Reuters says that IAEA inspectors are finding traces of graphite and uranium at a site alleged to have been a nuclear facility that was bombed by Israel in 2007. The ambiguous, almost teasing quality of the IAEA is consistent with the agency’s style. It never finds enough to convict but always enough to remain suspicious.
The first word that graphite particles had turned up came with the release of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s second report on Syria in three months. But U.N. officials familiar with it said the IAEA inquiry remained inconclusive.
Still, one senior U.N. official said the discovery of additional uranium traces was “significant.” That, together with graphite traces that are undergoing more tests, raised pressure on Damascus to provide evidence for its denials of wrongdoing.
The IAEA’s November report said the site bore features that would resemble those of an undeclared nuclear reactor.
But while there’s no doubt that IAEA will stay in business there are a number of unanswered questions about what the purpose of the mysterious facility was intended to have been. There are suggestions it was part of something else. In mid-2008 the Washington Post reported that the United States had asked it to broaden its search, “hinting that Damascus’s nuclear program might be bigger than the single alleged reactor destroyed by Israeli warplanes last year.” The Washington Post continued:
The absence of a clear fuel source for the reactor — as well as a fuel-reprocessing facility for extracting plutonium — has baffled experts who have studied the Syrian project. “It’s like having a car but not enough gas to run it,” said David Albright, a former U.N. nuclear inspector in Iraq and the president of the Institute for Science and International Security.
Global Security summarizes the anomalous character of the facility. It alleges that based upon a review of literature before the strike, that neither the US nor any other major power suspected Damascus was up to anything. What it the Global Security article didn’t explain was the front-loaded response that was even more mystifying than the facility itself. Not only was the facility previously unknown, the response to it was unprecedented. Rather than embark on the well known Via Dolorosa of opaque diplomatic warnings, requests for IAEA investigation, sanctions, threatened military actions, attempted Security Council Resolutions — the process is well known to the readers, someone simply went and bombed it.
The disconnection of the bombed Syrian site from other components of a nuclear weapons development effort strongly suggests that Damascus had partners in its effort. Suspicion has been cast in several directions. North Korea. There have even been arguments on several blog sites that the Syrian site was somehow connected to the WMD program that Operation Iraqi Freedom never found. But another clue to the nature of the facility comes indirectly: from an examination of Syrian strategy. The Daily Telegraph, citing a Janes analysis of satellite imagery, reports that Syria is rebuilding its chemical weapons capability. Since nerve gas weapons are threshold crossing devices like nuclear warheads, we can infer a lot about the vanished ‘alleged’ and bombed program by examining the chemical efforts of Damascus.
The Janes’s report said that new structures for warehousing and manufacturing complex chemical materials had been built. The buildings had sophisticated filtration systems and cooling towers. Bays for specially adapted Scud missiles had also been built.
It has long been suggested in intelligence circles that Syria had acquired chemical weapons munitions from Iraq in the run-up to the US-led assault on the country. An analysis by JIR suggested that the work on the al-Safir facility in the north-west of the country had started in 2005, in the aftermath of the Iraq war, and was continuing last year.
Jane’s analysts said that al-Safir was among the most significant chemical weapons production, storage and weaponisation sites in Syria. “Its presence indicates Syria’s desire to develop unconventional weapons either to act as a deterrent to conflict with Israel or as a force enhancer should any conflict ensue,” said Christian LeMière, editor of JIR. “Further expansion of al-Safir is likely to antagonise Israel and highlight mutual mistrust, even as peace talks between the two neighbours progress intermittently.
From between the lines in the Telegraph report, we see that the likely strategic target of Damascus’ efforts is Israel. Syria, by acquiring an arsenal of its own would destroy the nuclear monopoly that Israel now enjoys. The Bomb would free Syria from any worry that a new US administration would restart the Bush doctrine. Assad could never be toppled like Saddam. It would provide Damascus with a freer hand to operate in the region. But it would also be a fundamentally destabilizing event.
The front-loaded, bolt from the blue strike on Syria can retrospectively be understood as an Israeli message, delivered with tacit US support, that it would not tolerate a rival nuclear weapons power in the region. Israel served notice, by pulverizing the facility, that it regards this as an existential threat. The future significance of that fact lies in that, as Iran edges closer to developing its bomb, that it brings the region closer to that invisible tripwire. The inference is that if an Israeli response to Iran comes, it may arrive without warning.
As current diplomatic efforts to bring a comprehensive solution to the Middle East go forward, there is the danger that too much emphasis will be placed on the well known constituent parts: Gaza, West Bank, the two or one state concept, rights of return, settlements, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Golan Heights, the Shaba Farms — and too little consideration given to the larger context. The Sunni-Shi’ite tension between the capitals of the Arab world and the resurgent Persians; the excruciating existential position of Israel; the random effect of Islamic militancy — these are larger regional issues which find their most concentrated expression in the development of WMDs that throw a faint, but giant shadow over the Peace Process.
The attack on the Syrian nuclear facility which wasn’t supposed to exist wasn’t supposed to have taken place either. There is still room for surprise in the Middle East.
Re poss Iraqi WMDs moved to Syria, seems like someone in Iraq would’ve talked by now, having little to fear and much to gain.
Wretchard: Let us hope the surprises are no bigger than this one was! I like your description of the Alice-in-Wonderland quality of this event and what lead up to it. F
Wretchard, you left out the big one.
Obama is a pro-Muslim President, who may or may not be a secret Muslim himself, and certainly reminds Muslims world wide of his Muslim heritage and family.
This means Israel has an expectation of certain US betrayal, and is likely to nuke first rather than later.
Nuke first Syria. Nuke first Iran. Nuke first any enemy who presents an existential threat, knowing that Obama, Pro-Muslim and perhaps himself Muslim, will happily watch a second Holocaust.
It’s down to sheer survival time. Like “Surviorman” or Bear Grylls on reality TV.
Concern will not be called for, folks
There’s nothing here to worry
For didn’t Assad crack some jokes
While meeting with John Kerry?
Israelis know the sound of doom
They watch the flowers buddin’
And when they seem about to bloom
They vanish of a sudden
It is often said that the treatment of Israel by western elites resembles their treatment of South Africa a few years ago.
Not long ago we met, on separate occasions, two middle aged South African expatriots, both of whom had prominent and hideous scars on their necks. They did not know each other.
Both had their throats slashed in their homes in South Africa; both survived.
Don’t know if that has anything to do with Israel.
Probably not.
If ’tweren’t for Walt’s
Prose, God knows,
My somber mood, encroachin’
I’d be morose,
Or dead, of course,
For fear oth’ sun not risin’.
The calculus for these rogue regimes must be changed radically. I wish the US under Bush had assumed a posture towards ALL rogue nuclear players similar to that espoused by Kennedy against the Soviets during the “missile crisis”. Any nuclear attack (and I do mean ANY…), against the US or her allies should be interpreted as a nuclear attack by ALL rogue players against the US. At the very least I think this would increase exponentially the risk, and chill the current impulse to jump onto the bandwagon of nuclear proliferation.
The list of targets for retaliation would explicitly include Iran, Syria, North Korea, and (through private channels) Pakistan. Any of these enemies would be on notice that violent strikes against their vital interests would be inevitable if any type of attack, including any dirty bomb, or even an unexplained cloud of nuclear fallout, were to occur. Through this we’d force our worst enemies shoulder the lion’s share of burden to protect us and our allies from nuclear attack. Under such a regime, these enemies will be forced to understand that they will become far more vulnerable to grave or even existential harm with nukes than without.
Of course, Bush didn’t do it, and now the US, under the idiocy of our supine Hollow Man in Chief, will never do it. Not for now, anyway.
Re#7,
But the countries you list are NOT our worst enemies. Just the most obvious. And thus, as formulated, would not have the desired deterrence.
Russia is providing Iran the materials and technical help needed to acquire nuclear capability. China provided North Korea with the financial and technical help they needed. Both Russia and China consistently block within the UN any effective sanctions against the ‘rogue’ nations.
Thus ensuring not only the maintenance of the status quo of Islamic terrorism but the steady increase in it’s future capabilities.
China and Russia are using the rogue nations as a covert arm of aggression against the west in a geopolitical strategy of undermining the west and its sphere of influence.
A Kennedy style posture toward rogue nations would help but its deterrence will be limited. Russia and China do not care if the rogue nations get nuked in a retaliatory strike. It would just save them the trouble of, at some later point, doing the job themselves.
Finally, the democrats, MSM and gullible American public would shortly reject such a posture. It would be characterized by liberals much the way Sen. Goldwater was portrayed by the press, as ‘slightly mad’.
Re: There’s still room for suprises…Let’s hope so!
http://www.firstofthemonth.org/archives/2009/01/smiles_in_winte.html
Buddy and Wade and Storm and Trangbang – haven’t been keeping up w/ Club – But I caught the down mood in yesterday’s threads. Feeling – no lie – for you and yours. Two of my closest buds are definitely not into O so…
Anyway – if you can get past your worries re the eco – and I doubat you can – might recall some earlier projections re post-election violence in the Street/Leninist take-over etc. Wha’ppen? Hope you noticed that O just aaid no to re-upping on Fairness Doctrine. Doubt Totalitarianism is just around the courner…
A book suggestion for Stormrider – Try that book from last year on he Hemings’ of Monticello. You once noted you never felt the presence of slavery in that house. But it will be inescapable if you check this book. Some pretty good close imagining of, for example, what it must have been like for Jeff to deal distantly (but with relative intimacy in tight quarters) avec his many children by Sally at the same time as he was functioning as the classic loving grandpa to his daughters’ kids. It really is an essential STRANGE American story…
Bud and Wade – Only connect? Forgive me in advance – and I think you might – I’m going to cut and paste a piece about teaching lit at military academy that we’re going to run in next FIRST – not online so no link but Give it a shot – best to all -
Two Nations
By Fredric Smoler
“Two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets.”
