AFRICOM, Gulf gold, and proxy militias show how Washington and Tel Aviv manufacture terror while condemning Tehran.
By Fanta Kamara, MBA
There is a simple test for whether a rule is actually a rule or merely a power arrangement dressed in legal language. Apply it equally. If it holds, it is law. If it bends according to the identity of the accused, it is leverage. The West’s nuclear and security order fails this test so catastrophically, and in so many simultaneous dimensions, that the only honest response is to name it plainly: the world does not have a nonproliferation regime. It has a protection racket. Those inside the club keep their weapons, fund the militias, arm the genocides, and collect the resources. Those outside get invaded, sanctioned, or destabilized, on the premise that they are the threat.
Somewhere in the Negev desert, behind a perimeter that international inspectors have never fully crossed, a reactor has been operating for roughly sixty years. It has produced, by credible independent estimates, enough weapons-grade plutonium for somewhere between 90 and 400 nuclear warheads. The state that owns it has never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, refused comprehensive IAEA safeguards, and declines to confirm or deny that any of those warheads exist. That state is ISRAEL, and the world’s response to its undeclared arsenal has been, overwhelmingly, to change the subject.
Now hold that image against this one: Iran, an NPT signatory subject to intrusive inspection regimes and multiple negotiated enrichment limits, spends years accumulating low-enriched uranium—and the world mobilizes as if civilization itself is threatened. Sanctions strangle the economy. A U.S.-Israeli cyberweapon destroys centrifuges. Senior nuclear scientists are assassinated on Tehran streets. In 2025, the Israeli air force, with American logistical backing, strikes Iranian nuclear sites directly. And through all of it, not one Western foreign minister pauses to point at the Negev and ask: why is that reactor exempt from the rules we apply here? Hypocrisy Much~
THE BOMB THAT DARES NOT SPEAK ITS NAME
Israel’s policy of nuclear opacity—amimut in Hebrew—is a masterwork of diplomatic laundering. The arrangement, documented in declassified archives by scholars Avner Cohen and William Burr, was formalized in conversations between Israeli and American officials in the late 1960s: Israel would not test, deploy, or publicly acknowledge its weapons; Washington would not ask. The Dimona reactor was built with French technical assistance, and by SIPRI’s most recent assessment, Israel had accumulated approximately 900 kilograms of separated plutonium by 2024—material never under international safeguards. Researchers at the Belfer Center and the British American Security Information Council have consistently argued that Israel’s undeclared arsenal corrodes the NPT in ways no declared program could: other regional states cannot formally address a threat that officially does not exist. The Middle East WMD-Free Zone, endorsed repeatedly at NPT Review Conferences, remains permanently dead because Israel refuses to participate in any framework that would require it to be honest.
The United States, meanwhile, is the only state to have used nuclear weapons in combat, killing between 130,000 and 226,000 people in Japan in 1945, the majority civilians. It currently maintains roughly 5,550 warheads, approximately 1,700 deployed on high operational alert. It overthrew Iran’s democratically elected government in 1953, propped up the brutal Shah regime for twenty-six years, then sanctioned and threatened Iran for decades for enriching uranium under the NPT. It negotiated the JCPOA, had it verified as compliant by international inspectors, and then unilaterally abandoned it in 2018, imposing “maximum pressure” sanctions as punishment for Iran’s compliance.
The nuclear double standard is the organizing hypocrisy of the modern international order. It is not subtle, and it is not accidental. It is the architecture of hierarchy, dressed in the language of law.
One NPT signatory with zero nuclear weapons faces economic strangulation and airstrikes. Murder of it People.
The rule is not: no nuclear weapons. The rule is: no nuclear weapons without Washington’s permission. Israel has the permission. Iran does not. That is the entire doctrine.
AMERICA BUILT THE NETWORKS—THE DOCUMENTS PROVE IT
The justification offered for attacking Iran is that it supports militia groups and destabilizes the region. This charge must be weighed against the documented record of what the United States and its allies have actually done—not alleged, not inferred, but admitted in their own internal documents and on-the-record statements.
