In 2007 Think Progress happily announced that “a new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) released today concludes with ‘high confidence’ that ‘in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.’” But in 2009 Barack Obama announced to the world that Iran had been secretly operating a nuclear enrichment plant. What a difference two years makes. Perhaps the better report to read from that vintage year is Anthony Cordesman‘s 2007 study for the Center for Strategic and Independent Studies examining the outcomes of a hypothetical nuclear war in the Middle East between Israel and Iran. Cordesman concluded that once a conflict got started it would tend to escalate to where both countries were destroyed. A summary of the study on the CSIS site says:
It does seem clear, however, that both sides would probably be forced to target the other’s population centers in any scenario that escalated beyond an initial demonstrative strike. It also seems likely that such a conflict would quickly become existential in the sense that both sides would seek to inflict the maximum possible casualties on its opponent, and to destroy its ability to recover as a nation.
The analysis indicates that Israeli might have the near to mid-term advantage in such a struggle, at least in terms of the ability to inflict more damage on the Persian ethnic population and economy of Iran. Iran is much larger than Israel, but its population is heavily urbanized and extremely vulnerable to boosted and thermonuclear weapons.
AdvertisementThis advantage seems likely to continue until Iran obtained boosted or thermonuclear weapons. The outcome would be so costly to both sides, however, any such advantage would little or no practical value. It is unclear that either nation could reconstitute itself on anything like a prewar basis, if at all.
But the background material Cordesman prepared in support of the summary is worth reading in itself. It describes the apparatus of regional destruction; those expensive, sophisticated mechanisms that everybody claims are too dangerous use while pursuing their acquisition relentlessly. The truism that “no one wins a nuclear war” is belied by those arsenals in the same way that someone working on an expensive sportscar yet promises never drive it is less than credible. Who knows? On page 17 of his backgrounder, Cordesman states the chief problem which haunts those who smugly claim that no one is crazy enough to start an atomic war. “Rational actors do not fight nuclear wars, but history is not written about rational actors behaving in a rational manner.” Hitler invaded Russia and Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. Politicians do stupid things. They always have and maybe they always will. Once the assumption of rationality and perfect control is relaxed, the outcomes become far less predictable.
Essentially Cordesman’s study assumes that most of the hypothetical strikes against Israel will be concentrated on the Mediterranean coastal strip between Ashkelon and Hadera, with separate strikes on Beersheba, Nazareth and Eliat. A much larger and more powerful Israeli strike would probably come down on more than a dozen Iranian cities, including the perfect target that is Teheran, whose surrounding mountains will focus and intensify a thermonuclear blast like a lens. That a lot of people will die on both sides is a given.
What is less certain is whether the land will die too. Cordesman examines the relative effects of air versus ground bursts. While airbursts may kill more people in the short run “the closer to ground a bomb is detonated, the more dust and debris is thrown into the air, and the more local fallout.” These have more lasting effects. If one wanted to prevent the re-emergence of a country after a generation, poisoning the land would be one way to do it.
What is also unclear is whether nukes will be the only weapons used in an apocalyptic exchange. Cordesman examines the contribution of chemical and biological weapons to the attack mix because once an existential atomic war is underway, there is little obvious incentive for further restraint. Moreover, chemical and biological weapons would be devastatingly effective against populations stunned by nuclear blasts, whose medical response system was destroyed and whose water and sanitation facilities would be in shambles. Proxy terrorist organizations might have a specialized role in disseminating chemical and biological agents among the survivors especially if the police forces and border controls are in a state of collapse. A Middle East of half-destroyed nations would be a terrorist organization’s paradise.
Finally, Cordesman does not rule out the possibility that a war of mass destruction could spread beyond a hypothetical conflict between Iran and Israel. He presents colorful charts of the destructive extent of a nuclear hit on Riyadh, Cairo and Damascus. Since cities in Turkey, Russia and South Asia are in range of much of the weaponry there is no reason it might not apply to them. They can be hit if they are fired upon.
The 2007 survey also provides a fascinating glimpse into the new and improved ranges of biological weaponry that are coming into existence. If a nuclear exchange took place, even a limited one, it might unleash lasting hatreds of such intensity that the survivors, rather than being shocked into peace may, driven by the desire for revenge, simply proceed to finish the job. It is often assumed that a nuclear war would be mankind’s final conflict. Whoever believes that has a high opinion of mankind. Certainly the newer biological weapons seem especially well suited for the task of genocide.
- Binary biological weaponsthat use two safe to handle elements that can be assembled before use.
- Designer genes and life forms, which could include synthetic genes and gene networks, syntheticviruses, and synthetic organisms. These weapons include DNA shuffling, synthetic forms of the flu –which killed more people in 1918 than died in all of World War I and which still kills about 30,000 Americans a year –and synthetic microorganisms.
- “Gene therapy” weaponsthat use transforming viruses or similar DNA vectors carrying Trojan horse genes (retrovirus, adenovirus, poxvirus, HSV-1). Such weapons can produce single individual (somatic cell) or inheritable (germline) changes. It can also remove immunities and wound healing capabilities.
- Stealth viruses that can be introduced over years and then used to blackmail a population.
- Host-swapping diseases which act like customized versions of AIDS. Tailoring the disruption for attack purposes can produce weapons that are extremely lethal and for which there is no treatment. A tailored disease like AIDS could combine serious initial lethality with crippling long-term effects lasting decades.
- Designer diseases which instruct cells to commit suicide.
One of the key variables to preventing nuclear war is the regional perception of America. The key perception is not measured in terms of Barack Obama’s personal popularity or charisma but in the harder currency exemplified by extended deterrence (page 12). Extended deterrence is the perceived willingness of the United States to launch an nuclear response in retaliation for a nuclear attack on an ally. An ally’s willingness to leave things to the United States is akin to the concept extended deterrence and an important factor in letting the US manage a crisis, akin to a citizen’s willingness to let the police act instead of engaging in private retribution. This is a critical psychological edge which America must not completely lose if it is to retain any hope of controlling events. While the existing Israeli nuclear arsenal shows the Israelis have long been unwilling to completely consign their fate to Washington, some residual credibility of America as a regional cop is critical towards letting the hegemon sort things out instead of watching helplessly while things escalate under frantic national leaders.
Cordesman’s extended briefing provides an extended framework for examining whether this administration’s policy is making things better or worse. It lets the reader judge the following questions in the right perspective. Will America’s actions tend to stop the emergence of a nuclear Iran. If a nuclear armed Iran impends or eventuates, is America likely to prevent other powers in the region from following suit? Will current policies lessen or increase the Israeli incentive to build more and deadlier weapons? Will tensions in the area increase or decrease as a result of administration initiatives? Will America’s ability to “act the cop” increase or decrease? Will that enhance or reduce its ability to manage a crisis should one occur?
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.. Mr. Obama is not an ‘acter’, nor is he much of a reacter. He’s a watcher and a whiner and a prevaricator and a procrastinator par excellance. He won’t manage anything big, because he can’t get ahead of it. When Cheney said that Iran ” won’t get nuclear weapons on our watch “, I thought the operative words were ” nuclear weapons “. But I was wrong. ” On our watch ” was the important part. The U.S. is an observer and the worlds bad acters are inside our O.O.D.A. loop. After armeggedon, you may say of Obama…” Si monumentum requiris circumspice “.
It is not necessary to drop a nuclear bomb on Cairo. Nasser built one, it is called the Aswan High Dam. My guess is that one day some Islamic group will blow it up to kill Copts or Mubarak or just to kill.
The primary target in Israel is the reactor facility at Dimona. Israelis call it the “Banana Factory.”
Regarding the fraudulent 2007 NIE report that was used to cripple efforts to control Iran and which also boosted the Democrats in the run up to the 2008 election, actions must have consequences. The production and use of the false report to aid hostile foreign powers was a clear case of treason and sedition. Remember that Iran was and is engaged in active combat killing American soldiers in Iraq. If those who engaged in this fraud faced consequences, if their sense of overwhelming immunity was torn asunder, then we would be restored to a world in which reasonable people can disagree over policy.
The failure to permanently disbar Clinton for his admitted perjury started the devaluation of any sense that would be any consequences for assaults on the foundations of constitutional government. In addition the laughably soft response to Sandy Berger’s “Docs in his socks” destruction of the historical record in the National Archive was a body blow to any sense that those committing an outrage may be held accountable.
LOTM: As usual, you’ve got it nailed. Thanks for the analysis. What’s your take on how dangerous a strike on Dimona would be? Seems to me good planning would call for weapons-grade material to be dispersed so the big loss would be to research capability. How important is that when the future is possibly measured in months?
And Wretchard: You have once raised a question that will keep me awake for a few nights: the importance of America’s image in the target nations and what the current administration is doing to destroy that image. But doesn’t this assume rational actions on the part of the Iranians (and other anti-Israel parties)? And can we assume such rational action? Doesn’t seem that way — look at Iran’s human wave attacks against Iraq for example.
Bigger question: is there any way really to stop Iran’s nuclear ambitions? I mean leaving aside the laughable UN attempts? And does this administration want to do so or are they merely watching from the sidelines? F
Testing.
When Americans voted for Obama they voted for “anti-fighting-axis-of-evil” policies. They voted for an end of history but got the end of American exceptionalism with it. Under Obama we will stand idly by, fiddling while Israel burns. And after that, who knows to whom or where else the fire will spread.