Disraeli published Sybil, or The Two Nations in 1845, when his two nations were very famously the rich and the poor. The thought the phrase encapsulates is in part obsolete, for modern societies combine increasing economic inequality with a striking amount of cultural egalitarianism via a pervasive mass culture. In another respect the phrase is very far from obsolete. A little over a year ago Elizabeth Samet published a fascinating book about a meeting of two nations between whom there is nowadays disturbingly little intercourse and sympathy: American military officers, and academics who have very confident opinions about what military officers are like. A couple of generations ago, when military service was a norm, most people had family members who had served, but for current undergraduates at the better colleges (the sort of person Ms. Samet herself used to be) this is much more rarely the case. I started teaching in 1980, and to the best of my knowledge I have taught only one child of a serving officer; none of my current colleagues have ever been in uniform, the last one to have served in combat retired around a decade ago, and only a couple of my students have had a father who served in Vietnam.
So who is Elizabeth Samet? If you google her you will find, inter alia, some information on a woman who went to college in Boston. That Elizabeth Samet has a B.A. in Art history and an M.B.A. The first job a web site records for her dates from 2002, at which point she was Marketing Director for a company in the financial services industry, and from 2007 she has been a Senior Associate Brand Manager at Kraft. I find this a perfectly plausible career for someone with a B.A. in the humanities from a school in the North East, and rather more plausible than the one made by the Elizabeth Samet under review, who also possessed a B.A. from a good school in Boston. I can easily imagine the first woman going to grad school, studying Titian, then succumbing to the lure of the financial services sector near the crest of the longest boom in financial history. I have more trouble imagining an Elizabeth Samet graduating from Harvard College, earning her doctorate in literature from Yale, hitting the job market in1997, and then applying for and accepting a job at West Point. But that is what the second Elizabeth Samet did. The first thing she wrote about her experience dates from 2002, and in 2007 she published soldier’s heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point, which means that she took the West Point job when she was twenty-seven years old. Reading between the lines, it seems likely that had she not been a slight demographic oddity – her father, whose stories fascinated her, had served in the Second World War – Samet would have been less likely to pursue the job at West Point, and her book would not exist.
The book has been very well received, and for good reason: it is generally wise, and at times extraordinarily moving. As its author notes, when she began teaching at West Point most of her students had no reason to be confident that they would ever practice the skill their professional education valued all others: since 1945, the vast majority of several professional generations of American officer did not fight in wars. Now, of course, some of Samet’s students, and some of her colleagues, have fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, and two of her colleagues have died in Iraq, because most professors of literature at West Point appear to be serving officers who rotate between teaching and other duties. I suspect that this may be a more jarring revelation than would once have been the case: John Maynard Keynes, at one time the bursar of a Cambridge college where I was several times a temporary member of High Table, argued against professionalizing the post he then held, asserting that it was “much easier to make a Bursar of a Fellow than a Fellow of a Bursar.” Maybe so, but on the strength of the available evidence I have the uneasy suspicion that it may also be easier to make a professor of an infantryman than it would be to nowadays work the reverse transformation. This has not always been true: Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain taught college, commanded the 20th Maine on Little Round Top, saved the Union, and went back to teaching college. Two years ago I found the first syllabus for a very creditable university some GIs (one of them a friend’s father) had set up on Okinawa after taking that island from the Japanese, while waiting for enough then-scarce shipping to arrive to take them back to the States. Americans used to like that sort of story: as recently as Saving Private Ryan (1998), Tom Hank’s very capable Ranger captain reveals that his peace-time job is teaching expository writing, a revelation which is expected to move us, and does. But academics and soldiers are no longer widely imagined to be perfectly fungible. While it has become unfashionable to say that 9/11 “changed everything”, and in the case of most professors I know it hasn’t, for professional soldiers 9/11 did change everything, and there are hints in her book that it also greatly changed Samet. That she has been changed is not too surprising: to paraphrase Ruskin, who wrote that the soldier’s trade lies not so much in slaying as in being slain, she has spent a decade teaching teenagers who are learning how to die.
Her title is, I think, a multi-layered pun. The phrase “soldier’s heart” dates from the American Civil War, when it was a mistaken diagnosis for what First World War physicians would call shell shock, my father’s generation called combat fatigue, and my brothers-in-law were informed was post-traumatic stress disorder. Samet’s former students, who seem to stay in touch with her, are quite aware they run the risk of it – since 2001, almost all of them have been sent into combat soon after graduating. This alone makes their experience compelling – we want to know many things about them, including how they will fare in war, but not least what they make of the canonical literature they are made to read at West Point, and of the civilian woman who teaches it to them in an environment where almost everyone is career military, and most are male. Given their formality and great civility – they always address their instructor as Ma’am – she (and we) want to know what they really think – what they think in their hearts. It turns out that Samet’s students tend to find literature’s intrinsic ambiguities radically unlike most of what they study, and in consequence at least initially very difficult, but on the evidence she presents the ones who stick with it care about literature’s aesthetic properties, and about what they take to be its truths, with a passion that seems to have become less than central to the professional study of literature. This is a paradox, and not an uninteresting one, but perhaps less of a paradox than one might first think: for one thing, cadets are taught to admire what is arduous.
It is appealing to read about a cadet blurting out, after spending a lot of effort on Shakespeare’s 73rd sonnet, “That cat’s a genius, ma’am!”; our expectations are less wholly subverted when we find out that a lot of the cadets pretty quickly learn to love the Aeneid, War and Peace and Wilfred Owen. People who have never been in a war have been fascinated by the nature of the experience since recitations of the Iliad started packing them in. Perhaps predictably, the cadets respond passionately to Achilles; Samet at one point suggests that cadets, whose lives are strikingly regimented, are naturally drawn to rebellious heroes. She thinks Hector, on her account a bit closer to a citizen soldier defending home and hearth, is the more American military ideal, then observes that West Point cadets are not citizens who in an emergency have become soldiers, and that the Founders were suspicious of professional soldiers. I’d imagine both Achilles and Hector are in one respect equally hypnotic to cadets, because combat is, at least in the popular mind, the very heart of war, and Samet observes what one would expect: that West Point cadets, most of whom have never been in a war, are deeply interested in how literary characters (and about how they themselves) will behave in a battle. They naturally wonder whether, in several senses of the word, they have the heart for it. They are deeply interested in courage, and in what it will mean to kill. In the wake of Abu Ghraib, she is deeply interested in what will become of them in a war that seems to have made some of the Americans who fought in it heartless – and her students turn out to worry about that too.
She is also more broadly interested in their profession – about what is at its heart. She quotes Samuel Huntington, who in the late 1950s suggested that American professional officers are Spartans in Babylon. That phrase evokes many things: on the one hand, obscurantist bellicosity, on the other heroic asceticism. In their late teens West Point cadets choose the risk of death and mutilation, the near-certainty of a pretty modest income and four years of extremely rigorous discipline, in a culture that celebrates hedonism and the pursuit of wealth. In my experience patriotism is at best unfashionable in the American professoriat, at least in the branch that teaches the humanities – in a bit under thirty years in the business, I am not sure I have ever heard the quality praised. Samet seems to be a patriot, and has spent a decade around people for whom patriotism ranks among the highest virtues. Because they are professionals, they are in a crucial respect not much like the American soldiers we have come to most admire, the citizen soldiers of the Second World War, or their mid-nineteenth ancestors, the Northern farm boys, hard as hickory, who brought the Jubilee. Samet’s students are entering a profession pledged to defend, at potentially infinite cost to themselves, a society some of them may well deplore, and a few despise – American officers have come to be disproportionately religious, not necessarily tolerantly so, and there is evidence that they are nowadays much more Republican than is the country at large.
There is also some evidence that parts of their country – the profession for which Samet trained, for example – have at best imperfect sympathy with the American military. Her book, Yale PhD gal meets the cadets, potentially the stuff of comedy, or of bitter debunking, is pretty much humorless and in no way a debunking. It rather recounts a mutually respectful meeting of opposites, and is in part scrupulous ethnography. It contains a fair amount of terse but interesting literary criticism – she discusses quite a few of the books and poems she teaches, and there is some bleak reportage (on the nature of modern wounds, for example). Her picture of the American officer corps is unlikely to be wholly representative – almost everyone she quotes or describes seems to be scrupulously honest, and many are eloquent, which certainly isn’t true for any other profession – but her deep curiosity about and profound respect for this other nation seems entirely admirable. Her book did not change my views on soldiers, a subject I may have known more about than did Samet at the very beginning of her career among them (although no longer), for I trained in part as a military historian. Her book has, however, changed my opinion of American professors of literature. I happen to be one, and for a number of reasons – above all, Samet’s very quiet but also quite absolute certainty about the value of canonical literature for people pursuing lives outside the academy, and her combination of moral seriousness and rhetorical restraint when talking about war – I have not in many years thought as well of my nation as I did while reading soldier’s heart.
Benj:
I’m going to cut and paste a piece about teaching lit at military academy that we’re going to run in next FIRST
I would opine that Benj’s comment is kind of off-topic.
Just for fun, I tried to read Benj’s article, Two Nations, but I found that whenever I finished reading one sentence, then I really had to force myself to read the following sentence. This was a very challenging test of my will and persistence.
I won’t say whether I did succeed in reading the entire article, but I will venture a guess that the article never does get around to addressing the question of whether Syria has been developing some secret weapons.
