Immaculate preemption.(Raid on the Sun: Inside Israel's Secret Campaign that Denied Saddam the Bomb)(Book Review)

Raid on the Sun: Inside Israel's Secret Campaign that Denied Saddam the Bomb, by Rodger W. Claire (Broadway, 288 pp., $24.95)

IN the course of the last 40 years, France has done more damage to the Middle East than any other country, with the possible exception of the Soviet Union. Successive French governments have had no scruples of any kind in their effort to extract political clout and petrodollars from the Arabs.

French policy toward Saddam Hussein is a perfect case in point. The moment he began his ascent to absolute power in Iraq in the 1970s, the ingratiation and the profiteering began. Saddam wanted a nuclear bomb and made no secret of it. In 1975, he visited Paris. Jacques Chirac, then French prime minister, was a man after his own heart, sharing the view that power and money have nothing to do with moral considerations. Chirac happily agreed to build Saddam a nuclear reactor at al-Tuwaitha, not far from Baghdad. In view of Iraq's huge oil deposits it was absurd for the French to pretend that the reactor was for civil purposes. In any case, they made sure to provide the materials for a bomb. It was of no concern that they were certain to be disturbing the peace. After all, it was only the lives of Arabs, Iranians, and Israelis that they were putting at risk.

Too impatient to wait for this project to materialize, Saddam in 1980 invaded Iran. Aware of the potential nuclear danger, the Iranians soon staged an unsuccessful air raid on the reactor. For Israel, the writing was on the wall. A choice loomed: either to wait and see if Saddam intended to realize his threats, or to follow the Iranian example and preempt the danger by taking out the reactor. The issue was one of national survival.

Menachem Begin had been elected Israeli prime minister in 1977. By temperament, he preferred to act rather than let fate take its course. His cabinet included experienced soldiers and politicians such as Ezer Weizman, Yigal Yadin, and Ariel Sharon, and Begin rightly felt that he had to have a unanimous vote of consent from them. For a long time there was dissent; Weizman even resigned. But once the Iraqi reactor was producing fissile material, its destruction would lead to loss of life on an unthinkable scale; intelligence sources began to report that the window of opportunity was closing fast. At the last moment, on June 7, 1981, a squadron of Israeli F-16s took out the reactor. The circles of international bureaucrats and diplomats shook with indignation, most of it humbug. President Reagan, as usual, said what the man in the street was thinking: "But what a terrific piece of bombing!" The Israelis in reality were only escaping from the predicament in which France had landed them.

Rodger W. Claire is a former magazine editor, he knows that the ...