Whether a nation that thinks dodge ball is too brutal will be able to stand up to threats is an open question.
I’m not even going to read Cordesman’s analysis because I’m sure it’s just too depressing, and my pocket analysis is that there will be no escalation – and certainly no “demonstration” bomb especially on the Iranian’s part – it will be all on from the first second.
Regarding biological weapons, they are still either pretty much natural, or else crude and poorly understood. The potential horrors are stomach-turning beyond belief – there was a fad in science-fiction writing about ten years ago to write bio-fiction, and some of the creative stuff was just hauntingly awful. Fortunately we don’t yet have that technology to any great extent, and after four billion years of evolution we’re pretty tough, so maybe it’s not all as easy as it might look.
And I’ll say again – I don’t care how smart the Israelis are, to trust a major weapons system like an H-bomb, without having had an extensive actual testing program, is only barely credible. Hence the “demonstration” bomb, I suppose, set off without warning, in case it fails. But who knows just how much of the Israeli deterent, for all these years, has been a bluff.
Actually, it seems to me that the gravest plausible threat posed by Iran’s nuke-possession would be its ability to really savagely subvert the House of Saud and to have its proxies Hezbollah and HAMAS go full force against Israel. I believe this would be Russia’s strategy, of which Iran is a critical strategic weapon. The political effect of a nuclear detonation would still doom any user, in my opinion. In fact a nuclear detonation would provide a great excuse to withdraw from the United Nations. Strenuous subversion and apocalyptic proxy war against Israel – whether by a giant conventional missile salvo w/ or w/out WMD or invasion or what have you – and against the House of Saud – massive car bombs, massive attacks on oil installations or just their testicles (pipeline) – simultaneously executed (with an assault on Georgia and Ukraine?) would achieve the purposes of an Iranian nuclear weapon without the horrendous political risks. After all, the world has demonstrated irrevocably over 9 years what it really thinks and is prepared to do about these kinds of attacks.
That doesn’t mean the Iranian bomb is not in itself terrible and threatening, but. I don’t think the Enemy is prepared to test that particular political red line, particularly when he does not have to, and the results of the other tests are now known and built structurally into the System.
Israel won’t burn alone, that’s the only thing that is for sure.
How big will the fire get?
That’s the real question.
dan: I wish I were as confident as you in Iran’s unwillingness to cross “that particular political red line.” These are the folks who kept several of my colleagues blindfolded in our embassy for 444 days, and what lesson did they learn from that? That weak presidents are no threat at all. F
Production of 15-ton bunker buster sped up
F,
Thank you for the kind words. I claim no special knowledge of intelligence value. Now if only someone would offer me a job.
The Israelis have put much effort into their “Iron Dome” missile defense system. That should give some point defense capability but would not defend against a nuclear airburst. How many of Israel’s warheads are kept in storage at Dimona and how may are launch ready? The problem they face in needing to prevent a decapitating first strike is similar to that faced by Pakistan, only in Israel’s case it is even worse because the country is so incredibly small. What Israel needs IMHO are more submarines. Fuel cell powered subs with long deployment times armed with either nuke cruise missiles or ballistics would be their best option to guarantee survivability.
A few more hunter killer submarines would give the Israelis the option to blockade Iran. That would be a Samson option move in the face of an existential threat, unless prior support was forthcoming from other interested parties. If Iran is blockaded they will of course move to stop all traffic going into the Gulf. Any unsupported Israeli threat to close the Straits of Hormuz will produce panic and a confrontation with Japan, Nato, the Gulf Cooperation Council, the Saudis, the Russians who the KSA have now concluded a defense deal with, and the US 5th Fleet.
The Dimona location does minimize collateral damage if targeted. The greatest risk would be to the town itself (pop. ~36,000 according to wiki) and to archeological sites around the Dead Sea 22 some miles away and then the Jordanian desert. Beer’sheva, a sizable small city, is to the North-west.
From what I see, people are ignoring one option:
a) Israel decides a conventional attack won’t prevent the Iranians from getting the bomb, so instead launches a saturation nuclear strike on Iran as the means to insure Iran doesn’t get the bomb. The trick to making this work is having enough on hand to maintain deterrence against the rest of the world afterwards.
b) variant, provocation to justify a), followed by executing a).
F – i don’t think irrational people are capable of controlling things to the extent the mullahs, stalin, mao, hitler, whoever do. that’s just sloppy shorthand, the effect of which is ultimately to stupefy everyone. no no. a recent article i read quoted a russian official saying that he believed “russia would be the last possible target of an iranian nuclear rocket.” ask yourself whether a russian transfer of strategic technology and infrastucture to a country such as iran could possibly be accomplished without the simultaneous importation of russian technicians, scientists, and kgb? obviously not. a country without the ability to build its own nuclear arsenal or reactor does not suddenly bridge that gap because a pakistani educated in belgium decides to hang out a shingle. so where does the tech come from? russia. who must therefore man it, guide it, protect it? russia. this is obvious. he who believes such difficulties as ideology, 19th century relations, or other aspects of historiography preclude the designs of mortal men faced with the prospect of either victory or oblivion in the flesh should read JB Kelly’s Arabia, The Gulf & The West, for example. the Shah had relations with Russia despite his status US client (actually, the US was more like his client). those relations became the basis for future relations once the US had to withdraw under the conditions you point out. these are not irrational men. is it so much more irrational to believe in the Mahdi than it is to believe in Jesus Christ? of course not. it is entirely rational to want to kill people. for example, i want to kill all members of the government of iran. i think they amply deserve it and their use of their four score & twenty proves it. beware of nonsense.
Analysis of Iran seems to always assume that their actions are primarily considerate of the consequences to the nation of Iran. This is a product of the analyst looking through his own nationalist lens where the fate of the country is primary. I think perhaps that the mullahs have a different view and their primary concern it the fate of the Islamic Revolution.
If this is true, then the destruction of Iranian cities is relatively small potatoes to the larger Islamic world compared to the destruction of Israel. They may be willing to pay that price. The current president’s apparent belief that he can hasten the return of the 12th Imam is not encouraging.
Michael Yon has done a great service going to this years celebration in Holland of Market Garden.
“A world away from Afghanistan, over in Holland, was approaching the 65th anniversary of the allied liberation from Nazi occupation, and I had been invited to attend by James “Maggie” Megellas. Maggie, who had fought his way through Holland and is today remembered there as a hero, is said to be the most decorated officer in the history of the 82nd Airborne Division. Now 92, Maggie has recently spent about two months tooling around the battlefields of Afghanistan, and though it would be an honor to finally meet him, there was the matter of extracting myself from Kandahar City and getting through about forty minutes of dangerous territory to the military base at Kandahar Airfield.”
You have to see his pictures and read his dispatch:
Market Garden
He is going to be back in Afghanistan in a few days. I believe he has an embed with the Marines scheduled.
Michael is a small but significant light shining in the darkness of this world. Please keep it lit with whatever contribution you can make to him.
Papa Ray
Central Texas
When Pakistan tested its first nuclear weapon in the 90’s and then India responded with its own new nuclear tests and then Pakistan responded with more tests, Pres Bill Clinton was said to be personally distressed because all this happened on his watch. He had asked them not to do it and they did anyway.
And by the way, US intelligence analysts missed predicting the Pakistani and Indian actions because, while the statements made by the leaders of the countries were clear, they discounted it because they believed that “all politicians lie.” I guess that in the Era of Clinton this is an understandable viewpoint, if an unforgivable one for someone with their job. I wonder if Valarie Plame was one of those analysts?
So, I think that it is quite possible that Obama will emulate Clinton, and furthermore, Clinton squared, and go on rambling incoherently about better and more intensive diplomacy until the first bomb goes off. And then, desperate to stop the slaughter on his watch, he will try to either prevent a retaliation on Iran or ensure that, Bay-of-Pigs-like, it is symbolic rather than effective. He will react as if it is all about him – and all about Him The Nobel Peace Prize Recipient. This will in turn make the US reaction even more ineffective.
Then there is the possibility that we and/or the IDF shoots down the Iranian missile. The Clinton Squared = Obama reaction will be even more likely then.
Herman Kahn never foresaw this kind of thing. Thinking the Unthinkable has taken on new meaning.
Thanks, Papa,
Yon sez,
“ We came here to kill our enemies, but today we want to make a country from scratch.“
heads up, Snowe is going to vote for Obamacare
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091013/ap_on_go_co/us_health_care_overhaul
We are probably goingnto get this. Say goodbye USA.
It seems as though the Russians are not interested in supporting new sanctions against the Iranians. Evidently the “smart power” reset button is already broken. 2007 NIE….I thought “misinformed” was the subtitle of the Casablanca thread….? LOTM is correct in #2, treasonous acts all. Who knew that undermining the USA would be so in vogue?
14. CeeZar makes a good point, except that the Iranian mullahs probably have a vested interest in ensuring the survivability of an intact Persian influence on whatever is left of the Islamic Revolution world. Thus large-scale destruction of Iranian communities would seem self-defeating, leaving the winners of that battle Arabic Islamics. That result doesn’t compute. Hmmmmm.
F – “And can we assume such rational action? ”
Rational is relative to the belief system, or to the winner of the competing belief systems.
I don’t think we have any idea at this point whether the “anti-Israel/twelfth mullah” line of thinking will take precedence over the “survival as a nation” line of thinking.
re more subs
29 Sep 2009
JERUSALEM – Israel has taken delivery of two German-built submarines, a military spokesman said Sept. 29. “We have received two Dolphin-class submarines,” he said on condition of anonymity.