For me, the biggest surprise was the lack of reaction to the out-o-the-blue destruction of the Syrian facility. Who goes there? Don’t ask.
Here’s a timely note on Drudgie: Iran has enough uranium for bomb, linking to FT.com:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f367aada-fec8-11dd-b19a-000077b07658.html
OT – But A little GREAT news!
The Bakken is the largest domestic oil discovery since Alaska ‘s Prudhoe Bay , and has the potential to eliminate all American dependence on foreign oil. The Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates it at 503 billion barrels. Even if just 10% of the oil is recoverable… at $50 a barrel, we’re looking at a resource base
worth more than $2.5 trillion.
1. Terry Johnson, the Montana Legislature’s financial analyst says ‘When I first briefed legislators on this, you could practically see their jaws hit the floor. They had no idea.’.
‘This sizable find is now the highest-producing onshore oil field found in the past 56 years,’ reports The Pittsburgh Post Gazette. It’s a formation known as the Williston Basin , but is more commonly referred to as the ‘Bakken.’ And it stretches from Northern Montana , through North Dakota and into Canada . For years, U.S.oil exploration has been considered a dead end. Even the ‘Big Oil’ companies gave up searching for major oil wells decades ago. However, a recent technological breakthrough has opened up the Bakken’s massive reserves… and we now have access of up to 500 billion barrels. And because this is light, sweet oil, those billions of barrels will cost Americans just $16 PER BARREL!
That’s enough crude to fully fuel the American economy for 41 years straight.
2. And if THAT didn’t throw you on the floor, then this next one should – because it’s from TWO YEARS AGO, people!
U.S. Oil Discovery- Largest Reserve in the World!
Stansberry Report Online – 4/20/2006 Hidden 1,000 feet beneath the surface of the Rocky Mountains lies the largest untapped oil reserve in the world is more than 2 TRILLION barrels @ $50 = 100 TRILLION. On August 8, 2005 President Bush mandated its extraction.
They reported this stunning news: We have more oil inside our borders than all the other proven reserves on earth. Here are the official estimates:
8-times as much oil as Saudi Arabia
18-times as much oil as Iraq
21-times as much oil as Kuwait
22-times as much oil as Iran
500-times as much oil as Yemen
and it’s all right here in the Western United States.
….ok so US intelligence was involved helping the Israel’s detect and target the Syrian nuke reactor, that wasn’t “there” and had no fuel…that’s good. What else is out there in Paki, Ruski and Chavez land??? More surprises?
@13….will the US push for this development…nah, the oil companies want prices to raise not fall and who’s in bed with the oils companies???
See this link for Eliot Cohen’s (former Counselor to Sec of State Rice) that mentions in passing the North Korean reactor in Syria.
http://www.aei.org/events/filter.all,eventID.1874/transcript.asp
I understand (but have not yet read) the book The Inheritance which is suppose to address some of what else may be out there.
Benj,
The Fairness Statement is a typical feint from our Alinsky Inspired President:
The Dems plan on achieving the same result by other means, such as ownership rules, local content requirements, and etc.
On a more positive note: Hormel shares rise on strong Spam sales
If the Republicans were smart they’d groom John Bolton for a Presidential run….old Joe Biden bet that the anointed one would be challenged by a world crisis (the big 0 used that word 29 times in a speech yesterday)….but this ain’t the criis. When the world economy starts to recover and the Dems feel all smuggly and safe in 2010 is probably when one of our enemies will take advantage of the “we want to hear from you” posture of our new “soft” foreign policy and challenge the big 0 with an “in your face” foreign policy crisis.I suspect it will happen a lot closer to our shores than any one wants to imagine. The reaction by this administration will be tempered and we’ll hear… “we are in consultation with our foreign allies” and then…no immediate retaliation from the big 0 which will makes us look very weak. Our European allies, who rely on us for their protection, will get real scared…take it from there…for sure we need more satellite surveillance and analysis like the report yesterday from MIT as to where OBL is holed up.But unless we act on it like the Israel’s do, then we should just spend the money on bailing out sub prime slime mortgage holders.
last post for today…this one aint no secret:
Iran has enough uranium for bomb
Financial Times
19-Feb-2009
By Daniel Dombey
Iran has now built up a stockpile of enough enriched uranium for one nuclear bomb, United Nations officials acknowledged on Thursday.
In a development that comes as the Obama administration is drawing up its policy on negotiations with Tehran over its nuclear programme, UN officials said Iran had produced more nuclear material than previously thought.
They said Iran had now accumulated more than one tonne of low enriched uranium hexafluoride at a facility in Natanz. If such a quantity were further enriched it could produce more than 20kg of fissile material – enough for a bomb.
I am not sure if all of you are taking in the amount of distrust that real is building to tidal wave heights, Deceit is the norm “0″ is a master but all are getting to know the master so soon the words will be as wind blowing past their ears, there is rising a distinct two nations one of “Wishful willies” who will rely on the deceitful to enforce the Wishful ways only to find out that they might are willies to and paper tigers to boot, the other side which is patient and resourceful and violent when push comes to shove, it will be a nasty ending….
geoffgo – re: Bakken and Colorado Rockies oil reserves
Your sources?
The only references I’ve seen about Colorado oil reserves is in Oil Shale. Same with the Bakken.
If that’s what you are referring to, your playing games with us. This isn’t “news”. It’s been a fact for 100 years.
The US Oil Shale reserves dwarf petroleum reserves of every other kind. The only problem is the technology and political will to develop the resource. However, it’s better to bankrupt the nation (and future generations) to buy foreign oil from our enemies who use the most ecological “dirty” production means, than to allow American’s to touch cheap oil on U.S. territory, or so claims the Democrats.
So, there’s no new news on US Oil. No new oil will be pumped from new American wellheads in my lifetime – we have a firmly entrenched governing left-wing oligarchy in place which will guarantee that.
Benj, Benj, Benj, brother would you do me and probably all of us a favor? Pretty please. Stop with the C&P. Just post a link. I now have a blister on my scrolling finger. Personally I find you boring to a large degree. But I am sure there are those that read your every word. If only to find a small mistake to call you out on. Me, I just scroll on by.
Big oil, can’t produce oil from shale at $50 per bbl. Probably can’t get it out of the ground in Montana either for that price.
Jim
Wretchard,
“The Sunni-Shi’ite tension between the capitals of the Arab world and the resurgent Persians”
I see where the Mullahs have accelerated their destruction of the Sufi houses of worship. Saying that the Whirling Dervishes are a perversion of Islam.
Jim
Benj,
“might recall some earlier projections re post-election violence in the Street/Leninist take-over etc.”
What? Huh? What you smoking man? That was Lib’ral prognostidefecation…for if McCain had won.
“Wha’ppen? Hope you noticed that O just aaid no to re-upping on Fairness Doctrine. Doubt Totalitarianism is just around the courner…”
The economy is just about everything, and judgments from far lands handling are not yet all in, but unless the President is a very fast learner, I fear we are in for a long/short four year term. Frankly, the one thing keeping me in the Presidents corner is fear of having to deal with the alternates Joe and Nancy.
Besides along with the fairness doctrine would come a requirement for censorship. So, in the pursuit of balance, what Democrat’s constituency could afford that.
The piece is not an unrealistic look at the reflections from outside of the USMA looking in. Just cause they’re mainly engineers doesn’t mean they cannot appreciate literature. Sometimes it means appreciating good writing in a deeper, more logically meaningful way.
If the Academies candidate pool is leaning heavily right, left or in some other direction it is a reflection of the candidate pool and not the selection process. Even US Grant went on a Democratic/Whig nomination. RE Lee on a Democratic/Republican recommendation I believe. (I could be mistaken) Go Figure.
I dont know sigintel, I would like to think that all the walled compounds on the Paki border E, SE and NE of Tora Bora / Spīn Ghar were monitored long before MIT got interested in hunting. If not then yeah, maybe we should be dumping money down holes.
Doug wrote:
“Benj,
The Fairness Statement is a typical feint from our Alinsky Inspired President:
The Dems plan on achieving the same result by other means, such as ownership rules, local content requirements, and etc…”
Benj, don’t underestimate the intelligence or depth of resources Wretchard’s readership makes use of to remain informed on issues.
We’re not so easily fooled.
The Great Dilemma for so many years was that the responsible Republicans (and no, as individuals most of them were anything but) had to make a deal with the Devil. In order to obtain what they wanted in terms of foreign and military policy they had to accede to the Democrats in domestic policy, and now we are where we are. To whatever degree the economy is tanking is due in large part to Democratic policies and the cure for the disease is…importing more of the viruses that cause the disease into the system.
The lesson to be learned is, as the old stories tell us, is never to make deals with the Devil.
Wade: Benj has moved beyond the point where he makes “estimations”.
andrewdb (@16)
See this link for Eliot Cohen’s (former Counselor to Sec of State Rice) that mentions in passing the North Korean reactor in Syria.
He mentions it twice.
Here is the second time that Eliot Cohen mentioned “the North Korean nuclear reactor in Syria.”
[quote]
I participated in one episode where I was astounded that everything was kept entirely secret, and this was the North Korean nuclear reactor in Syria. No matter what you think about the policy outcome, and there was a lot of very severe disagreement about whether we should take that thing out ourselves, we should try some sort of diplomatic overture, and in the end of the course, we decided simply, or the President decided simply to be quiet and let the Israelis do it. There was real debate. There was real disagreement. There was a small deputies’ committee. There were no leaks, which astounded all of us. This was argued out among the principals and with the president, and the president made the decision.