Operation Cyclone, 1979–1989: the CIA’s program to arm and fund the Afghan mujahideen was the most expensive covert operation in the agency’s history—between $3 billion and $20 billion by various estimates. Classified records, documented in detail by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Steve Coll in Ghost Wars, show that Jalaluddin Haqqani—one of Osama bin Laden’s closest associates—received direct CIA cash payments without Pakistani mediation. More than $600 million went to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who later worked closely with bin Laden. The organizational infrastructure those funds built became al-Qaeda. Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto warned President George H.W. Bush directly: ‘You are creating a Frankenstein.’ In January 1998, Operation Cyclone’s architect Zbigniew Brzezinski was asked by the French paper Le Nouvel Observateur whether he regretted the outcome. He replied: ‘What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe?’ The stirred-up ‘Muslims’ [who have recently been confirmed as Jewish 9/11] he dismissed went on to execute the deadliest foreign attack on American soil in history. There’s another story here (Your Closest ally is actually your worst enemy) but lets not digress. Let’s get back to the hypocrisy.
ISIS is the second chapter. The Islamic State grew from al-Qaeda in Iraq, itself a product of the 2003 US invasion that destroyed the Iraqi state and dispossessed the military class that became ISIS’s officer corps. When Iraqi Security Forces fled Mosul in 2014, they left behind 2,300 Humvee armored vehicles, 40 M1A1 Abrams tanks, and 74,000 machine guns—all U.S.-manufactured, all immediately seized. US and international reports from senate and congressional hearings have since confirmed shocking testaments revealed by congressman Scott Perry and others, that U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) funded terrorist organizations, including Boko Haram, ISIS, and Al-Qaeda.
Conflict Armament Research, analyzing over 40,000 weapons recovered from ISIS battlefields over three years, found that U.S. and Saudi-supplied arms reached ISIS in quantities far exceeding battle capture alone. One documented case: a missile manufactured in Bulgaria, sold to the U.S. Army, and traced to ISIS fighters in Iraq within 59 days. A 2020 Pentagon Inspector General audit found $715.8 million in Syria weapons simply unaccounted for.
Then there are the admissions. At Harvard University on October 2, 2014, Vice President Biden stated on the record that Washington’s allies Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE ‘poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad,’ and that ‘the people who were being supplied were al-Nusra and al-Qaeda’. He was pressured to apologize to those governments for name dropping. Note carefully what was not retracted: the substance. It is also widely reported that Israel has supported for years the very ‘terrorist group’ Hamas, they have been fighting, all along.
America built al-Qaeda’s organizational infrastructure. Funded it. America’s abandoned equipment armed ISIS. Funded Them. The weapons of the world’s terrorist networks were made in the West and delivered by Western policy. Where is the Accountability?
THE INCONVENIENT FACT: ISIS ATTACKED IRAN
Here is what the ‘Iran sponsors terror’ narrative requires you to forget: the groups the United States built and armed attacked Iran. On June 7, 2017, ISIS launched simultaneous terrorist attacks on Iran’s parliament building and the Mausoleum of Ayatollah Khomeini in Tehran—the first major terrorist attack inside Iran in over a decade. Seventeen people were killed, over fifty wounded. ISIS, the organization whose weapons were traced directly to U.S. and Saudi supply chains, killed Iranian civilians on Iranian soil. Iran responded by launching missile strikes into ISIS positions in Syria. It was not sponsoring terrorism. It was retaliating against it.
Iran has deployed forces and advisors against ISIS in both Iraq and Syria. It lost soldiers fighting the same group that Washington claims to be fighting. ISIS is virulently anti-Shia and anti-Iran—one of the primary reasons it split from al-Qaeda in 2013 was al-Qaeda’s reluctance to attack Iran directly. The Islamic State views Iran as an enemy to be destroyed. Yet Washington used ‘Iranian-backed militias’ as its stated justification for striking Iranian territory, while the U.S.-created network that actually attacked Iran on its own soil received no comparable response. The logic only works if you stop asking which groups killed more people and simply decide in advance who is the villain.