The submarines, called U212s, can launch cruise missiles carrying nuclear warheads, although when it confirmed the sale in 2006 the German government said the two vessels were not equipped to carry nuclear weapons.
http://www.strategypage.com/militaryforums/36-25149.aspx
It isn’t news that the obama administration is openly working with anti Isreal forces and would love to see Isreal wiped off the map.
Those who oppose the administration on this and other issues are threatened and dealt with a la General McCrystal. Although he is a uniformed member of our nations military and chosen by the current White House resident he was not allowed to give his military assessment. Perhaps a breach of protocol but the stakes are very high and the current leader is a genuine girly man with a heavy dose of Lady Macbeth.
There are more than a few rumblings that a rebellion is in order. No less that these men advocated such in their time,
http://tinyurl.com/yfmblfj
Yet, I have from an unimpeachable source that Pajamas media has forbidden this topic.
I wonder what Thomas Jefferson would think? Check out the site I have provided and see who has the better stand on things. The men or Pajamas media?
Dan 7, I come to a similar conclusion after reading the Cordesman document that the country who should be most afraid is Saudi Arabia.
An Iranian first strike on Saudi does the following:
1) proves both weapons and missile capabilities
2) strikes a country that the American population might not be crazy about defending
3) takes out the largest crude oil exporter in the world, benefitting both Iran and Russia
as with any first move, the unintended consequences escalate in ways that my simple brain cannot comprehend, so i have no idea whether it could simply stop at that.
but i would be worried if I were in Saudi’s shoes
“Cordesman concluded that once a conflict got started it would tend to escalate to where both countries were destroyed.”
Why is this so? Why an escalation to extremes? What is the human/political mechanism that results in this outcome? What kind of human psychology both recognizes the possibility of armagedddon/apolcalyptic disaster and reflexively suppresses that knowledge? Why is “rational action” so unlikely?
I can’t begin answer Wrichard’s questions at the end of his post. (Besides, Hillary’s got all of those covered.) But I think it’s worth exploring the nature of escalation to extremes evident in the post 9-11, post-MAD, Obama reset version of nuclear/thermonuclear rivalry.
Here’s some commentary regarding escalation to extremes by Rene Girard, “On War and Apocalypse,” “First Things,” Aug/Sept 2009). The perspective is Christian, but a reader might filter out that perspective and still glean some interesting perspectives:
“‘Durch diese Wechselwirkung wieder das Streben nach dem Äußersten,’ he wrote in his first chapter: ‘War is an act of violence, which in its application knows no bounds; as one dictates the law to the other, there arises a sort of reciprocal action, which, in the conception, must lead to an extreme.’ Without realizing it, Clausewitz discovered not only the apocalyptic formula but also that it is bound up with mimetic rivalry. Where can this truth be understood in a world that continues to close its eyes to the incalculable consequences of mimetic rivalry? Not only was Clausewitz right, in opposition to Hegel and all modern wisdom, but what he was right about has terrible implications for humanity. This warmonger alone saw certain things.”
. . . . “Hope is possible only if we dare to think about the danger at hand, but this requires opposing both nihilists, for whom everything is only language, and pragmatic realists, who reject the idea that intelligence can attain truth: heads of state, bankers, and soldiers who claim to be saving us when in fact they are plunging us deeper into devastation each day.” . . . .
Few Christians still talk about the apocalypse, and they usually have a completely mythological conception of it. They think that the violence of the end of time will come from God himself. They cannot do without a cruel God. Strangely, they do not see that the violence we ourselves are in the process of amassing and that is looming over our own heads is entirely sufficient to trigger the worst. They have no sense of humor.”
“Violence is a terrible adversary, since it always wins. . . . We have to fight a violence that can no longer be controlled or mastered. More than ever, I am convinced that history has meaning, and that its meaning is terrifying.” . . . .
“In fact, the apocalyptic moment serves as a link between Clausewitz’s treatise and considerations on the destiny of Europe. If we take to its logical conclusion our analysis of a new global escalation of extremes, we have to consider the complete novelty of the situation since September 11, 2001. Terrorism has again raised the level of violence up a notch. It is one of the last metastases of the cancer that has torn the Western world apart. . . . It is a very violent and unpredictable revival of conquest, which is all the more terrifying because it has encountered America along the way.”
“We are witnessing a new stage in the escalation to extremes. Terrorists have conveyed the message that they are ready to wait, that their notion of time is not ours. This is a clear sign of the return to the archaic, a return to the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries, which is significant in itself. But who is paying attention to this significance? Who is taking its measure? Is that the job of the ministry of foreign affairs? We have to expect a lot of unexpected things in the future. We are going to witness things that will certainly be worse. Yet people will remain deaf.”
“Why has Christian revelation been subject to the most hostile and ferocious possible criticism for centuries, but not Islam? There is an abdication of reason here. In some respects, it resembles the aporia of pacifism, which can be a strong encouragement for aggression. The Qur’an would thus benefit from being studied in the same way that Jewish and Christian texts have been studied. I think that a comparative approach would reveal that it contains no real awareness of collective murder.”
“The trend toward the apocalypse is humanity’s greatest feat. The more probable this achievement becomes, the less we talk about it. I have come to a crucial point: that of a profession of faith, more than a strategic treatise, unless both are mysteriously equivalent, in the essential war that truth wages against violence. I have always been utterly convinced that violence belongs to a form of corrupted sacred . . . .”
At the time of said NIE release, it was a head scratcher. And we now know WH KNEW the new Qom site all along. [Why in the world Bush never 'defended' his position is another head scratcher.]
The only conclusion was that some let politics get above national security/national interests.
Now, these same people still at their jobs, providing analysis and advising POTUS. More head scratching, we all are going bald.
steeple – and it makes you wonder, if the house of saud supposedly covertly supports al Qaeda-in-Pakistan, who supports al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia/Yemen? is it Yemen? but isn’t Yemen a Communist country? And if not Communist, tribal? And if tribal, a basketcase, and how can a tribal basketcase pretend to prick the Colossus Bestriding the World? Maybe so – but if not, who then pays for al Qaeda inside Saudi Arabia? Disaffected princes? But – how could they operate unknown to the Crown?
Or is the case that in every country with a secret police (or two), the secret police really rules – to the extent it can attack its host-government rudely enough to make the evening news and yet survive?
I mean, when you look at it closely, what is all this? Now ISI is supposed to have created Taliban, hosted al Qaeda, ignored attack on USA or even participated in its planning – why? Because they hate colonialism? Colonialism how – because the House of Saud and Communism tell them so? (Cf. 1979 US embassy attack during Siege of Mecca.) But they don’t hate Chinese colonialism? What Afghanistan or Pakistan to do with the USA prior to 9/11? Some aid? Some diplomatic annoyance after detonation of its “Islamic Bomb” (created substantially by German Jews in America)?
Grant Soviet invasion/ISI/US-China post-Nixon cooperation created massive Islamic propaganda to maintain esprit de corps, that the monster turned when everyone else left, that Pakistan wanted its Pashtun servant in the Kush – fine. Then they said suddenly – hey f-ck it lets go nuke the USA with airplanes! Pakistan zanzibar!!!
What?
That is an irrational story. It’s like a goofy boy’s adventure from the 1930s whence Indiana Jones. No. I think that’s not how it happened. Nor does it make sense that a Saudi trustfund baby who never displayed any competence in his life just magically created a world-historical force.
Meanwhile, while all this is going on, suddenly North Korea and soon Iran get nuclear – strategic – weapons. Europe is colonized by Russian fuel and its ruling elite are offered positions in the coming as-yet-concealed EU order. And oh – by the way – EU has pretty much no army.
How much easier to conquer Europe, finally, if it has one government, rather than 25?
I repeat: Russia’s orchestration of this is controversially true except for in the Islamic context. Iran? Venezuela? Saudis get s-400? now Burma? This is all in the NEWS. And yet – you never anything about Russia except that they are some phantom on the other end of the negotiating table with whom it is necessary to offer “overcharged” buttons.
Why? Why is there never ever ever ever any “anti-Russian” ism? Except when you talk to actual peoples who lived inside it or in its shadow?
Anyway, it’s a sleepy day here at work so what the heck.
#6 Josh
And I’ll say again – I don’t care how smart the Israelis are, to trust a major weapons system like an H-bomb, without having had an extensive actual testing program, is only barely credible.
Vitiating that need for a test may be the fact that a number of scientists who became Israelis worked with us on our nuclear and thermonuclear programs. I note a similar situation with Taiwanese scientists. Both the physics and engineering are well known. In effect, they may be working from a basis of already tested designs.
#11 LOTM
How many of Israel’s warheads are kept in storage at Dimona and how may are launch ready? The problem they face in needing to prevent a decapitating first strike is similar to that faced by Pakistan, only in Israel’s case it is even worse because the country is so incredibly small. What Israel needs IMHO are more submarines. Fuel cell powered subs with long deployment times armed with either nuke cruise missiles or ballistics would be their best option to guarantee survivability.