Again, whether it was the right policy outcome, I think reasonable people can disagree. In terms of process, it was just fine and it was confidential. And I suspect that the largest part of the reason for that was that the team at the very top, at the principal’s level, but also the team at my level or the undersecretary level trusted one another and there was room to have a spirited disagreement on both personal and institutional grounds without anybody wanting to blow this publicly.
[unquote]
Another mystery in the desert solved. Dont let whiskey see this one:
“Woman: An inferior element in our society”
Osama Ahmed Al-Subaie I Al-Madinah
http://www.arabnews.com/?page=13§ion=0&article=118802&d=19&m=2&y=2009
conclusion for those that dont want to bother with the link:
“To this I say yes. Women are incomplete in our society. They will remain incomplete and will always be considered inferior. Their participation in literary clubs, journalism training courses, conferences and seminars would lead to them mixing with men.
This would open the door for seduction, a source of corruption. Women would then become shameless and coveted by men.”
dual h/t to Jawa Report and Interested Participant
There are other ways to stop a nuclear program. The question is, is this true?
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1064852.html
So the geniuses at IAEA found carbon at the burned out and hastily scrubbed site of a former suspected nuclear or chemical weapon storage and / or development site. I wonder how they analyzed it. One would guess there were only trace amounts, and not handfuls of ruble laying about for them to pick up after the Syrian military & security services, and any interested foreign powers finished cleaning up the site and attempted to disguise it as an antibiotics plant or baby milk factory. Did the IAEA perform x-ray crystallography to verify the crystal structure of the graphite? Did they examine the interstitial contaminants within the graphite crystalline structure with an electron microscope? Did the graphite sample contaminants look like they had been exposed to neutron bombardment as we would expect for the graphite control rods in a nuclear reactor?
No word on that, just more conjecture!
If the graphite found had been used in a nuclear reactor, there will be unmistakable evidence of it. The IAEA as it is currently, and has recently been, configured is all about covering the asses of third world thugs who are trying to fabricate nuclear weapons. If there were incontrovertible physical evidence that Syria had built a reactor, (entirely for peaceful energy production you understand) then the IAEA would have produced that evidence already. They would have shouted it from the rooftops at Turtle Bay. It would have been on BBC, and CNN, and in the Times, etc. “IT WASN’T A NUCLEAR WEAPONS PROGRAM!”
Such assertions and independent verifications of the physical evidence are not forthcoming! What can it mean?
But, the IAEA protests, there was very little highly enriched nuclear material, it couldn’t have been a nuclear weapon storage facility or laboratory, or even a working reactor…
Amazing! If the Syrians had been using the site to store nuclear material there would have been a great deal of highly radioactive debris. In order for the IAEA to believe the Syrians could be so deceitful and successfully cover up such a dastardly plot so thoroughly, it would require someone to invent some instrument that could detect minute amounts of radioactive material (let’s call this figment of the imagination a Geiger counter), so that the Syrians and their helpers could spent thousands of man hours combing over the site removing said debris before allowing access to the IAEA and other unwelcome busybodies.
There has been a long stream of highly placed people in Saddam’s regime who came forward before, during and after OIF with details about Iraqi WMD, including Saddam’s own son in law, and all of the captured Iraqi military general staff. Everyone conveniently seems to forget that, yet relatively little WMD material in the form of ready to use weapons was found after the invasion. Where could it all have gone?
Oh well, Bush lied! People died! If you just hate Boooooshhhh, and are looking for any available excuse to club him (baby seal style), it’s possible to make yourself ignore the smoking gun, which wouldn’t have been possible if it had blow your head off.
Cease and desist encouraging [replying to] B**j, please?
The “Axis of Evil” was not just a plot device by Pres Bush. No doubt far more cooperation exists between Iran, Syria, and North Korea than is apparent on the surface – and there is quite a lot on the surface.
North Korea shipped Scuds to Iran even way back in 1993. North Korean ships have loaded up with solid rocket motor propellant components in Syria. A train loaded with missiles, propellants, and Syrian technicians mysteriously blew up in North Korea several years back. Iranian components have been used on North Korea space boosters and the Iranians sent a ship to help monitor the last Taepodong launch. You can be assured that Iranian launch technology is flowing to North Korea.
The US SECSTATE’s recent statements warning North Korea not to test a new missile are curious, though. You normally are eager to see what the other guy has. Was that just normal diplospeak or a desperate attempt to see the world in a way it is not?
The same political party that brought us every filthy form of pornography in the name of free speech wants to impose a “Fairness Doctrine”.
@geoffgo and Old Salt: There is plenty of petroleum or equivalent out there.
The problem with great new finds is this:
Bring in a LOT and your expenses go up but your revenue goes down.
Person has to know that there will be buyers at positive cash flow levels or foot dragging ensues.
That is what enables all the obstructionism.
Been this way ever since John D Rockefeller lost that big antitrust case just like he wanted to lose it.
Gotta have some “price fixing” in the mix or production suffers.
Also, a royalty paid to a US citizen is a business expense. A royalty paid to a foreign government is a tax credit. Think that doesn’t discourage domestic production.?
What I have never understood is why Bush held back and let the Syrian regime survive. After the Harari assassination they were on the run, human rights prosecutors circling, Beirut protest babes winning Western hearts. Why did he let the opportunity go?
The Republicans should be preparing a $200 million dollar ad campaign now and start pounding away on what was probably the best theme they wandered away from last Summer “Drill Here, Drill Now and use everything.” Don’t be subtle, use pictures of Oil Sheiks and Putin and Chavez and call the Democrats toadies and slaves, rip Joe Kennedy apart publicly. Make him a liability.
What I have never understood is why Bush held back and let the Syrian regime survive. After the Harari assassination they were on the run, human rights prosecutors circling, Beirut protest babes winning Western hearts. Why did he let the opportunity go?
In part because of the pushback on Iraq, though that it is not the only reason. Opponents of regime change in Damascus, which is an Alawite, or Shi’a body grafted onto a Sunni majority body, claimed that if America liked the chaos following Saddam’s fall, it would love the consequences of Assad’s fall. One of the major defenses of repressive regimes lies in the fear of releasing all the pent-up energies they’ve stored over their long years of tyranny. The worse the regime, the greater a time-bomb it is.
This sort of argument has been marshaled in various forms to argue against regime change in North Korea and in Iran. We are afraid of smashing the tyrannical vessels because of the miasmic vapors that will be released. So we keep propping them up. The diplomats find it much easier to go to an address certain than to deal with messy revolutionary situations.
Given enough time any regime, no matter how evil, becomes hallowed in diplomatic circles. If Hitler had lasted 30 years he would be a statesman. For a brief period following 9/11 this conventional wisdom was shaken. Now we are back on the “stability” track. Posterity will judge whether GWB’s decision to confront tyranny, however badly and partially, will fare against the records of the “engagers” now in power. I think the verdict of history will be plain within five years. Until then, it is needless to comment. When the jury comes in, we’ll know.
North Korea has to be in a league of it’s own:
The Duration of the Regimes, level of poverty and ignorance of the outside World, number of men in arms, lethality wrt the small village called “Seoul” (24.5 million) on and on.
And here we sit a power capable of reaching out and destroying with pinpoint precision any place or person in the world, often with plausible deniability, and we do nothing while lunatics develop nuclear, chemical and probably biological weapons. Cheesh!
Sometimes it is no time to talk.
A short series of hits and no explanations, like the Israelis did seems to be in order.
This is ridiculous.
Little hits now or big ones later, a bit like the lead up to WWII when Germany was rearming, re-occupying the Ruhr etc etc but the stakes are far higher this time.
Yes Joe, what else can you expect? In a society that treats women as plunder, with every man having a woman only so long as he can keep his Harem intact by force and brute thug-patronage, that’s the attitude you get.
Europe’s climb from utter barbarity following the collapse of Rome was due to Christian monogamy, and you can see the acellerating climb from say 1000 AD when it stuck for good vs. say, 800.
Intriguingly, some evidence suggests that sexual/natural selection in humans can produce intelligence/behavioral traits in as little as 1,000 years (Cochran-Harpending’s study on Ashkenazi Jews). It’s possible that extended polygamy has made Muslims different from European on a biological level, in terms of behaviors and particularly male cooperation and freedom of women (the two are closely linked).
What Israel is likely to do, is not fool around, with a bolt from the blue destroying ONE site. That was with Bush, who could be relied upon to be Israel’s last gasp protector. Obama, would certainly allow Israel to be destroyed, the only question is would he openly celebrate it? Certainly, Europe would, bound as Mark Steyn points out by Muslim Demography as those nations become Muslim more every day.
And it’s not just Israel. EVERY small nation, with a large and hungry one nearby, will have to nuke up, as quickly as possible, and think of pre-emptive strikes at the larger nation to kill as many people as possible to prevent being gobbled up.
Bahrain (claimed by Iran), Poland (claimed by Russia), Estonia/Latvia/Lithunia, Italy and Spain and their North African neighbors (sooner or later), and many others will face this threat. Possibly even Japan and China.
All small nations. All left in the wind by the withdrawal of US protection and a “peace” President who is unwilling to use force or even believe in US interests. All with large, angry, hungry neighbors. All terribly vulnerable themselves to a first strike.
If such a quantity were further enriched it could produce more than 20kg of fissile material – enough for a bomb.
I’m staying with Bruce Bueno de Mesquita on this – that Khamenei will not go beyond this stage of enrichment although it’s likely that the production facilities necessary to do so will be completed.
The possibility of a nuke is a huge bargaining chip for Iran that would be lost if they actually went ahead and built one. Plus, actual production would almost certainly result in an Israeli first strike without the assurance that it would not itself be nuclear.
