's gonna go -- a Christian colonel that's stationed there in Baghdad, and he's gonna go and get the Bibles ..."

In April, Soldiers Bible Ministry entered into an official partnership with an organization called Heart of God International Ministries. To announce this partnership, Heart of God sent out an e-mail about Soldiers Bible Ministry, featuring the Swahili Bible story as an example of the "supernatural things God is doing in Iraq."

"Right now there are about 200 men from Uganda protecting 100 U.S. Army soldiers in Iraq near Babylon. These men from Uganda have been having dreams, and these dreams have been of Jesus Christ as the messiah, which led them to begin asking questions about Christ to the chaplain. Many of these former Muslims have come to Christ."

The e-mail ended with this fundraising pitch for Soldiers Bible Ministry:

"The signs of the times are all around us ... Jesus, the messiah, is coming back soon. It is our responsibility to make sure every man, woman and child has had the opportunity to meet the Lord Jesus Christ. Seize every opportunity to share the good news ... seize this opportunity to put the word of God into the hands of U.S. troops and allied forces."

In spite of their blatant violations of military regulations, Soldiers Bible Ministry is heartily endorsed on their Web site by none other than the Army's chief of chaplains, Maj. Gen. Douglas Carver: "Thanks so much for your invaluable ministry of the word to our Soldiers."

In addition to Bibles, other Arabic-language Christian books are being shipped into Iraq and Afghanistan for distribution by our troops. The January 2009 newsletter of Worldwide Military Baptist Missions, for example, included these images of their English-Arabic proselytizing materials.

This is from the caption for these photos:

"In 2008, we shipped over 226,000 gospel tracts, 21,000 Bibles, New Testaments and gospels of John (to include English-Arabic ones!) and 404 'discipleship kits' to service members & churches for use in war zones, on ships and near military bases around the world."

And, last, but certainly not least, there is Jim Ammerman, a retired Army colonel and conspiracy theorist who heads a Department of Defense-authorized military chaplain-endorsing agency called the Chaplaincy of Full Gospel Churches, which endorses 270 military chaplains and chaplain candidates.

MRFF has demanded, for a number of reasons, that the DoD investigate CFGC and revoke Ammerman's endorsing authority, as I wrote in a recent post titled "MRFF Demands DoD Revoke Authority of Chaplain Endorser Who Suggested Democrats Should Be Executed."

Among the reasons for MRFF's demands is that Ammerman, working with an organization called the International Missions Network Center, set up a network of 40 of his chaplains serving in Iraq to receive and distribute Arabic Bibles in order to "establish a wedge for the kingdom of God in the Middle East, directly affecting the Islamic world," as he said in one of the CFGC's newsletters, and which IMNC called the "true reconstruction" of Iraq.

http://www.talk2action.org/

Related:

Is The Bible God's Word?

50 000 Errors in the Bible

Christ in Islam

Crucifixion or Cruci-Fiction?

Resurrection or Resuscitation?

The "GOD" That Never WAS

What Was The Sign of Jonah?

Who Moved The Stone?

ATNATU !!!