Now apply the measurement stick Washington claims to use. Iran has been accused of supporting Hezbollah, which has killed thousands in its three-decade conflict with Israel. That figure is real and documented. Against it, set the following, sourced entirely from Brown University’s Costs of War Project and U.S. government audits: the post-9/11 U.S. wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, and Yemen have killed at least 940,000 people through direct violence, including over 432,000 civilians. When indirect deaths from destroyed healthcare, food systems, and infrastructure are included, the total reaches an estimated 4.5 to 4.7 million. Thirty-eight million people have been displaced. The financial cost to the United States alone exceeds $8 trillion. If supporting proxy violence is the standard for regime change, there is no government on earth that meets that standard more completely than Washington.
REGIME CHANGE FOR THEE—BUT NEVER FOR THE MONARCHIES
Iran was targeted for regime change. Iraq was invaded on this premise. Libya was bombed into collapse. Syria was subjected to a decade of proxy war. In each case, the United States and its allies have positioned themselves as the arbiters of which governments must be replaced, by force when necessary, by engineered destabilization when preferable. But the question no one in Western foreign policy will answer is: by what authority? On what principle does a state that has overthrown governments in Guatemala, Iraq, Afghanistan, Mozambique, Iran, Chile, Venezuela, Panama, Angola, Congo, Liberia, Libya, etc., determine which other governments are legitimate?
Because if we are serious about applying any consistent standard, the United States must immediately address the monarchies of Europe and the Gulf—governments where power is inherited by bloodline, where democratic accountability is either absent or theatrical, and where centuries of dynastic rule have produced precisely the kind of entrenched, unelected authority that American rhetoric nominally opposes. The British monarchy has been sovereign for over a thousand years. The Saudi royal family has governed by dynastic decree since 1932. The Gulf monarchies of Bahrain, UAE, Qatar, and Kuwait are hereditary autocracies that have never held a free election. They are also Washington’s closest allies, their airspace used for military operations, their purchased weapons used to suppress dissent domestically and fund extremism abroad.
Iran, by contrast, holds elections, contested, imperfect, constrained by clerical oversight, but elections, nonetheless. Iraq under Saddam was a secular nationalist government that had previously received U.S. support, including intelligence assistance during the very period it was using chemical weapons. The question of regime legitimacy, in Western foreign policy, has never been about democracy or human rights. It has been about compliance. Governments that hand over their oil, host the bases, and buy the weapons are legitimate regardless of how they govern their people. Governments that refuse are threats to the international order—an order whose rules, as we keep discovering, are written exclusively for the powerful to wield against the weak.
SUDAN: THE GENOCIDE NO ONE WILL SANCTION
If there is a single case that strips the rules-based international order to its skeleton and exposes the machinery underneath, it is Sudan. Since April 2023, the Rapid Support Forces—a paramilitary militia built on the ruins of the Janjaweed, the force that committed the first Darfur genocide—have killed an estimated 225,000 people, displaced 14 million, and subjected Darfuri women and girls to systematic rape and sexual enslavement documented by Amnesty International and described by UN investigators as genocide. The world’s largest humanitarian catastrophe, by the International Rescue Committee’s own assessment. Famine declared in multiple regions. A hundred thousand children at risk of acute malnutrition.