The common wisdom is that merely having a nuke is a rock solid guarantee against external regime change. That may be true with Russia and China but there is no compelling logical reason to believe that the same deterrent would apply to Iran, which does not share a border with any other nuclear military power as is the case with NK and Pakistan.
Peter, you base your opinion on false premises, paradoxically on logic.
But logic is not the trait that can be applied to the current Iran leadership and their magical thinking. But even if that were not so (the mahdism as a core of their ideology and political scaffolding), the production and acquiring of more centrifuges every few months simply does not make sense. Why such an expense if Russia could supply the fuel elements? It would be way cheaper.
Iran’s leadership wants nukes and wants to use them, as a threat/blackmail (to Arabs) or directly (on Israel). It is as simple as that.
2x
I think the error may be to base your conclusions on Ahmadinejad. De Mesquita rates him as maybe the 18th most influential person in Iran with a following largely confined to the urban areas. He will most likely be out of office in a few months.
Peter, actually, no. Ahmadjihad is not that important, I know. But there is a whole group of mahdists that got established into different positions of power during Ahmadjihad’s tenure and control some key aspects of the government and comprise a sizable minority of mullah establishment. They have a loud front man, and themselves remain in a shadow. So, even with Ahmadjihad gone, nothing much would change, except Iranian leadership may not display as outright hostility and instead of touting their intentions into 4 corners, they would quietly continue to build up their nuclear arsenal. In other words, the course would be the same, but with less rhetoric.
Iran belongs on the enemies list for Hezbollah regardless of what else they may do.
I am not ascribing any good intentions to the Iranian leadership. I just happen to agree with de Mesquita that actually having a nuke is more of a liability to the regime than it is a benefit.
geoffgo @ 13
This is just off the top of my head but (1) geologists dispute the estimated Bakken reserves with the amount growing in recent analyses and (2) extraction requires use of “cracking” to pry out the oil from the shale deposits which adds to expense with some questionable side issues. It’s exciting but iffy. Montana’s true resource (and Wyoming) is coal. USA has 25% of world reserves – 25%. That’s a lot of coal.
Build a lot of energy plants with $800B. Down in Florida, they built a plant with zero carbon footprint using gassification.
GW has got to be smile’n, KRove is too! the way “0″, Nancy Pee, and H(greedy)Reid are going GW will be looked on as a Theadore Rosevelt or as Abe himself compared to whats come after! Keep up the good work Demo’s! I just hope we (US) ain’t missing any cities or in a civil war by the time these clowns leave the government…
“I just happen to agree with de Mesquita that actually having a nuke is more of a liability to the regime than it is a benefit.”
Well, gosh, that convinces me.
Whiskey (#42) how true a path, If one looks one will find that during the JC years the Russians had serious eyes on Europe, if Jimmy C had gotten an extend time (another four years) to waste the US military from the inside out and the congress had gotten all our ICBM’s banned with SALT (something the Ruskies never planned to honor) the Russkies would have gone thru the Gap before JC 2nd term would have ended, with little fear of JC nuke’n anybody, we would be in a much different world, fast forward to JC 2 (Obama) and we can only hope none of our enemies have learned from the past and wait till “0″ as completely destroyed the US from the inside and they will destroy us from the outside. The song goes “the end is near my friend”
I agree – there was a point where it seemed Syria was seriously being considered for outright destabilization (even with French backing!) preparatory to regime change. This was about the time of the color revolutions in Lebanon and Ukraine and elsewhere less talked about (wiki the central Asian ‘stans, for example). As I bet Russia removed the WMDs, so Russia – in my opinion – capitulated, or relented temporarily, in these political events, but knew it only had to wait for its active measures, the pressure of Iran and Korea, the Eurodupes, and the US elections to utterly blunt the Bush Admin drive to throw the Asian enemy off balance. There is a deep strategic game being played of which there is no public discussion. Probably much worse retaliation was threatened in the event Syria should go. Look now and see how Russia is dredging a deep-water port in Syria, has provided it with missiles, WMD, and armor – I don’t have the links on me but you can find them. Look how unhelpful in Iran. Look at the brazen denial of Manas airbase in Kyrgystan. Look at how menacing North Korea, the return of Russian bombers to Cuba, the obnoxious friendship between Putin and Chavez, who just abolished term limits and provides a naval base and a proxy army against Colombia and the whole South American north.
Look at these things. Look at how obviously co-opted the IAEA is – its utterances are *absurd.* The Syria gambit is of a piece with the Islamist proxy armies it hosts. A North Korean WMD site – especially a nuclear – in SYRIA!? Gee, that’s an awfully long way away, I wonder how that train route looks? Please. The one thing I liked most about John McCain is that he publicly stated “the only thing I see when I look into Putin’s eyes is a K a G and a B.” THAT is reality, without there is no reasonable explanation. But the immediate problem remains Pakistan. Russia cannot expose itself everywhere, but without Pakistan the present overt strategy cannot be used as a reasonable cover for the covert, and our forward bases could very soon and very suddenly start to look like forward hostages.
Shell Oil says that they can recover oil from oil shale profitably down to $30.
@dan,
You get the prize for the best two paragraph summary I have read in along time. That is plagiarism worthy it is so good. It is time for Bush and Cheney and others to get back in the public square and start reading your exposition out loud so everyone hears and understands. Why the hell is Gates allowing himself to stay at DoD and provide a fig leaf for this betrayal? Gregg’s refusal to get sucked in is starting to look like one of the great acts of statesmanship in our history. That man deserves a statue inscribed with one word “No.”
Some years ago, from the mid-Seventies, when we were out of wars, there came to be a species of adventure fiction known as “military techno-thriller”. Gen. Hackett’s history of the Third World War was the first, iirc.
The authors needed plausible scenarios in which to let off their state-of-the-art weaponry, which usually had more character than the supposed humans involved.
The authors devised believable ways of getting from the here and now to the fighting. They did a good job, often the best part of the book.
The ways the authors took us to a war scenario were logical, based on fact, and plausible enough to make the book reasonable.
Tom Clancy took a glancing shot at this by suggesting that nobody could get published a novel starting a war as WW I started because it was just too crazy. Come to think of it, that applies to practically every war in history.
To exercise our logic and historical knowledge is an interesting recreation. But it does us little good in prognostication.
Iraq’s nuclear program moved to Libya, where it was surrendered by Q-daffy ON THE VERY DAY THAT SADDAM WAS CAPTURED.
Iran was trying to develop an alternative source, so they could claim (it wasn’t us, it was the other homicidal maniacs) someone else was giving the terrorists weapons.
The UN regulatory agency is a bad joke. They seek to be a living embodiment of Gresham’s law. They are the regulators that are so feckless and ineffective that no rogue state would bother to deny them access.
RWE,
“The US SECSTATE’s recent statements warning North Korea not to test a new missile are curious, though. You normally are eager to see what the other guy has. ”
They have to say that; too soon to tell whether or not it’s part of a head-in-the-sand attitude.
Finally some good news: Netanyahu to form government. He wanted a “unity “government with Kadima but Livni would have none of it.
If there is a will, there is a way. I’m hoping on the next moonless night, things start falling on Dinner Jackets head. The IAEA may then become irrelevant, as it should be.
LarryD @ 53
CEO of Rentech claims their coal to liquid process can produce (carbon-neutral) gasoline for $2/gallon. Not to swap numbers or argue off-topic, but facts and reality just sweep in and out like the sea breeze. Can build a lot of plants and employ a lot of people developing shale oil and coal if not for the motgages to be saved.
(P.S. The real message of Rick Santelli was the message – why did it take one obscure (sorry Rick, not to me but most of the world) trader on the floor to finally articulate the brewing unease with this administration’s reactive approach to an asset bubble that got mysteriously bumped upstairs to a global credit/liquidity/solvency crisis?)
#33 Armageddon Rex – We went to war in Iraq on the basis that Saddam had the means, methods and raw materials to build WMD’s. After the war, the most definitive, on-the-ground after action report was the Duelfer Report, which confirmed all of the above. Check out the Key Findings (they start on page 7 of this PDF file):
http://www.lib.umich.edu/govdocs/pdf/duelfer1_b.pdf
To all of our liberal brothers who argue that the Iraq War wasn’t worth it, I ask: so it wasn’t worth to shut down Saddam after 12 years of UN Security Council sanctions enforcement, it wasn’t worth it for Libya to give up their WMD programs, it wasn’t worth it to expose the AQ Khan network, it wasn’t worth it to have whatever happened in Syria happen? The world would be a better place with all of those WMD operations up and running right now, alongside Iran’s and North Korea’s WMD programs?
In Douglas Feith’s “War and Decision” he stresses that the Bush Administration was determined to strike global terror beyond just Afghanistan and the original miscreants, they wanted to take this war on terror global. Some may argue with that idea, but Osama and Al Qaeda sure bought into it, didn’t they?
We’ll live through Obama, we lived through Carter, and the Cold War was a lot more scary than this one. (Not that I ignore the fact that the Cold War didn’t really die, and it is coming back to life again now.)
SMART Power at work…The United States expressed concern to Pakistan’s President Ali Zardari that a deal allowing Sharia law in the volatile Swat valley amounted to a possible capitulation to Taliban militants.
US envoy Richard Holbrooke told CNN in an interview on Thursday afternoon that he had spoken with Zardari by phone just hours earlier and expressed his “concern.” …
“I am concerned, and I know Secretary (Hillary) Clinton is, and the president is, that this deal, which is portrayed in the press as a truce, does not turn into a surrender,” Holbrooke said. …
Asked about the risk of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal falling into the hands of extremists, Holbrooke said it was “a legitimate concern.”