While I am not sure about their gravity bombs, their missile force is on ready alert TEL’s in hardened tunnels. I assume a ready alert force for aircraft delivery. I would guess [and it is a guess] that further gravity bombs are in storage on the bases. If they decide on a first strike, one can assume that it will be a full force effort and that they will be dispersed to operational units. And the DOLPHIN-class subs are each capable of carrying 4 cruise missiles of Israeli design called the POPEYE TURBO with an extended range of 1500 km with a nuclear warhead. When I first looked at these, they had 3-4 DOLPHINS. They now have 6, although the operational status of the last two is unknown. If I was Israel, I would be pushing their working up exercises as fast as possible.
#12 Crisco
I think that they do.
——————
I think that things as they stand are such that the US is no longer going to influence what is going to happen. Extended deterrence no longer exists. No ally with any contact with reality will base national survival on a belief that the current regime will lift a finger to help them if they are attacked. To be honest, as discussed here, we cannot be sure that if this country is attacked that there will be any defense or retaliation ordered. At most, Buraq may influence the timing. But Alea Iacta Est.
Subotai Bahadur
Old Guy quoted @ 22 “….the German government said the two vessels were not equipped to carry nuclear weapons.”
Okey Dokey, then. Yup. That’s that. Move along. Nothing to see.
*************
I think the Israelis may consider a nuclear armed Iran to be literally unacceptable (and not in a diplo-speak way). It may be so unacceptable that they put a nuke on the two or three major centers of development. After it happens everybody runs around with their hair on fire atke strong positions that the Israeli actions are unacceptable but then later nquietly says in the language of your choice Gratias Dei or the equivalent.
Crisco: I dont think anybody around would have the stones to go after Israel.
****************
The Paks talk some about the Indians and vice versa, but each considers the other to be basically a rational actor. The Paks never talk about the Israelis. Every other state in the area has a position against the Israelis. Not the Paks. I think the Paks have gone out of their way to not be perceived as a direct threat to Israel, because they think that a way to oblivion.
If the mullahs want the 12th imam raised, they may well get that done one way or another.
I just had a brainstorm.
Pause, whenever I hear that phrase I inspect the room for evidence that Joe Biden may be speaking.
We are adopting a European style administration that has a somewhat flexible view of constitutional strictures and an infinite appetite to redistribute and skim off wealth. Meanwhile the real Europeans are abolishing their heritages of national sovereignty and subsuming themselves in a rapacious collective administration that seeks to be subsidized by America, even as it criticizes us. The make deals with a hostile Russia that demands entry into Nato and the EU just to embarrass us and extract side payments. Clearly we have failed to control this process, so here is my proposal. We should join it. The US should demand admission to the new EU, and invite the Russians to join also. We should remember the wisdom of Sir Humphrey Appleby on why the UK joined the then EC.
Life, except that Sarko and Angela are watching the rules, and that poor ol lords of the round table are going bankrupty !
but this is a good image how the Brits were fonctionning for the rest of us.
Now, as far America joining the EU, you wouldn’t believeit, it is on the way, since a few decades, and more evident with the different agreements on trades that have been passed without much advertising.
Normally, in 2015, this will be achieved.
As far as Russia coming into the association, well, many big politicians from Russia, Germany and france were saying that too.
So, what a wonderful world from Vladivostok to Vladivostok !
Pretty bad mix, both foreign and domestic.
Bush hatred and treason inside the CIA has crippled our ability to respond to the Iranian Nuclear WMD program.
But the CIA is not alone. German’s, French, Russians, Pakistan, UN, etc all have had a part in seeing there is no effective effort to stop Iran from getting these weapons.
What agenda do these countries have?
Some of this looks suicidal. They are closer to Iran than we are.
It is good that these comments look at these deeper issues.
Robinsolama, your seeing bladders for lanterns, got to need reversing psychology there
Suppose that the Iranians develop deliverable nuclear weapons? Consider the following:
1.) Saudi Arabia nukes up in short order. They have long had missiles capable of delivering nuclear warheads, and I suspect that if they do not already have posession of at least a small nuclear arsenal, they are currently working feverishly towards that goal to counter the threat from their ancient Persian enemies. This perevents a nuclear exchange between the two countries, but leaves Iran with a net gain in bargaining power and enhances prestige for Shia Islam within the Muslim world as a whole.
2.) The clerical class within Iran, to include Ayatollah Khameni, has a vested interest in avoiding a nuclear war, at least on or around their own soil. They have done well, financially, since 1979 and do not want to lose the 20-persent tithe from so many of the Shia faithful and the enhanced prestiege of Shia successes against the west by the like of Hezbollah. While many in the West dismiss Khameni and his ilk as suicidal nutjobs, objective analysis of their behavior patterns shows that they are rational, if dangerously ruthless actors. (Meanwhile, our leaders refuse to recognize this reality confronting them.) I do not see Iran pushing the button without some sort way to justify it. However….
2b.) The same cannot be said of the “Modernists” as represented by Ahamadinejad. I have little doubt that they would think twice about employing whatever means may be necessary to pave the way for the appearance of the Madhi. This dynamic between the Clerics and the Modernists bears increased scrutiny, especially since the events of the summer.
3.) Israel has long relied on nuclear weapons as the last-ditch defense of their homeland. Although unable to conduct testing of their designs, these tests are used more to verify yield and efficiency of the given designs. I think that they are less concerned with these specific properties than with whether or not the things will go “Bang” when needed. In the case of the Israeli arsenal, I have little doubt that they will.
4.) The US has acted as a restraint on Israeli action, not the least by the implicit policy of the US to respond to a nuclear strike against an ally with overwhelming use of its own “special weapons”. Even the Iranians are not reckless enough to risk that. As Wretchard mentioned, the assurance of US protection has historically stabilized the region.
5.) The current US administration, in the name of world peace and mature, enlightened action, has given Arab and Persian dictators alike the green light to go on as before, previous to 9/11, secure in the knowledge that whatever they might to do repress their own people and antagonize their neighbors, the US will benignly look the other way. Also, commitments of previous US administrations toward manitaining Israel’s security seem decidedly less firm….
The Israelis are nervous, and rightly so. The Left in this country seems perfectly content to sell them down the river, while many on the Right would like to see them take care of the “Iranian problem” by staging a pre-emptive strike on Iranian nuclear facilities, just so long as we do not have to get our hands dirty. *Perhaps* this is exactly what the Iranians want.
I have long wondered if part of the Iranian goal in developing nuclear weapons and appropriate delivery systems has not been to goad the Israelis into a pre-emptive strike. Such an attack would further isolate Israel and allow the Iranians to paint themselves as the victims. It would not surprise me if Ahmadinejad and his fellow travellers were to take advantage of such a situation to rally Islam in an attack upon Israel, under the banner of Shia leadership. The Wahabists would detest this, but be powerless to stand against the opinion of the “Arab Street” in responding to the Zionist attack on Dar-al-Islam. Saudi Arabia, and the rest of the Arab and Muslim nations, would have little choice but to join in cleansing “Palestine” of the hated Zionists.
Unless a pre-emptive strike against Iranian targets destroyed both the Iranian nuclear facilities as well as their capacity for offensive military action, the Theocrats’ overall goals would be advanced, while Israel would pay the ultimate price. Only the US has the means to carry out a campaign of such timing, scale, and redundancy to ensure the destruction of each target, but even then the chances of success would be very low.
We are within a very narrow window for the people of Iran to take matters into their own hands and end the rule of this regime. They must be given the time and space to be able to do so. However, every decision made by the current administration has done nothing but counter this popular underswell for democracy in Iran, and enhance the prestiege of this nation’s enemies.
In my opinion, it is less the result of some set of hidden agendas than the result of overweening arrogance of those making the policy and cutting the deals. I am sure that I am not the only person on this forum to have experienced this menality on the part of fellow government officials first-hand.
Should regime change fail in Iran, the US will stand as the only player able to neutralize this regional threat. The other players in the region, Arab, Israeli, and Persian alike, have taken our measure and determined that the current administration lacks the fortitude to do so. It’s back to the wall, Israel will have no choice but to stage a pre-emptive strike against potential nuclear targets in the region, and not necesarily confined to Iran. To maximize both operational success and “shock value” in the minds of their enemies, I would expect such a pre-emptive strike to include nuclear weapons. The response against Israel will most likely be devastating.
Israel and much of the rest of the Middle East will burn while our president polishes his Nobel medal, and basks in his fading memories of adulation.
We will have no one to blame but ourselves.
When reading this post I thought about “Dr Strangelove” movie. “In strategies of Commitment”, Thomas Schelling refers to “Dr Strangelove” movie and the ‘Doomsday Machine’ (DM), a device that would annihilate all trace of life on Earth if there is a nuclear strike on the U.S.S.R., in order to explain that for a threat to be effective it requires an “announcement that punishment will be forthcoming in the event of misbehavior”. Reading the 2007 survey I understand that there is plenty brand new device of terror… so, my hope is that there is no DM out there that nobody knows about.
In its book Schelling says that “a threat, …, to be effective must be persuasive, and persuasiveness has two dimensions that may be called “potency” and credibility. Potency refers to the ability of the person making the threat to carry it out on a scale sufficient to make compliance attractive. Credibility refers to the correspondent’s belief that what was threatened will indeed be carried out”. If administration initiatives impact either the US “potency”, or its “credibility” then may I conclude that it impacts also the commitment of “Extended Deterrence” and ‘reduce its ability to manage a crisis should one occur’. or does it?
#29 An Israeli preemptive nuclear strike is more likely to take out hardened sites in Iran than a conventional strike. Furthermore, it will take some time to decontaminate the sites and/or for the sites to cool down.
