Sharon says Libya funds Iraqi nukes

By Robert Wiener · November 30, 1999

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JERUSALEM, Aug. 22 – Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told New Jersey Sen. Robert Torricelli that Libya is quietly bankrolling and sharing nuclear weapons technology with Iraq. The startling revelation came during an hour-long meeting on Aug. 15 at Sharon’s office, during the last stop on the senator’s three-day fact-finding tour of Israel. “There is nuclear cooperation between Iraq and Libya,” said the prime minister. “Iraq has the know-how and Libya — they have the money.” Sharon vowed that unlike the restraint it showed during the 1991 Persian Gulf war, Israel would retaliate forcefully if attacked by the Iraqis. The prime minister said his government stands ready to fight back against the regime of Saddam Hussein. Eleven years ago, it bowed to the pleadings of then President George Bush not to retaliate against Iraqi Scud missile assaults. “This time,” said Sharon, “we have to react.” (That reaction, according to the Aug. 15 edition of the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, could include nuclear weapons if Iraq were to strike Israel with “nonconventional” arms. The newspaper cited an “assessment from American intelligence” presented two weeks ago before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, of which Torricelli is a member.) Facing one another from the center of the long conference table in what Sharon calls his “inner cabinet room,” the prime minister told the Democrat from Englewood that Israel hoped for the support of such Muslim nations as Jordan and Turkey should military engagement with Iraq occur. But ultimately, the prime minister said, “we never trust anyone but ourselves. We have never lost a war.” For the senator, the meeting was an opportunity to promise the continuation of a strong American alliance with Israel. After the hour-long session ended, he labeled it “a very productive conversation. It is very reassuring that Israel is prepared to cope with any scenario that may arise.” Shortly before the meeting, Torricelli told NJ Jewish News that he hoped any Israeli response to an Iraqi attack would be carried out “in a measured way” so “we don’t allow Saddam Hussein to transform this into an Iraqi-Israeli war and make it more difficult for the United States to get the cooperation of the region.” The conversation with Sharon was the culmination of a tightly scheduled trip which included talks with a range of Israelis but omitted any meetings with Palestinians. “I just didn’t want to do it,” said Torricelli, arguing that the terrorist killing of Americans at Hebrew University two weeks earlier had made holding such dialogues unseemly. Joining his delegation were two fellow Englewood residents, Rabbi Menachem Genack, rabbinic administrator of the Kashrus Division of the Orthodox Union, and manufacturer Fred Horowitz, as well as attorney Steven Goldman of Woodcliff Lake. All three men describe themselves as long-time friends and supporters of the senator. Hours before seeing Sharon, the NJ legislator and his entourage heard Foreign Minister Shimon Peres say, “Israel’s problem with Iraq is very large and very serious. None of us would like to wake up one morning and discover it’s too late” to make military preparations for an attack. Turning to his country’s long struggle with its Arab neighbors, the soft-spoken cabinet minister observed that “the Palestinian Authority is at a pretty low point. The minute they close their eyes to terror they are allowing people to murder.” And, he said, “there is no sense talking to [Palestinian Authority chair] Yasser Arafat as long as he doesn’t control the situation.” Torricelli said the meeting showed him a “new side” of Peres, a person he has known for 25 years. “It is sobering that this man, who negotiated the Oslo and Madrid [accords] and has lived through so many stages of the Palestinian conflict, is now so resigned that Arafat has no credibility and can play no role. It is the ultimate confirmation of the change in Israeli-Palestinian relations.” Within an hour, Torricelli would hear a warning that attempts to undermine Arafat’s standing among the Palestinian people would worsen tensions. “If Israel and the U.S. try to unseat him it will backfire,” said Shimshon Zelniker, a critic of much current Israeli policy. Zelniker is director of the Van Leer Center, a Jerusalem think tank that deals with “advanced learning in the humanities and social sciences.” He labels himself a “leftist” who favors “a two-state solution” and a return to Israel’s pre-1967 borders as a prerequisite for peace. “We can’t leave the [Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza] in place,” he told Torricelli. “We need to disengage from the Palestinians.” Zelniker cautioned that his country could be undermined economically by trade boycotts and movements urging institutions to disinvest in companies that do business with Israel. Many such campaigns, he said, spring from college campuses and have been modeled on the successful moves that helped topple the racist apartheid regime in South Africa. He labeled Sharon “a smart politician and a smart leader,” remarking wistfully that the more liberal administrations of prime ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak “might have been much more violent” in dealing with Palestinian terror attacks. What struck the senator about the hour-long dialogue with Zelniker “was how the sharp distinctions between Right and Left in Israeli politics have narrowed. The violence has given a new sense of purpose to Israelis.” Several hours later, the rhetoric surrounding controversial Israeli policies shifted radically from the academic to the emotional. Eight West Bank settlers, six of them American-born, told Torricelli they had an absolute right to their homes on lands contested by the Palestinians. And they insisted that they should not be asked to leave, even as part of an eventual peace plan. One settler pressed the senator for his personal stand. “I think,” he replied, “that Israel is being held to a standard which is otherwise not justifiable in history. There is no nation that has ever had territory used against it for an attack, captured at the cost of their own lives, and then forced to return it.” Later, in an interview with NJJN, he said land in the occupied territories “should be given back only to the extent that Israel sees it justified for its own security needs and because Israel does not want to be in the position of occupying other people.” And, he added, “it is necessary to occupy as much of the land as necessary to guarantee Israel’s own security.” Briefing reporters on his return to New Jersey on Thursday, Aug. 15, Torricelli said it was inevitable that Iraq would attack Israel if the United States tries to topple Saddam Hussein. In the timing of a possible attack on Iraq, the United States must consider “how long we have before [Saddam’s] weapons of mass destruction are not only complete, including nuclear weapons, but also deliverable,” Torricelli explained. “He does not have a good delivery system. He probably does not yet have a nuclear weapon. If we wait six months, or two to three years, does the risk increase?” Although Israelis anticipate they will be attacked in the event of another Persian Gulf war, they also know of the “overriding” danger if the Iraqi leader is allowed to stay put and further his development of weapons of mass destruction, Torricelli said. On his visits to Israeli hospital facilities, the senator said, “I was enormously impressed at their preparations in case there is a biological or chemical attack on Israel. They have taken extraordinary efforts and are highly organized in being able to cleanse individuals and equipment, medical equipment, the stockpiling of materials, the coordination of emergency officials.” New Jersey, he continued, “does have coordination among our hospital administrators – and there is some stockpiling” of materials to respond to bio- or chemical terrorism. But, he advised, “there’s a great deal that could be learned in how far the Israelis have gone to deal with individual chemical or biological threats, specific equipment, and very detailed roles for every health care institution.” “The Israelis are very ready; so much so that I am going to recommend that [NJ Gov.] James McGreevey visit those same sites.” McGreevey was in Israel Aug. 18-20, a short visit scheduled after the governor canceled his original plans to visit Israel last week. Should a U.S. military strike be made against Saddam, Torricelli noted, there is “a real danger the United States would have to stand alone or simply with Israel. That isn’t right and it isn’t fair. Saddam Hussein is not just a threat to the United States, he is more principally a threat to our friends in the region and even to Europe, and it is not right the United States would have to bear this burden.” But he believes that “when our European allies and our friends in the region discover we are serious – they may reach a different analysis.” NJJN Middlesex bureau chief Helen Teitelbaum contributed to this report. Robert Wiener can be reached at . Helen Teitelbaum can be reached at hteitelbaum @njjewishnews.com.

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Sharon says Libya funds Iraqi nukes

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