Nearly four years after Israeli warplanes bombed a Syrian installation to rubble, the UN’s official nuclear watchdog agency finally admitted that the target was a secret nuclear reactor.
It’s about time.
“The facility that was . . . destroyed by Israel was a nuclear reactor under construction,” said Yukiya Amano, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, at a news conference last week.
The IAEA is expected to say as much in a formal report in June and might even refer the matter to the UN Security Council.
Not that the news is a surprise.
Within days of the Sept. 6, 2007, attack on the Dair Alzour complex in southern Syria — a strike Israel has never confirmed — US intelligence sources put out word that a nearly completed nuclear reactor, built and designed by North Korea, was involved.
Moreover, those sources indicated that the reactor, if completed, would have been able to produce plutonium for nuclear warheads.
But until last week, the IAEA had been reluctant to flat-out label the bombed site a nascent WMD factory — particularly while the agency was headed by Mohammed ElBaradei, the Nobel Peace laureate now eyeing a run for Egypt’s presidency.
Amano’s admission is a stark reminder of the dangers — not only to Israel, but to the entire Middle East — posed by the Assad dictatorship.
And of the duplicity of North Korea, which was exporting its nuclear know-how abroad to the likes of Syria and its strategic ally, Iran — even as Pyongyang ostensibly negotiated a shutdown of its own facilities.
Israel, of course, is not alone in recognizing the dangers posed by a nuclear Syria: It’s significant that not a single Arab national formally protested Jerusalem’s widely reported strike at the time (just as many Arab states reportedly have privately been urging Israel to take action against a potentially nuclear Iran).
Whether the IAEA admission signals a more aggressive UN stance against rogue states remains to be seen; the world body’s track record remains pretty dismal.
After all, the Security Council’s toughest step so far to curb Iran’s nuclear pursuits has been sanctions that have produced little results.
And not until Friday did the council formally condemn Syria’s bloody crackdown on anti-government dissidents — and the resolution was watered down to meet Arab and African objections.
But finally acknowledging the facts in Syria is a notable step, however small.
Now all it will take is the kind of will that the Israelis showed four years ago.