Israel can do a “En passant” by making a deal with the Saudis.
My enemies enemy is my friend.
Just imagine the strategical benefit of a forward bases in Saud.
Herb#29:
Not just the Pakis. Soon after becoming President of Afghanistan, Karzi said “We see eye to eye with Israel on how to deal with terrorism.” It’s not hard to see why. Not only had the country essentially been occupied territory until we liberated it, the occupiers were essentially fanatically Islamic Arabs. Islamic though they may be, the Afghanis know what the Israelis have to deal with from first hand experience. The same can be said for the opposition in Iran.
Yet, I have from an unimpeachable source that Pajamas media has forbidden this topic.
Well, Habu, PJM is in this for the money.
They aren’t the only forum for the discussion of “forbidden” topics.
What does China want?
Hitler was not irrational in invading the USSR. He rightly saw that the military of the Soviet Union was weak, ill equipped and worse led, with the debacle in Finland amply demonstrating Soviet Weakness, and that Stalin was a military idiot. His problem was underestimating the tyranny of time and distance in matters of supply, the effects of Russian winters, and his stupidity in not treating the Ukraine and Belorussia as France was treated, leaving himself and his followers to indulge their brutality. In addition, he trusted the Luftwaffe and the idiot Goering to conduct long range bombing attacks and supply when it had proven a failure in the Battle of Britain.
Nevertheless, a leader less indulgent of his brutality, with better preparation and leadership could have won in the East, and then faced the West without a second front. The Germans nearly won with this strategy in both WWI and WWII.
To the Iranian leadership in the IRGC, a Hezbollah nuclear strike on Israel wiping out significant aspects of that nation is “advertising” on what it can do on the Gulf States and America, generating an endless amount of cash and other concessions/tributes. If required, nuke NYC or DC, America will in their view do nothing significant in response. Which guarantees of course this gets used, and generates not a matching “onesy-twosey” series of nukes but a movement of “national survival” desiring to wipe out all potential threats by killing the majority of the people within them.
This has generally been the fate of various tribal peoples fighting civilizations — the tribute and such goes on for a while, until the costs become too threatening, and the civilization undergoes upheaval and wipes out the tribal peoples. A good example being Rome vs. the Gauls.
The Iranian IRGC, the real power centers in Iran, overestimate their own abilities, the vastness of America, the galvanizing aspect of nuclear threats, and the willingness of the average Westerner if it comes to that to totally wipe out most of their people if it means living a decent life, not one of misery or poverty, let alone losing their own.
I do think that a leader or President acting like Lincoln, suspending the First Amendment and Habeaus Corpus, while fighting a war of national survival, will be given fairly wide latitude by the military and the populace. Lincoln faced no serious military insurrection or mutiny, and McClellan lost rather soundly to Lincoln. People will accept considerable short-term sacrifice to preserve the status quo.
Asking America, it’s military, it’s other institutions, including States, Governors, the people, and so on to accept an abject surrender ala Vichy France in response to nuclear car bombs is IMHO a bridge too far, no matter that Obama and Emmanuel and Axelrod think it reasonable. Churchill would have found no takers for “blood, sweat, and tears” if he offered a PC set of multiculti platitudes. Asking Americans to surrender a good deal of their daily life when the ability exists to fight back in Jacksonian fashion is delusional. If NYC or DC were nuked by Iran or elements within Pakistan and various American surrenders were demanded, if Obama then suspended the Constitution and ruled Zelaya-Chavez-Castro style, with SURRENDER as the goal, he’d get fought. Indeed removed. Not the least of which is that everyone knows the dying cities won’t stop with NYC, or Tel Aviv. Until the status-quo ante, i.e. Russia, China, the US, UK, France, Israel, India are the only nuclear powers, is restored through ultra-violence.
This is exactly the tragedy that Wretchard warned about. Rejection of the Bush Doctrine for Hope and Change guarantees no deterrrence, global slaughter on an unimaginable scale, as tribal extortion with nukes collides with Western desire for survival.
Cordesman’s analysis appears to ignore or discount Islam. Iran’s leaders aren’t irrational, they’re religious zealots. It’s entirely rational, in their view, to get a bunch of their countrymen killed in order to eliminate Jews and Christians. Individuals don’t matter, only the cult does, and killing the Jews advances the cult.
If Israel isn’t too lost in political correctness, such an attack on it guarantees the destruction of Mecca, Medina, Constantinople, Tehran, Riyadh, Cairo, and Islamabad. Every Islamic capital and “holy site” in the Middle East gets it, along with numerous secondary cities. Every Muslim in Israel gets booted out and both Jerusalem and the Temple Mount is reclaimed (it should never have been given up). Muslims, of course, will whine loudly and conveniently forget they started it.
What kind of human psychology both recognizes the possibility of armagedddon/apolcalyptic disaster and reflexively suppresses that knowledge?
What kind? Islam. Iran attacks Israel, it gets destroyed in return. Islam wouldn’t have it any other way.
39. Cannoneer No. 4:
You speak the truth. What is so amazing is that the obama agenda includes eventually controlling everything, including the Internet. So instead of allowing what King George referred to the Colonists as, “rabble in arms” a voice loud and strong to protest PJM is aiding its own demise. The Stockholm syndrome firmly attached to this area of the Fourth Estate.
We can talk about total destruction of all life on Earth , take your pick from the smorgasbord of NBC/XYZ and that’s just dandy but attempt to add some testosterone to the citizenry that is begging for a mulligan on the last election and nyet, brother.
Bob Smith I believe has it pegged on this thread that Islam counts for all, the individual for nothing. Stalin was famous for the same approach stating that the loss of one life was a tragedy …the loss of a million just a statistic. Islam feigns the love of individual while fomenting worldwide performed with lurid acts of hatred.
I said it four or five years ago and I still recommend the annihilation of at least a quarter of Islams on Earth. It would give them a much needed Charles Martel moment and allow the world to avoid the denouement of their philosophy. After all, it would just be a statistic.
Mark, the end times teachings say that the apocalypse will be engineered by 1) man’s folly and what Jesus called “the end of the time of the Gentiles” and (2) divine intervention on behalf of Israel. I know some enlightened secularists here have mocked me for saying such, but that is what the Scriptures teach. The Old Testament clearly teaches this and it has long been the Jewish hope that Messiah will come to save Israel from their enemies. Christians believe that the Jewish nation missed the first advent of Messiah when He came as a suffering servant. The prophet Zechariah states that when he comes, Israel will”look on he who they pierced and mourn” We’ll see won’t we.
Israel can do a “En passant” by making a deal with the Saudis.
My enemies enemy is my friend.
Just imagine the strategical benefit of a forward bases in Saud.
I’ve considered that many times, but when push comes to shove, I’d be afraid the Sauds would double-cross the Israelis, at least far enough that it wouldn’t be secret, Iran could attack the Israelis on Saudi territory, and … and the US would still stand aside.
What I wish is that the Chinese were more aggressive and we could cut a deal with them to supply 1,000,000 troops to “protect the oil fields”. Or even, India. But both have large Muslim populations, which is enough to prevent. Well, it’s still interesting to mix and match possible alliances.
I have little faith in the ability of the irans to accurately deliver a reliable weapon via any sort of non-wheeled vehicle. If I were living in Saudi or Syria or Jordan or even Iraq for that matter, I’d be worried about what fell off the rocket (or truck for that matter) into my yard. If the irans got their hands on a Special Weapon the temptation would be for them to use it. The House of Saud has a clear understanding of their own personal best interests. And, as well, so do the Hashemites and the Great Ophthalmologist. So the deed may not be that badly regarded.
LITM
“Regarding the fraudulent 2007 NIE report”
According to Robert Conquest, in his timeless history of the Soviet Union “The Great Terror”, even Lenin (between his first and second strokes) called this sort of stuff Com Lies, and Com Boasts, as such stuff as that was used to persuade Russian’s and people generally of the benefits of change they were about to undergo. We are already hearing com boasts about “saving” the economy, after “saving” housing and now “saving” health care. What next? Will be education have to “saved from itself?
The Com boast and com lies quotes were highlighted in the same paragraph that noted the “Tsarist Bureaucratic deformities” “only just covered by a Soviet veneer”. He had already complained of the personal spite and malice in the conduct of those charged with purging the party. These minor purges were but a prelude to the Stalinist purges of 1930-1933.
GWB let the so-called assessment pass without public comment, as he would have wanted the NIE and their backers to eat their words. Common sense dictates that the Iranians after having invested all that political and material capital in nuclear technology, will not stop short of acquiring a nuclear arsenal. Game theorising is worthless if out of cowardice or fecklessness one leaves common sense out of it. A far larger question than Iran looms, the intentions of China. The Chinese have taken the measure of Obama in the light of his deficiencies and have found him to be wanting, there will be serious consequences. Already we Indians should start to miss the laconic cowboy Bush, the Chinese have rattled their sabre over Arunachal Pradesh with a menacing statement from their PM. I cannot help but think that had George Bush, the baddest boy, been around the Chinese thugs would have been more circumspect.
It could go a different way. I don’t see a protracted mutually destructive nuclear war between IRAN and Isreal. All that’s needed is for Isreal to loft a few pulse weapons in IRAN’s direction on several Jericho missles – enough to cover the country. The centrifuges would short out and probably crash inside their vessels due to the electrical pulse. All large scale industrial plants – refineries and the like would be very damaged. All electrical pumps would be useless, (no pumping gasoline) and various attendant damage. No one would die initially, beyond crashes of people using various public transportation systems. But after that nothing would work, and without a lot of international help soon there would be large scale starvation. In short, a mess.