Now for the bad news, Bibi is the good news of course..
This mornings AP headlines:
Netanyahu gets nod to form new Israeli government – 12 minutes ago
US: Pakistan-style truce in Afghanistan acceptable – 31 minutes ago
Kyrgyzstan issues eviction notice to key US base – 2 hours ago
Politics News from APCollapse appDelete AppApp OptionsRefresh App
Obama tells mayors to spend stimulus money wisely – 36 minutes ago
Clinton queries utility of China rights debate – 2 hours ago
Gates: US asks more time for missile base decision – 3
To all of our liberal brothers who argue that the Iraq War wasn’t worth it, – Tony
To that list I would add the exposure of the scandals and the players at the UN, which still await prosecution. Maurice Strong needs to be a houshold name.
(The rebuttal position of the government is that it can’t be seen as ‘doing nothing’. How about spending that money to prosecute the Oil for Food players or the mortgage industry or the SEC? And just for grins break a finger suspending the MTM rule. And build some domestic fossil fuels facilities. Strikes me that this administration is tone-deaf to the paradigm shift spearheaded by Rick Santelli – please don’t help quite so much. Nothing cowardly about Santelli’s voice.)
wretchard
It should be noted [and has been largely overlooked] that a graphite pile reactor does not require enriched uranium. the fission reaction can be sustained in such a reactor using natural uranium that is 0.72% U235 as fuel. The nuclear reaction may be sustained for a while in such a reactor after which the nuclear reaction is shut down and the fuel removed. The fissionable actinides such as Pu, U235, and so forth may then be extracted from the fuel by various chemical extraction processes. This is how portions of the Manhattan project in the U.S. were carried out. Just as a guess, the Syrians may have been nailed while in the process of constructing the graphite pile reactor before the reactor went critical which would be consistent with the absence of enriched uranium or fission products. The fuel – uranium metal – could be fabricated elsewhere i.e. another country. Similarly, the fuel extracted from the reactor following the fission reaction could be shipped elsewhere for further processing. This could account for the alleged absence of supporting facilities within Syria.
Similar things may be occurring in Iran. The media is focused on the Iranian centrifuges. This is a slow path to enrichment. However, it is reported that Iran has a heavy water facility. Heavy water, like graphite, can be used as a moderator to sustain a fission reaction with naturally occurring uranium as fuel thereby producing U235 and PU which can be extracted and concentrated using a centrifuge cascade and/or various chemical extraction processes. This is a much faster path to obtaining a quantity of fissile material for, say, a bomb. [Note that this is why the Allies destroyed the heavy water facility in Norway during WWII.] There has been no explanation of this at all in the MSM or anywhere else that I have seen and I do wish you or someone would expound upon these points, which are very important imo. Thank you.
I have known Bruce the mosquito for years. He is a charlatan who has managed to become a full profess or Rochester and then NYU. I made a forecast for us at a meeting six months before the first Gulf War. He has conned the CIA for years but then you know what I think about the CIA’s leadership.
Bruce coauthored a book some years ago that I consider the worst international relations book every written. I keep it as an example of how bad political science can be.
I missed it Jay. Bruce who?
Thanks, Jim
The Shell article is long on pollyanna and short on market ready. I have talked to people in the industry and they are telling me that at 70 dollars per bbl it is doable. Less than that and you need a gov’t subsidy. I personally think the state of CO should step up and take back the Fed land and support the program with leases like they have in AK. Reduce state income taxes and sales taxes to zero. This will help the poor much more than O’s current debacle.
Jim
JF, I was referring to Bruce De Mesquita. He is a full professor in the poly “science” department at NYU.
I agree – there was a point where it seemed Syria was seriously being considered for outright destabilization (even with French backing!)
are we your Jews ??? you hate us so much !!!
Syria isn’t backed by the Frenchs, and if you’d studied (at least read regulary the papers) the very events that happened since the early 80ies show that the Frenchs were in the iranian colimator, through thier tool Syria, The drakkar terrorism act killed more than 50 of our soldiers, while the Americans had a heaver loss. Since then there have had many terrorist acts against us as against the americans, which origin were/are still from Iran.
The Hariri assassination was rooted to Syria, I recall that Hariri was supported by the french and the Americans, also he was Chirac’s private friend
So all I read from you is merely BS as far we are concerned, So I advise you to get a blow job, that would appease your resentment against us
if you’re too lazy to find links that corroborate my dires, tell me, I’ll be glad to compensate your averred biased ignorance
The riviledged europeans that had/have relation with Syria were/are Germans, and Italians.
OK, Sarko wanted to launch the mediterranean union, this is still a dream, cuz that would mean that Israel would also be part of it !!!
BTW, renewing connections with Syria, was one of the main back-yard objectives of your former administration, that I supposed is carried on, so far Bolton is still on business
Marie,
I think you misunderstand. He was saying that the French were with us on the plan to destabilize the Syrians. As for your “oral” argument. Who doesn’t need one?
@Jay, Thanks. Now I know why I have that link open in a tab. Nice play on words.
Jim
JFSanders, I would like to agree with you, but so far he hasn’t shown his fairness as far as we come on topics
engineer,
If I understand you aright then these alternate paths to fissile material have timelines which aren’t discussed in the MSM. Or am I getting it wrong?
The IAEA is much like a bikini bathing suit – what it reveals is suggestive; what it conceals is vital.
@engineer:
Thank you for the reminder about the Iranian heavy water facility. It doesn’t do my blood pressure any good to be reminded, but I haven’t heard much comment about it’s implications in open sources. Be assured there are plenty of folks concerned about it in U.S. government circles, but it seems, since the recent elections, that none of those people are in the “right” circles to influence policy any longer. Regrettably, most of us don’t give much thought to the international results of our national elections. At this point, the Israelis will either use thier own tactical nukes to destroy the Iranian effort, or the Iranians will succeed, probably sooner than later. It will be an interesting world, so long as one doesn’t have friends of family in or near Israel…
Yes – I meant that the French backed the effort to destabilize Syria, partly because of the Hariri assassination, which also provided an actual political opportunity to force military and intelligence assets out of Lebanon, a place in which actual existing shreds of France’s legacy give it a useful (but entirely coincidental) opportunity to exercise its egotism *and* actually contribute to regional improvement.
I am completely fair to France. Do you think I take any pleasure in it? Your country is governed by delusional trash far more interested in making extravagant demonstrations of its independence and subverting the hated Anglo-Saxons and co-opting what is left of democratic (that is, Anglo-Saxon) Europe through the EU via conspiracy, than contributing to reasonable world intercourse – and is moreover honeycombed with Soviet/Russian agents. And you personally, madame, are the apotheosis of France, writ small.
Dan, I don’t care to be the apotheosis of France for you, I am here to point on deliberatly inate discourses on us, and I had the opporunity to pick you, not only here though. Though seems that I misunderstood your purpose here, you were not explicite, and tradition oblige !!!
Do you think that your country was/is better governed ? it doesn’t appears on a world scale that your Country was/is appreciated for smartiness.
I am sorry to tell you that you are not our suzerin and I am glad that our leaders don’t make allegeance to an averred imperialist ambition since 1945 ; do you want me to link America’s conspiraties against our interest in Africa, in Maghreb, in Algeria… ?
I can also recall you the conspiracies that your beloved neo-con quarteron launched against us, all lies, WMD… Plame, yeah, the French, LMAO
Also I am glad you didn’t put us in that last uranium topic
Seems that your policy is failing, ie URSS, your going to collapse too.
wretchard, the stability considerations were main reason for papa Bush to leave Saddam in power. If your congecture is correct than junior’s policies were even more confused then I’ve thought before. No wonder he failed.
No wonder he failed
Please provide the well reasoned argument why a Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq is more favorable to US interests than the current Iraqi government.
Wrichard writes:
“Rather than embark on the well known Via Dolorosa of opaque diplomatic warnings, requests for IAEA investigation, sanctions, threatened military actions, attempted Security Council Resolutions — the process is well known to the readers, someone simply went and bombed it.”
“Via Dolorosa”! That’s good!
engineer said:
“It should be noted [and has been largely overlooked] that a graphite pile reactor does not require enriched uranium. the fission reaction can be sustained in such a reactor using natural uranium that is 0.72% U235 as fuel. The nuclear reaction may be sustained for a while in such a reactor after which the nuclear reaction is shut down and the fuel removed. The fissionable actinides such as Pu, U235, and so forth may then be extracted from the fuel by various chemical extraction processes.”
This is called the PUREX process (Plutonium – URanium EXtraction). There’s a Wikipedia article about it. The United States ran most of its PUREX production at the Savannah River Site (google “Savannah River Site” for more information about this).
Re. 77
1. technological disparity between US and Saddam did not justify such a long campaign. He unnesessarily prolongs it;
2. In a process he overburdened the military;
3. Syria, Iran, NorK, Lybia, Saudies, etc. were deadly scared after initial actions in A & I. He did everything to calm them down;
3. He allowed dems (and RINOs) to highjack his domestic policies, or may be his policies were like that all along and I just misread them from the beginning;
4. Anyway, huge run up in non-essential spending was on his watch; etc.
I think it’s enough.
