Friday, January 24, 2003
INTERESTING ANALYSIS OF THE IMPLICATIONS OF U.S. POLICY TOWARD NORTH KOREA AND ITS INFLUENCE ON ARAB OPINION
Over the past decade, commentaries in the Arab media have repeatedly argued that the US follows a double standard in the nuclear realm. The common complaint has been that what is allowed to Israel is denied to the Arab states. But in the past few months, the public debate in the Arab media has undergone an interesting evolution. The initial impulse was to continue this same line of argument but to substitute North Korea for
Israel and focus on Iraq as the exemplification of the Arab case. The basic argument was that the US persisted in its double standard by relying on diplomacy in the case of North Korea, even though this state is a clear nuclear proliferator, while pursing a war option against Iraq, even though it has denied possession of WMD and has agreed to international inspections. However, there are also indications of a realization that the two equations are actually quite different, and that North Korea might in fact be an example to the Arab states. The lesson sometimes drawn is not that Arab states have a right to redress the lack of balance in the Middle East due to the US adoption of an unjustified double standard, but rather that nuclear weapons may have real strategic value beyond the Arab-Israeli context.