I think a pulse weapon makes a lot of sense for Isreal. They could dispose of IRAN once and for all with no immediate mass killing and messy nuclear fallout. After that though, the race will be on among global bad actors to see who can be the first to pulse America, probably via a cruise missle fired from a ship several hundred miles out in international waters off our coast line. It would be bad news.
Persia, Russia and China all want their rightful place in the sun. Europe wants to die quietly and America’s leaders seem to want America to do the same. Iran will develop nuclear weapons and America will just waggle it’s finger.
Watching Sprout TV with the grandson, it’s clear that American youngsters must embrace Spanish-African culture. I wonder why. Could it be because these cultures have just been so damn successful over the ages?
Western culture, especially American culture, seems to be viewed as a mistake on the world stage. It must be eradicated so history can get back on the right track. All this individual freedom and Christian ethos nonsense must wither and die so that global Feudal Lords may rule as Gods.
“[Extended deterrence] is a critical psychological edge which America must not completely lose if it is to retain any hope of controlling events.”
Wretchard, you put your finger on the central issue for the US. A strategic fact driving geopolitics today is that technology has created a situation where the attack has overwhelming advantage over the defense. Your recent essay in which you described the fall of Constantinople may have identified the tipping point into the modern era – prior to the development of powerful siege cannons, strong castle and city walls provided a measure of safety.
In the binary world of the cold war, we developed MAD – ‘we cannot defend but we can counterattack.’ Today MAD won’t work except in special situations and so we seek to ensure our safety with a system of alliances based in part on extended deterrence. In my view, it provides more than just a psychological edge – it lies at the core of our strategic defense.
My perspective is that all the players in the current game are acting rationally, and to the degree we understand their goals, predictably. With this perspective, I assume the NIE reflected some kind of backroom deal with Iran. My guess at the time was that the deal likely involved shipping young Sadr off to study at Qom so that we could put his shia-based insurgency on hold while we focused on the sunni problem after the bombing of the Golden Mosque. But then Ahmadinejad upped the ante with his rhetoric about our ally Israel. So, a message needed to be sent.
I think that Cordesman’s study was that message – and its intended audience was in Iran. No think tank had closer ties to the Pentagon in 2007 than CSIS, and none was better positioned. If I recall the timeline correctly, following the release of the CSIS study, Ahmadinejad was reported on one occasion to have ‘clarified’ what he had meant when he threatened to ‘wipe Israel off the map.’ He said he meant to do that only by pushing peacefully via diplomacy for the ‘one state solution’ where, with the right of return of the refugees guaranteed, the resulting state would be majority Islamic. So, I assumed at the time that was his way of saying ‘message received.’
Cordesman’s message was, of course, the old MAD doctrine in fresh clothes… and with the kicker that thermonuclear weapons available to Israel were vastly superior to whatever Iran could come up with in the next decade or more. His message was credible because it was based on verifiable truth.
This post is already far too long and I haven’t gotten to what I originally intended to say.
Soooo – cutting to the bottom line – in my view we are witnessing a test of wills in a very rational geopolitical game. The game is masked by wild rhetoric on surrogate issues due to the domestic politics of the various players. The resulting confusion is, of course, deliberate.
Josh@6. Israel has tested its weapons in the south Indian ocean. Very far south, away from prying eyes.
President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for, as the Norwegians explained, his professed desire to rid the world of nuclear weapons. To that end Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is working with the Russians for a strict and verifiable nuclear weapons inspections regime, the better to one day soon dismantle our nuclear arsenal, depending on the good faith of the Russians not to hide any of theirs, and hoping, naively, that the North Koreans, the Iranians, the Pakistanis, the Indians and everyone who nukes up in response to American abdication of the leadership role will do the same. Of course they will do nothing of the kind, but rather the reverse will take place; instead of everyone disarming, everyone will scramble to nuke up, fearing to be the only kid on the block without a weapon. Given human nature, this will be an unstable situation, with nuclear war a given, and, if President Obama has his way, the United States the only kid on the block unable to defend himself. Since this post is about Armageddon revisited, I am, with your kind indulgence, doing something I’ve never done, revisiting and updating my six month old post called Zero Nukes.
The concept of the zero goes a long ways back in time
A thousand years and more or so they state
When Hindoo mathematicians figured out the paradigm
That nothing was a number just like eight
Since that time we’ve had a few advances ‘long the way
And Roman numbers simply bit the dust
We don’t use C for hundred like that anymore today
‘Cause zeros made the old systems a bust
But zeros had their problems too as Jap pilots soon found
They had no armor or self sealing tanks
A couple fifty cals and they were headed for the ground
And grinning Navy pilots whistled thanks
A zero is a nothing just an empty circled space
A little like the brain of people who
Believe that we can opt out of the nuclear arms race
And live in peace like nuns and Buddhists do
So anyone who thinks that zero is the perfect place
To be in this cruel world of men insane
Will have to look the few and scarred survivors in the face
And say I tried a peaceful world to gain
And just because it didn’t work’s no reason not to try
We’ve proven that we’re better far than they
It’s just too bad so many of you really had to die
But did you think ‘twas zero that we’d pay?
Yes Armageddon came because our president declared
The USA was just another land
And just because our actions made the other guys all scared
It’s not our fault it’s glass where once was sand
Josh@6. Israel has tested its weapons in the south Indian ocean. Very far south, away from prying eyes.
Maybe, back when.
I hope, in any case, if the day comes, it all works.
The problems of the dollar, which began with the deficits of the last administration, but which have metastized under the stimulus, cap n’ trade and health care, are an example of runaway effects. My US dollar earnings have lost 40% of their value vis a vis the Australian dollar. And there’s no end in sight. The current administration has been redistributing the heck out of the economy and international security. The “world without nuclear weapons” is the security equivalent of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Too many mouths are issuing checks their asses can’t cash. Today we hear that the top leader of Iran may be in a coma: a string pulled here, a string pulled there — how long before the ball of yarn comes apart?
How long before the system runs out of design margin? Maybe it already has. If that happens, then the same kind of uncontrollable and accelerating fall that has characterized parts of the economy will happen in the realm of international relations. Readers of this site know this has been an old and constant meme on the Belmont Club. In complex systems, things don’t fall apart in a linear way. They slowly collapse at first but when they reach a certain tipping point, the collapse speeds up and becomes violent.
In these circumstances, a month will be a very long time. The administration may still think they are in control, still think it’s possible to filch a little more, redistribute a little more and if things seem to be going wrong, put some back and keep everybody happy. The way an embezzler thinks he can still undo stuff if things get hot. But maybe the point has already been reached when even if they empty the sack and put everything back on the shelves from they took it the system will no longer respond. The first sign will be minor retreats from the ambitious Hope and Change Agenda. A few less speeches, a little more public humility, briefer interviews on Letterman, few more troops for McChrystal, a little bit more “bipartisanship”, some sops to fiscal responsibility. Too little too late. Then the revisions will come at an accelerating rate; there will be finger pointing; Fox News hunting, campaigns against bloggers, blame-mongering. This will be the second phase which won’t work at all. Then the Third Phase will all out panic from the administration. Calls for Unity, bipartisanship, “we’re in this together”, “shared sacrifice”, even the offer of a cabinet post or two. That will be the trajectory of a collapse. I hope it doesn’t happen, but if it does, that’s what it will look like.
That whole massive edifice — the EU, the Obama administration’s whole stimulus, cap n’ trade, health care expansion, nuclear free initiatives, Wall Street, the MSM, Hollywood, the academe — which looks so solid and secure, may in reality be only a very short distance from an epic failure. I actually hope its not true, simply because a rapid collapse would be ghastly to behold, but I’m not so sure you can discount it any more.
Whiskey @ 41,
The war against the Soviets was conducted in a deliberate genocidal way. This had been the Nazis’ intentions all along, they intended to create a Lebensraum free of Jews and with the remaining Slavs reduced to the status of slaves. German savagery was legion and not all of it can be blamed on the SS. So to speak of Hitler’s blunders in the East is moot. That great man, Churchill knew what he was talking about when he said he will join the Devil if need be to defeat the Nazis.
Israel has a nuclear warhead stockpile – Iran doesn’t. I guess I don’t understand the “analysis”. Any exchange would be very lopsided. It would take very little to destroy Iran’s economy even though it is 3x larger than Israel’s.
And the doomsday scenario of MAD doesn’t apply anymore. Never did. Just as people rebuild from natural disaster, so nations will rebuild after a nuclear exchange.
Whiskey,
a bit of historical extrapolation :
Hitler treated badly the Slavics, because he thought they were Untermenschen, while he still could give us a pass for living, and also because, may-be, of his former studies as architect, he had a kind of reverrence for our culture. (BTW, he was austrian bred, Austria was our favorite war partner for ages, but the emperors liked to copy our kings palaces style, ie Schönbrunn.)