Who is arming the RSF? The United Arab Emirates. This is not disputed by anyone with access to the evidence. U.S. State Department and Defense Intelligence Agency reports from late 2024, cited by PBS NewsHour, confirmed UAE weapons transfers to the RSF including Chinese drones, heavy machine guns, mortars, and armored vehicles. Conflict Armament Research documented the supply chains. UN investigators found them credible. The passports of four UAE nationals—believed to be intelligence operatives—were recovered from RSF vehicles in Omdurman. UK-manufactured targeting systems produced by Welsh defense company Militec were found in former RSF positions in Khartoum, routed via UAE in violation of arms embargo obligations. In 2024, the Central Bank of Sudan reported that 97 percent of Sudan’s official gold exports went to the UAE, earning Abu Dhabi $1.52 billion from a war it is actively fueling. The UAE is not simply backing a militia. It is extracting a country’s mineral wealth under cover of a genocide it is financing.
Where is the invasion? Where are the sanctions? Where is the Security Council resolution, the no-fly zone, the regime change demand? There is none. The UAE is a Western ally. Its sovereign wealth funds hold stakes in Western financial institutions. Its ports and airspace are used for Western military logistics. It buys Western weapons, the same weapons now appearing in the hands of the RSF. The UN Secretary-General told the UAE-hosted humanitarian conference for Sudan that ‘external support and flow of weapons must end.’ The UAE organized the conference. The weapons kept flowing. Washington confronted Abu Dhabi with its own intelligence evidence of arms transfers and was, according to European Council on Foreign Relations reporting, simply rebuffed—and made no further effort to press the issue.
225,000 dead in Sudan. The weapon supplier is a Western ally extracting gold. No invasion. No sanctions. No outrage. The rules-based order does not apply when the killer is on the right side of the ledger.
NORTH KOREA’S LESSON—AND AFRICA’S OBLIGATION
Kim Jong-un’s government arrived at its nuclear posture through a strategic audit, not ideology. Gaddafi surrendered his weapons programs, normalized with the West, and was killed in 2011 with NATO air cover overhead. Saddam had no WMD; he was invaded anyway. Ukraine surrendered its nuclear arsenal under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum in exchange for solemn security guarantees from Washington, London, and Moscow; thirty years later it was at war, abandoned. The conclusion Pyongyang drew from this evidence is rational: compliance does not protect you. Only the bomb protects you.
African governments must run the same audit—with open eyes and without the diplomatic politeness that has historically confused courtesy for protection. Because the continent has not been a passive observer of Western power. It has been its laboratory. The Congo’s Patrice Lumumba was assassinated within months of independence with documented CIA and Belgian involvement, for daring to suggest that Congolese mineral wealth should benefit Congolese people. Thomas Sankara was killed in a 1987 coup whose external dimensions have never been prosecuted. Kwame Nkrumah was overthrown in 1966. The pattern is not incidental. It is policy. And when direct intervention becomes too visible, there is always the proxy: armed groups flowing through Libya’s post-Gaddafi collapse into the Sahel, nourished by the same networks that Biden and Clinton identified on record as creatures of Western allied policy.
A fractured Sahel is not a security failure for Western interests. It is a security rationale. Instability justifies the bases. The bases are the point.
AFRICA MUST BUILD THE DETERRENT. THERE IS NO OTHER INSURANCE.
This editorial will not soften what the evidence demands: Africa must develop a credible nuclear deterrent. Not because nuclear weapons are morally admirable. Not to replicate the pathologies of states that have used them against civilians and funded proxies to kill millions. But because the bloodied historical and contemporary record is unambiguous, the United States does not protect non-nuclear states, it eats them for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It exploits them. It will continue to change their governments when inconvenient, fund militia groups to destabilize their resource regions as have been done to Sahel and use the resulting chaos as justification for the permanent military presence that protects the extraction. The bomb is not a weapon of aggression. In the hands of a state that has no imperial ambitions and every historical reason to fear those that do, it is a certificate of sovereignty, the one document the West has consistently shown it will not tear up.
That deterrent must be built alongside genuine continental security architecture: an African Union with real unified command and no external veto, no external funding; full implementation of the African Continental Free Trade Area to break the financial tethers that transmit Western sanctions; and disciplined bloc diplomacy at the UN that imposes measurable political costs every time the double standard is applied. The goal is a continent so costly to attack, destabilize, or exploit that the calculation never gets made in the first place.