#77 Peter B – c’mon, you have to put this “failure” in context with the tremendous success of the previous administration in confronting our allies. When presented with Sudan with the opportunity to take custody of Osama in the mid-90′s, the Clinton Administration lamented that they didn’t have the proper evidence to try him (y’know, a declaration of war won’t stand up in court, right?) And when confronted with the Embassy bombings, it was spectacularly effective to shoot off a half-billion dollars’ worth of Cruise missiles at nothing in the night. And, darn it, Clinton spent billions blowing up Iraq in ’98 with the coyly named Operation Desert Fox, that was the opposite of failure, even though Saddam shrugged it off like a moth. Of course, with the bombing of the USS Cole, nothing could possibly be done because it might interfere with Al Gore’s election. And the final, fabulous success was leaving Al Qaeda in their comfy sanctuary in Afghanistan, plotting 9/11.
See, to understand how Bush “failed” you have to know what success looks like. Actually defeating one’s enemies is the height of failure, doncha see?
wretchard
You commented “If I understand you aright then these alternate paths to fissile material have timelines which aren’t discussed in the MSM. Or am I getting it wrong?”
That is precisely my point – there are process paths and corresponding time lines to the production of weapons grade fissionable material from naturally occurring [unenriched] uranium using a graphite pile reactor [Syria?] or heavy water reactor [Iran??]. These paths and time lines are certainly understood by competent engineers and therefore presumaby by competent intelligence analysts. These paths may or may not be understood by policy makers. In any event, these paths are obfuscated at best in the general media and thus imo are not understood by even highly sophisticated members of the general public who are unversed in these arts. imo these paths and corresponding time lines must be understood by the public in order to allow the public to understand the threat posed by, for example, Iran.
Furthermore the various facilities such as the late Syrian facility and the Iranian heavy water facility have implications that are not explained in the MSM. Again, whether these implications are understood by policy makers I cannot say.
What it all means I am not a deep enough thinker to understand. I am confident that you can sort out some of this.
And in a side note:
Santelli gets attacked by O’s infodog
A fact sheet. Yeah ok. Now I believe you…
Jim
The White House is most upset that Santelli has a NBC return address.
The shock and rage at thinking they could be betrayed, how sweet.
Interesting article from a former abassadoe to the US from Kyrgyz.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/19/AR2009021902777.html?nav=rss_opinion%2Fcolumns
He does neglect to say that more money would have helped a great deal.
He almost seems to say that the current government kicked us out because we where ot critical enough if the current government.
Interesting though. I think it is a safe bet that Obama did not want to meet what every price they wanted.
@Mongoose,
If we do not want to issue uncovered calls to 3rd World thugs to get their support fair enough. That is why we need both carrots and sticks. Simply picking up our toys and going home is not an option. Now the Chief Ego of Kyrghiz or Whackistan or whatever knows that saying No to Uncle Sugar is cost free. The worst that happens is that some thumb sucker who majored in Sociology at Brown will say that he should do more “for the children.” Maybe they’ll even praise him for showing courage. If you say No to Uncle Vlad then there is a real possibility that some morning you’ll find your breakfast milk doesn’t agree with you, accidents happen. Right now the Israelis are supergluing lavatory doors and slipping whoopie cushions onto chairs used by Iranian physicists. We also need to put the fun back into foreign affairs.
The Hanford Reactor style of promoting U238 up into fissile P239 entails chronic swap outs of reactor feed stock.
It can run without any enrichment, but enriched fuel is quite helpful. Heavy water as a coolant helps the performance, too.
Using U235 for bomb making is costly since there is no way to get the purity much beyond 85% at a practical cost… and getting to 85% was expensive indeed.
Hence, virtually all weapons use Plutonium. It can be chemically isolated from the fuel charge to give you high purity without a lot of grief.
Since the A Q Khan network has provided functional weapons designs based on Plutonium it’s a pretty good bet that the mullahs will take that road.
The most obvious use of atomic weapons for Iran would be as psycho-economic tools to panic up the price of oil.
Again, repeating:
We need to get a Panama Canal style treaty granting us linear access up into southwest Afghanistan.
We’d want air bases at both ends and a port built off shore.
A railroad, highway, and pipelines would connect Afghanistan to the sea.
Caspian Crude Oil would then have a safe route to market, indeed the terminal would be much, much closer to the market.
During construction, cash flows into Afghanistan and Pakistan would be most helpful. As it stands Pakistan is headed for insolvency.
The desert to be crossed is essentially devoid of life. It’s one of the driest places on earth.
That makes it impractical for small unit sabotage.
As expensive as it would be, one must compare the cost to what we are already throwing down the drain in classic war expenditures in Afghanistan… with no end in sight.
Such a project plays to our strengths. It permanently re-shapes the battle space.
It also provides us with our own Malta right where we need it to be.
It would plainly advance the economies of all of the ‘stans.
Whether it is better to tunnel through the mountain or chop it down and use a high pass I leave to the experts.
I know this scheme will play well in Peoria.
Another atomic tidbit:
Heavy water is the route to Tritium, a very handy thing to have.
The press seems to completely miss the significance of Tritium triggers. You can bet your last burka that A Q Khan’s blueprints specify more than Plutonium.
@blert,
The most attractive part of your plan is chopping down Muhammad’s mountain. Looks like a good opportunity for us to demonstrate the peaceful use of nuclear technology. From what I have heard you are overestimating the security of the route but I like to hear re-shaping ideas.
Of course I am sure that some wild goat will be discovered whose plight will mobilize all the NGOs and the Upper West side of Manhattan against any effort by the US to alter the environment in pursuit of our war plans.
LOFTM: I have spent some time i the CIS reagion. Believe me, all the Kyrgyz wanted was more money. This guy was from the prior regime, i;d wager.
Obama just did not want us to be there, is my guess. So they did not want to pay the increase in the rent.
Yes it is a black eye. But that black eye is due to both Obama’s stance and the fact that we elected hi,
To much of the world over there, Obama is seen as a sign of American decline, even senility. Bush put the fear of God into those people at least up until the the spring of 2007. Obama is hard for a lot of people ot process over there.
Another aspect of the transit zone would be that it would frustrate enemy movement.
The idea of a modern Lawrence of Arabia detonating track is quite amusing. In a world of robots, sensors and UAV’s it’s a hopeless endeavor. It’s not as if the corridor wouldn’t have a fence.
No water, no food, no animals, no civilization and absolutely no cover: how does our opponent deal with that?
As for Afghanistan, we are not facing an insurgency. We have, instead, a non-Afghan invasion army funded and recruited in Pakistan. It’s a brigand army. This is going to play out like the Thirty-Years War. That means that victory occurs when a new major player re-aligns the power balance. Well, kind of like France ( Catholic ) hooking up with Sweden ( Protestant ) This time around it’s going to be India ( Hindu — Muslim ) backing up Afghanistan ( Muslim — Fanatic )
If you start a tunnel boring machine in say Colorado and bore clear through to the stans…
Aaaah nevermind just bomb ‘em back to da stone age already.
Jim
JFS…
That’s impossible…
They’re already there.
Or is it they’re already then.
Since the Caspian Sea deep deposits are some of the largest ever found — basically an extension of the super giants in Iraq, Kuwait and KSA — getting it to market is of great significance.
Putin’s entire play is to shunt the ‘stans through his toll booth.
With one stroke, that can be trumped.
You know, I was thinking that as I hit the submit button…
How about the pre-Pleistocene age?
Jim
@blert:
In comment #87 you say: “The desert to be crossed is essentially devoid of life. It’s one of the driest places on earth. That makes it impractical for small unit sabotage.”
Then, in comment #92 you say: “Another aspect of the transit zone would be that it would frustrate enemy movement.
The idea of a modern Lawrence of Arabia detonating track is quite amusing. In a world of robots, sensors and UAV’s it’s a hopeless endeavor. It’s not as if the corridor wouldn’t have a fence.
No water, no food, no animals, no civilization and absolutely no cover: how does our opponent deal with that?”
So which is it? If the area is already completely unsuited for small unit sabotage, because the terrain is nearly uninhabitable, how is any pipeline or related security infrastructure going to frustrate enemy movements when there is no enemy at hand to begin with due to the impossible terrain?
I can’t see Joe & Jane American sitting by happily as our economy nose dives, while the ONE spends billions upon billions of dollars for infrastructure in the Afghan / Pakistan region. In good economic times it might pass muster, but in the current climate it never will. If we’re going to stay involved there successfully, we must either drastically reduce our footprint and goals to meet changing realities, or commit to a massive increase in military & political involvement in the region in order to succeed. To ramp up successfully, we would in effect expand the fight fully into Pakistan with 150,000 or more troops, and stop pussyfooting around.
I don’t believe the ONE is going to do that. He’s much more likely to vote “present” and waffle on doing anything substantive. His policies will slowly ramp up boots on the ground while vetoing any successful strategies or tactics by commanders so that we can take a really good pounding, with a lot of casualties. Then when the useless bleeding has caused a shudder in even the most stouthearted warrior, he’ll pull us out in disgrace to demonstrate his commitment to U.S. international humiliation, and ensure the loyalty of his deafeatist base before 2012.
AR…
What I advocate and what I expect are two different things.
I figure that the ramp up in Afghanistan, under current conditions, is exactly like piling on the man-power at Stalingrad circa September 1942.
We have no flanks, we are bringing our essentials right through the battle space… !
I would much prefer to withdraw most American forces, almost all NATO non-forces, and finance an Indian expedition of mountain troops. Without heavy elements the Indians could place and maintain a lot of boots on the ground.
Flitting around the battle space, sucking down the fuel is strategic disaster.
Right now the ISI is making us look like chumps.
BHO wants us to be double chumps.
And I’m afraid that your scenario is entirely too plausible.
Still, me thinks that BHO would like to loose a battle fleet at the same time, too.
Kind of like AH destroying his Air Fleet while losing 22 divisions and crippling his essential allies.
Lets think big.