Also the particularity of France was that It was the alone country to which Hitler accorded “Armistice”, but it was a calculation :
Mussolini didn’t favor an armistice for France, but Hitler thought that an armistice with France would empech that a part of the french army would carrry on fighting on her colonial bases, and to rally and form a powerful maritim coalition with the British empire. Also, the most economical mean to keeep the french ressources away from the Alliees was to give France a neutral regime with a relative autonomy
I dunno who were his political advisers, but they were clever, and it did work the way he forecasted the evenments.
about the Holocaust, at the beginning of the war, Hitler didn’t project the elimination of the Jews, but he wanted to expell them from the german territories and from the countries that he was conquerring on the eastern front. This is only from 1941 that things became what we know as genocide, Jews were so numerous on the eastern front, and nowhere to expell them (France refused to get more of them) that it was decided to eliminate them.
In 1940 the nazi Germany wasn’t yet ready for the final resolution of extermination, she wasstill at expelling Jews from Germany. Vichy opposed to the arriving of these undesirable people on french soil in 1940. The anti-jewish policy of Vichy was for a part initiated , at the very beginning, for neutralizing this german project : expel the Jews into France, project that pursued and worsened the refugiees crisis of 1930.
this damned 1930 crisis !
a very interesting link (in french :
http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/ahess_0395-2649_1993_num_48_3_279156#
Josh@54. Me too. It occurred to me at the time that if Cordesman said Israel had thermonuclear weapons, then as our ally they would indeed have tested and reliable thermonuclear weapons if needed. But, that was another Pentagon, another Administration.
Mark #25
I’ve been reading the Girard article you referenced. At one point he writes the following about Islam:
“Indeed, some aspects of this religion contain a relation to violence that we do not understand and that is all the more worrying for that reason. For us, it makes no sense to be ready to pay with one’s life for the pleasure of seeing the other die. We do not know whether such phenomena belong to a special psychology or not.”
I believe the above is at the core of why the Iranian bomb is so hard to deal with. We don’t really understand the jihad/martyr impulse, so we don’t know when the threats are real, and when they are not.
In order to plan for any conflict, the behavior of an opponent must be predicted. Once the assumption of rationality is relaxed, the behavior of the opponent becomes impossible to predict.
It seems reasonable to assume that the Ianian leadership is not constrained by what we would consider to be rational behavior. But if so, what assumptions about their likely actions should we use?
#60 Angel Martin
If I may intrude, might I suggest that in the absence of rationality [or what we consider rationality from our point of view. It may be that from their viewpoint they are being strictly rational, albeit incomprehensibly to us] then first we accept that there is no possibility of deterrence, which requires rational calculations from a shared frame of reference. Since 1979, there has been no sign of a shared frame of reference.
In that case, you look at their capabilities, and while you take into account what they say, you do not try to judge intentions. If you make a mistake in judging intentions, you can lose everything. Instead you look at their full range of capabilities and figure the worst case scenario involving them. And based on that, add a fudge factor to cover what you may not know, and deal with them on the basis of them posing that level of threat.
With Iran, we have to assume that they will attack us and/or our allies and be ready to deal with that.
With this administration in power, there will be no such dealing or attempts to defend. Therefore, we must be ready to be hit, hard, repeatedly; until we have a National Command Authority willing to hit back. And if we reach that point, the Three Conjectures is a best case scenario. Our enemies hold the initiative, and we can only wait.
Subotai Bahadur
Slightly OT: Billboards have begun springing up in San Jose, CA: “Why Islam?” promoting a weblink to whyislam.org.
Have never seen any around here before.
I agree with Highlander’s analysis @34. In fact, I have argued that Obama WANTS Israel to attack Iran. If they do, Mr. Nobel Prize gets to have Iran’s nuclear program set back for years, gets to step in to stop the conflict (thus “earning” his Prize), gets to defend Islamic nations, gets to cut off arms sales to Israel, and gets to preach against nuclear weapons. All of this costs President Peace nothing.
I agree too with Wretchard @55. In college I could never understand how the Hapsburgs could have been transformed so quickly from powerful to broken in just a few years. Now it is clearer. It is kind of like charging your credit cards to pay off other credit cards. You can do so without feeling it for quite a while, then you sweat to make payments, then you run out of credit and crash quickly in a debt death spiral.
Finally, I can’t imagine any nation relying on President Peace to come to their aid in a military conflict. F-22′s, missile defense for Eastern Europe, investigations of former CIA and National Security lawyers and other personnel — and that is just what we know on the surface.
So I fear it will be extremely difficult for Israel to sit passively while Iran develops weapons to destroy them. Iran will probably not use these directly against Israel. Those who suggest that Hezbulla will be the agents are probably correct, as that will create the problem for Israel of whom to retaliate against and where to do so. President Peace will no doubt try to stop such a retaliation.
So time is indeed running out. All this should have been done during the most recent Lebanon offensive, or if not, then in late 2007 or early 2008. (I believe that the erroneous NIE was published more to stop Israel than anything else, as it made it more difficult for the US to covertly cooperate on an attack against nuclear plants that our NIE said did not exist.)
The US still controls Iraqi air space. This may not be true next year. The windows of opportunity are closing.
24 Steeple,
Don’t forget China. They are probably more thirsty for oil than Russia is in selling it. What is their role if the Saudis are taken out. Interesting times.
Ned
Just to add to the general gloom, I hope you will all remember that Israel has lots of bioweapons.
If Iran nuked Israel, I hope that survivors would use bioweapons against Iran.
Revenge is not a particularly Jewish trait, but I’m not a good Jew, and I’m sure that there are many other not-good-Jews who would be willing to destroy Iran.
It took me about 50 years to get over my intense hatred of Germans. I’m sure I’m not the only Jew who feels this way. I hope someone explains to Iran that there are many ways to die. Normal people, given the right tools, could do a lot of damage.
The “funny” thing is that most Iranians probably don’t want to destroy Israel. But they’re in the grip of their terrible leaders.
On a previous thread, someone called me a moby because I reported something I learned from the field. I’m not a moby. I’m expressing my observations.
If we’re going to discuss world affairs, we should all be prepared to think about what average people like me are thinking.
wretchard @ 55 said: “….may in reality be only a very short distance from an epic failure. I actually hope its not true, simply because a rapid collapse would be ghastly to behold, but I’m not so sure you can discount it any more.”
That the center has held this long just amazes me. I had thought that things would have moved faster than this. That being said, I think that there were circumstances that had to be in place before the collapse. I do think this is being engineered as a ‘feature, not a bug’ of the current regime in DC. However, they do not account for those “unintended consequences” things that may reach out and touch them in ways they cannot or would not anticipate.
This is going to get messy. How messy is yet to be seen. IOW, how large the body count has yet to be determined.
Re: Batman@63:
Thanks for your consideration of my analysis.
Call me a starry-eyed idealist (you’d think that the past year-and-a-half had taught me otherwise!) but I am not sure that I agree with your assessment of our beloved president’s intentions. However, it does make a certain degree of sense. What scares me is that our Dear Leader might be arrogant enough to believe that he could “manage” the aftermath of an Israeli pre-emptive strike within such a scenario.
A case has been made that the US defeat in Vietnam and the crumbling of American resolve during the 1970s led to the threats that we are facing today on both the terrorism and nuclear proliferation fronts. With America doubting the ideals that it had always stood for, and reneging on its obligations to the world order that it had helped to build after WW2, the Arab world, among others, began to look for ways to hedge their bets, preserve order, and some measure of stability.
What did this bring? President Carter’s arrogance and indecision brought us the fall of the Shah, the rise of the theocracy in Iran, the spread of state-sponsored terrorism, and the Saudi reaction to the increasing influence of Shia Islam in the form of radical madrassas and support for Wahabist organizations throughout the world. This led to directly the rise of al Qaeda. At least Carter has had 30 years of order and relative stability to recast himself as a “peacemaker” and a Grand Old Man of international statesmanship. He should thank President Reagan’s accomplishments, and the short memories and good will of the American people for this rare opportunity.
Our current president is Carter with more charisma, and even greater arrogance. He makes Bill Clinton look like a poster boy for American resolve. He believes his own “Hope and Change” rhetoric while the rest of the world sort of looks askance and says “Riiiiigggght….” as they slowly back away and start making their own mental plans to deal with the uncertain future. Arab culture, particularly, values order above all other things. How does he think that they, and the rest of the world, will truly react while he continues to dance, hedge, and spin away from anything that might look like a principled stand? What will be the outcome of this administration’s cowardice?
It’s all about the art of the deal to these guys. What matters is the degree to which it enhances their political careers or their place in the history books. Permanent, just solutions are too hard to achieve, pose unacceptable risks to careers and personal legacies, and require one to make unpopular decisions and stick by them. It requires a certain combination of guile and personal arrogance to be successful at this. There are many in this administration with those qualities.
As I’ve said before, in the “real” world where steel meets bone, that kind of arrogance gets people killed.
America used to stand for something much better. One can only hope that there is another Reagan to follow this president, and that the mess that he or she will be left to contend with will, by the Grace of God, something that is not orders of magnitude worse that Carter’s illustrious legacy to both the world and the American people.
Kyrie eleison.
@65 Promethea
Whether or not you’re a moby, (and frankly, while I wasn’t sure before, this post convinces me you are) you don’t make much sense. If you don’t believe most Iranians want to see Israel destroyed, why on earth would you “hope” to see them on the receiving end of a biological plague? In fact I don’t get why anyone would “hope” for the use of biological weapons anywhere. Talk about a nightmare of unintended consequences. What’s more, it’s hardly typical of what “average people” are thinking.