EITHER THE LAW BINDS EVERYONE—OR IT IS NOT LAW
The scorecard is not complicated. Nuclear non-proliferation summits will continue to convene in Geneva and Vienna. Statesmen will continue to speak with grave concern about existential risk. Israel has undeclared nuclear weapons and is committing a genocide in Gaza. Iran has no nuclear weapons, signed the NPT, yet it’s being attacked. The United States is funding (Boko Haram, ISIS, and Al-Qaeda), the very groups they accused Iran of leveraging; The Sahel states have seen the worst with AFRICOM security interventions; The UAE is funding a genocide in Sudan for gold. The governments that inherited colonial-era dynasties by bloodline face no regime change demands. The governments that hold elections, get bombed.
Unfortunately, this is not a series of calamitous inconsistencies. It is a system. It has architecture. It has beneficiaries. And it will continue to operate in exactly this way for as long as Africa and the Global South lack the strategic depth, the economic independence, and the credible deterrent to make the cost of operating it prohibitive.
Either the law binds everyone, or it is not law. It is leverage. Africa knows which one it has been living under. The question now is whether it will continue to be enslaved.
KEY SOURCES
Coll, S. Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden. Penguin Press, 2004. [Pulitzer Prize. Documents CIA direct payments to Haqqani; al-Qaeda formation from CIA-funded infrastructure.]
CIA Operation Cyclone, 1979–1989. Declassified. $3–20 billion to Afghan mujahideen. Guinness World Records: most expensive covert operation in CIA history.
Brzezinski, Z. Interview. Le Nouvel Observateur, January 1998. Admitted deliberate creation of mujahideen program that produced al-Qaeda.
Biden, J. Remarks at Harvard Kennedy Forum, October 2, 2014. On-record: US allies ‘poured hundreds of millions’ into al-Nusra and al-Qaeda. Reported: Foreign Policy, The Daily Beast.
Clinton, H. Email to Podesta, August 17, 2014. WikiLeaks. Confirmed authentic by Clinton campaign. Qatar and Saudi Arabia funding ISIL. Reported: The Intercept, Fox News, Salon.
Clinton, H. State Dept. cable on Saudi terror financing, 2009. WikiLeaks. Saudi Arabia ‘most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.’
Conflict Armament Research. ‘Weapons of the Islamic State.’ December 2017. 40,000+ weapons analyzed; U.S.-supplied arms traced to ISIS in 59 days. Reported: Al Jazeera, NBC News, Newsweek.
Pentagon Inspector General. SOJTF-OIR Audit, 2020. $715.8 million in Syria weapons unaccounted for.
2017 Tehran ISIS attacks. 17 killed, 50+ wounded. ISIS responsibility confirmed. Sources: West Point CTC, Al Jazeera, ABC News, NPR.
Brown University Costs of War Project. costsofwar.watson.brown.edu. Post-9/11 wars: 940,000+ direct deaths, 432,000+ civilians; 4.5–4.7 million total including indirect; 38 million displaced; $8 trillion cost.
Cohen, A. and Burr, W. ‘Duplicity and Self-Deception: Israel, the US, and the Dimona Inspections.’ NSA Briefing Book No. 733, 2020.
SIPRI Yearbook 2025, Chapter 6. Israel: ~90 warheads estimated; 900kg separated plutonium; undeclared, outside NPT.
Conflict Armament Research / Amnesty International / UN Panel of Experts. UAE arms to Sudan RSF, 2023–2025. Reported: Al Jazeera, PBS NewsHour, New Arab, ECFR.
Central Bank of Sudan. 97% of official gold exports went to UAE in 2024, earning $1.52 billion. Reported: ECDHR, ECFR.
Biden Administration State Dept. Genocide Determination—Sudan. January 7, 2025. state.gov.
International Rescue Committee. Sudan described as ‘largest humanitarian crisis ever documented.’