With regard to construction expense…
Import second hand mining equipment from Australia. I think some big stuff has just come on the market.
The rough-in will greatly resemble open pit mining.
At the end of the day, having our own Malta just off the Pakistani coast is worth a battle fleet.
Frustrating Putin: winning WWIV.
Controlling critical transportation nodes: American pre-eminence. Let’s not lose it.
American pre-eminence means the ability to run chronic trade deficits covered by computer entries and paper money — that is we retain our status as the international money. That status means that we hugely export our defense expenditures. That’s right, the outside world is mostly picking up the tab for our armed forces in that round about way.
As Britain could explain, losing reserve currency status collapses your defense budget. That’s what happened to the Royal Navy.
So…
Spending on extra-territorial bases comes easy when you realize that you are expanding your strategic position which directly increases the desirability of your currency exports.
And as for America’s external trade deficit…
When your currency is international money you MUST run chronic trade deficits.
That serves the same function as mining gold were it to be the basis for international money.
Any attempt by America to deliberately contract her trade deficit will cause a horrific contraction in all alien economies. Pulling dollars back home is staggeringly deflationary for the rest of the planet. Of course, that’s exactly what is going on.
Take a look at how many currencies are being crushed right now.
Spengler is right.
ag
Why am I not surprised that you cannot provide a coherent, on point answer to a simple 2+2 question.
@ JFS 96
Pre-Cambrian works for me.
The Pre-Cambrian Basement under Wright Patterson is where we keep all the rest of these aliens. Well, not all of them, just a representative sample.
PB, i think that AG amply showed his non-English skills in that short burst and can be even more easily dismissed.
Blert, the canal thought is a very interesting one. Eyeballing it, are we talking 300-400 miles? Plenty of South Asian construction workers available.
And the added bonus? It could help take some of the extra sea water that we are sure to get as our earth continues to suffer from man-made Global Warming! (have had one of those references in at least a few days).
Steeple…
I’m more of a mind that the legal framework follows the Panama Canal… ie this is a 99 year lease… so as to not be an affront to islam.
However, the actual transport link would be above water, well above water.
Cutting our own pass through the mountains to my mind beats a tunnel.
I intend to use the immense spoils to fill in a piece of the Indian Ocean. This routing terminus would not be a leasehold: it would be American fee simple.
It would be large enough to operate as a naval base, oil export hub and air base.
The closest parallels from history: the Burma Road, the Alcan Highway. These are routes built to achieve a military victory. It is upon such economics that they pencil out.
The naval and air base would effectively buttress our 5th Fleet. Eventually, the 5th fleet would re-locate to it.
We need to be in the area for a long, long, long time. We don’t want to be dependent on this or that local player.
—-
As for a military canal: the Negev Sea Level Canal. Cut a twin to the Suez. Dump the spoil into the Med. Plop an air base and port neatly athwart Gaza.
Move the locals out… build them habitation in Jordan on 99 year leasehold land.
Ship the hot heads to Iran and Syria.
Abu Musa is claimed by the U.A.E. and is occupied by Iran. Why not have the U.S. “buy” it from the UAE for $20? We can then have the 5th fleet move into its new home, after first declaring it a free fire testing range for 30 days.
“Volcker sees crisis leading to global regulation” By EILEEN AJ CONNELLY, AP Business Writer Eileen Aj Connelly, Ap Business Writer – Fri Feb 20, 6:29 pm [h/t Elephant Bar]
He scoffed at the notion that those entities must be free to innovate — stating that financial “innovations” like asset backed securities and credit default swaps have brought few benefits. The most important “innovation” in banking for most people in the last 20 or 30 years, he maintained, is the automatic teller machine.
…………………………………………………………………………..
The story on the Glass-Steagall wall separating investment banking from commercial banking is more – or less – damning (depending on POV.) The actual repeal in 1999 was indeed a formality that acknowledged longer-term trend for bending the separation rules beginning in 1980′s.
The fall of the investment bank was of its own making, analysts said. Starting in the 1980s, investment banks began straying from their traditional roles as intermediaries to mergers and acquisitions, investment advisers to corporations and individuals, traders of securities and portfolio managers for wealthy clients.
Driven by competition and the hunger for bigger profits, they began to aggressively push exotic products like asset-backed securities and other derivatives.
The investment banks not only sold these instruments to investors but also began purchasing them for the firms’ own accounts, using larger and larger amounts of borrowed money. The more risks investment bankers took, the more money they made. Internal controls were lax.
http://www.impactlab.com/2008/09/21/shifting-tides-ahead-after-financial-titans-fall/
Two additional consequences of interest (depending on POV), (1)the investment bank culture of BSD’s described by Michael Lewis and others will be absorbed by the risk-averse culture of commercial deposit banking and (2) the investment talent pool is fleeing the big institutions and going into smaller boutique houses where presumably they will offer more targetted investment options for clients seeking risk and high reward, if there are any left. That’s just for starters of course in the narrow context.
On another subject I like the way blert’s mind works. I’m not sure his construction project will play in Peoria but I like it. As I’ve written many times to the point of being tiresome, this country cannot build the conceptual “narrative” to support (let alone fund) the idea of construction and industry and manufacturing. Those sectors have been permanently tainted.
@ AR 97…
The corridor would be a military zone…
Towards the Indian Ocean, the desert is extreme…
The Taliban within Afghanistan would be impeded.
The proposed location would be astride the north-of-the-mountain cross traffic. Hence, the western zone would be unvexed by Pakistani Taliban.
Think of the northern terminus as Fort Apache Afghanistan.
Think of the port and air base as a custom built Singapore.
It is better to be outside the Persian Gulf, yet proximate to it.
It is better to improve land that currently lacks hostile players.
World wide there is now a glut of idle ultra-heavy duty surface mining equipment. That means that you can get the site shovel ready as soon as a treaty is signed. Pakistan and Afghanistan are ripe for a treaty since cash is king.
Karzai would be crazy not to sign up: he’s heading into national elections. What a feather in his cap.
As for the Pakistanis: they’re going insolvent.
Strategically, getting fresh access to the Deep Caspian Sea Crude is a world changer. T’stan fronts big discoveries under the Caspian. So to K’stan.
Cutting a railroad yet further on into Kabul and such would keep the locals very busy indeed. Keeping them building keeps them off the farm.
Permitting the Afghans to achieve low cost access to the world economy would utterly transform it into something like Mongolia or Bolivia.
Not perfect democracies, but a far, far cry from the Talibs.
blert, Now, how do we get the criminally incompetent to move forward on that project? We can’t even get them to quit screwing with the TV signals….
Jim
World wide there is now a glut of idle ultra-heavy duty surface mining equipment. – blert
The Montana coal deposits (and Wyoming) are surficial, which means open pit mining not tunneling. They’re also low in sulfur which means they’re more expensive to develop because they don’t get the rebate for scrubbers.
I’m thinking Australia… Brazil…
BTW the Deep Caspian test holes indicate that this is a mega-deposit comparable to KSA, and yes, loads of light sweet crude.
In short: it’s realistic to imagine 8 million barrels per day in less than 16 years flowing through this oil export/ mineral export corridor.
Without America… it’s just not going to happen.
As you might imagine, Afghanistan would be able to extract a transport ‘rent’ so that her government is no longer an unremitting black hole.
“16 years”
??
16 years? Gotta figure in the talibs blowing it up every few months until completion. And then being nationalized by somebody. Aint nothing easy in this world ‘cept dying.
Jim
Blert…please send your Afgan oil corridor plan to General Petraes…he would get the strategic and game changing aspects immediately….especially putting most Afghani men to work for five years…which would be a more attractive option than joining the Taliban.
Blert wrote: “A railroad, highway, and pipelines would connect Afghanistan to the sea.” Did you look at the map recently?
Peter B: I do not see much difference between Clinton and junior. With regard to your request to comp. of Saddam with present Iraq “gov” the obvious reply is: Saddam was better buffer to mullahs.
But my initial point was about the mixed signals Bush sent to all local clowns that he is not after them. It is elementary fact that one cannot change regime in one ME location and assure clowns in other locations that you are not after them. It is d-e-s-t-a-b-i-l-i-z-i-n-g. All of them soiled their pants initially. Quaddafi gave up his programs. Now he probably regrets it. And the rest feels empowered.
Meanwhile he allowed Barney Frank, Schumer, et al. to browbeat him into present mess.
ag…
Did you read all of my posts?
No, I do not (I assure you, the reasons are decent). But unfortunately there are a lot of similarities between a very long pipe in a hostile territory and a pipe-dream. And no amount of elaborate details in project description change this fundamental fact. BTW, the realistic route is through Iran. And it was closed (chiefly) by Jimmy Carter when he courted Ayatollas and abandoned Pehlevi.
Blert,
Don’t worry about those armies at Volga bend, we’ll just supply them by air 8^O
I like your creativity, seems better than anything I’ve conceived… skrink back to special ops and UAVs to keep the swarms disorganzied.
Hard to imagine what it would look like to reduce a pocket occupied by such a potent force, at least Zhukov won’t be in charge…
Veracious, not to nitpick, but that was Gen. Vasily Chuikov.
Buddy, Chuikov was just the underling told to hold the city. Zhukov was the master trickling just enough troops to Chuikov to hold while planning & building the counterattck ate 6th and portions of 4th Pz Army.
There were great German generals (Guderian) and USA Patton, but Zhukov, trained in German blitkrieg during the Russo-German pre-war period, was the best general of the war. What he did to the Japanese in Manchuria during 1939 was nothing short of massacre. Whole divisions with 80-90% losses; unheard of. Must read, for serious understanding of _real_ war (VS minimal precision styles).