And just out of curiosity, if you “hated the Germans intensely for 50 years”, what was it that made you, exemplary “not-good-Jew” that you are, change your mind? Did their support of the Palestinians through thick and thin convince you they were only human after all?
Sorry sister, but I’m not buying it.
@26 Always Right said:
“At the time of said NIE release, it was a head scratcher. And we now know WH KNEW the new Qom site all along. [Why in the world Bush never 'defended' his position is another head scratcher.]”
The NIE was black propaganda perfectly timed to sabotage any political possibility that Bush could launch a preemptive attack against Iran. The NIE came from the American intelligence community and was obviously the work of high level professionals who did this sort of political manipulation for a living. Bush had been very publicly blind sided by his own spooks. It was like being dealt a full house in a poker game and then the other guy deliberately tipped his hand to show you that he had a straight flush. Bush did the right thing and folded.
The real head scratcher is why did Bush tolerate these scorpions within his own intelligence apparatus. Bush knew about them previously because they had been leaking classified information to the MSM. My guess is that these people were like a metastasized cancer thorough out the intelligence community (they were probably a Clinton legacy). They could not be removed without shutting down the whole apparatus.
The conservative who eventually replaces Obama will have to fire everyone within the intelligence community and start from a clean slate (Is that even legally possible?).
Nice questions, Mary.
Fascism of any sort makes my trigger finger start twitching. That includes Prussian militarism, Japanese militarism and communism. I couldn’t care less about their minor differences.
However, I spent almost three years in Germany in the US armed forces in the mid-60s. Germany has thoroughly remade itself with much help from us. My generation German hated what their parents and the Nazis had done. They despise blind obedience to authority though, probably due to population density have an inbuilt sense of order.
The fascist thing has been thoroughly purged from this nation (I am in Germany now after a month riding my bicycle around the Bodensee and the Rhein river) though I am not so sure about the Saxons from the former DDR. They walk different (more like Anglo-Saxons, who would have thunk it) and think different from the Westies.
I think there is less chance for fascist escapades in Germany than there is in the Anglosphere including America (looking at who we elected and why in the last presidential contest).
And I’m quite impressed with 20 something Germans who are thoroughly democratically minded and far less dour than their parents and grandparents.
There are adequate grounds for even the Jews to forgive them.
If I were a Jew I’d be more concerned about the French. But then I’m just a fallen away Catholic, what would Iknow.:)
Batman said:
“The US still controls Iraqi air space. This may not be true next year. The windows of opportunity are closing.”
The Window of Opportunity is closing for Israel. My guess is the Israelis have until Christmas of this year. I don’t think they’ll launch their raid with aircraft. Obama would not cooperate with them and the Israelis would not be stupid enough to trust Obama (he’d leak their battle plans to the Iranians). The Israelis will probably use submarine launched cruise missiles. They’ll take down the Iranian economic and industrial infrastructure, e.g. nuke Kharg island along with the isotope enrichment sites. The Israelis will have to go for full decapitation with the first strike because it will snowball afterwards if the Iranians are left with any capability.
I posted here approximately a year ago concerning “0bama” getting elected that history would repeat its self, how after the USSR fell it was found in a former Eastern Bloc county that the Russkies were well into their plan of over running Western Europe and only needed Jimmy C to win re-election for them to “Pull the Trigger” they had come to count on Jimmy to be a “ watcher and a whiner and a prevaricator and a procrastinator” and would never use Nuke’s even if the red iron monster was to roll thru the “GAP”! My friends, I even posted then that our enemies would learn from History and because “0bama” is the “par excellance”, the Master of Jimmy! I doubt the US will escape this repeat in history with God’s grace as we did last time! The word says far worse will come to pass…
Wretcherd is right, things can go along for some time and then a single event can tip the apple cart with tremendous speed.
I believe that’s inevitable, and will come in a relatively short time. I too hope I’m wrong. I fear that I’ll wake up one morning, turn on the internet, and see that the world has changed drastically and forever while I slept.
We have both the economy and the deteriorating International situation coming to a climax at the same time, and a collapse in one area will almost certainly lead to a collapse in the other. We need to do all we can to avoid this. An economic collapse can be rectified eventually, given enough time and pain. Mushroom clouds appearing all over the world is another thing altogether.
When you have intractible problems, with no good solution, the only rational thing is to kick the can down the road and hope sometime in the future things will change. I know, that’s how we got to where we are today, but keeping a lid on things is still the only strategy we have. We don’t have any good way of implementing that strategy, but there it is. Once that first nuke goes off, wherever it is, there is no way anyone can forsee how far it will go. The prospects of any sort of limited nuclear exchange are almost nill, IMO.
I’m not sure how my Countrymen would react to a nuke attack on American soil, but my guess is we’d throw all our chips into the middle of the table, find a culprit if one wasn’t readily apparent, and let fly. Doesn’t matter who our “Dear Leader” is – they’ll get swept aside quickly if they don’t retaliate. That’s one of the main dangers of the H&C Presidency – our enemies may take our Leadership weakness for a weakness of the country as a whole, as many commenters here do. I think that’s a big mistake.
History is full of episodes where the players had no idea of the forces they would unleash by their actions. A good example is the start of WWI in 1914. All of the European leaders would have avoided that war like the plague if they could have forseen what the results would be when it ended 4 years later. It ushered in a decline in European influence and prestige, a slow motion suicide if you will, that appears to be coming to a head now.
Someone once said that Diplomacy is the art of saying good doggie in a soothing voice, while you search for a rock. I don’t see any rocks laying around right now, so our voice needs to be extra soothing. People who are speculating, or even hoping, for an Israeli preemptive strike on Iran ought to really think about the events that are likely to follow.
dtmack said:
“History is full of episodes where the players had no idea of the forces they would unleash by their actions. A good example is the start of WWI in 1914. All of the European leaders would have avoided that war like the plague if they could have forseen what the results would be when it ended 4 years later. It ushered in a decline in European influence and prestige, a slow motion suicide if you will, that appears to be coming to a head now.”
Read John Keegan’s “The First World War” for a better understanding about the political dynamic leading to WW-I. By the way, WW-II was merely a continuation of WW-I, i.e. they fought to exhaustion during WW-I, waited a few years to catch their breath and then start in again with WW-II. The tragedy of WW-I was that war was mostly accidental and could have been avoided. Likewise the coming world war will be seen as avoidable by future historians. I believe George W Bush could see it coming and was trying to dodge the bullet. Unfortunately he failed…
Maybe, just maybe, advancing technology will get the human race out of the bind it finds itself in. The main threat to human survival and even the most basic of freedoms is Islam; essentially it is the Dark Ages transported through time to the 21st century, and as such is utterly alien to the rest of the world – even the worst of the non-religious dictatorships.
Possibilities? One is a variation of the Conjectures without the fallout; asteroid strikes on every Islamic city over 100,000, with special attention to three sites that may be below that figure. Maybe a nanotech plague that specifically targets Islam – imagine a nanovirus present in everyone, that triggers whenever the host utters the words of the Shahada and renders him or her permanently and irreversibly sterile – or if you want to be nasty dissolves the host into a puddle of goo.
It is far more likely, however, that the Conjectures are going to end up applying. Fortunately, I live in a small enough town not to be likely to be one of the initial 1E6.
And just to be snarky – the current situation is America’s fault. The entire problem could have been nipped in the bud at the time of the Suez crisis, and this was just the first example of the USA clumsily throwing its weight around in the Middle East.
One more thing; if we ever get into space in any numbers, no Muslim should ever, under any circumstances, be allowed into space. Unless he isn’t wearing a suit.
RE wretchard #55
Perhaps wars can be viewed as “corrections” to these epic failures that occur on a global scale. I continuously feel that the economic doom the world is experiencing will only end in a war. Could be wrong, but my feeling is most likely Europe will get the worst of it. I think they are the most vulnerable, especially from spillovers from an Iranian conflict. Maybe I am just a paranoid whacko, but there certainly seems to me little attempt at a course correction.
Funny, a week or so back you cited that in times like these one looks to the stars…I lately have been rewatching the “Cosmos” series (all on youtube) which was very interesting to me back when I was less mean and less old. Besides the Library of Alexandria, and I had not picked up at that time Sagan’s deep concern for the Species of Man destroying himself throughout the series, and his obvious fear that Science could suffer from the fallout of any huge, global conflict…
Did not see it then because I was way too naive and I did not believe it was possible for us to go backwards with the lessons History teaches us.
I assumed careful, rational thought for all parties involved. Disqualifying that assumption, it seems more than just possible.
70 Bob Murphy
I think there is less chance for fascist escapades in Germany than there is in the Anglosphere including America (looking at who we elected and why in the last presidential contest).
then you’re ignoring neo-nazi revendications for certain parties in Bavaria and eastern Germany.
Also that the yong generation doesn’t feel the weight guilt of their grand-parents and parents, you’ll rarely see one person advocating for supporting Israel, but almost all are supporting Palestinians.
One more thing, some french persons might have been anti-semit, some are ant-sionnist, but they would never have gone so far as eliminating new born babies.
The resistance increased when french people happened to know about the death camps, and hide Jews,under falsh identities, ever wonder why 3/4 of them were spared, even after that Germany occupied the whole country ? while in Poland 95 % of them were eliminated, fast idem for Holland…
RE# 75 Fletcher Christian – “Possibilities? One is a variation of the Conjectures without the fallout; asteroid strikes on every Islamic city over 100,000, with special attention to three sites that may be below that figure.”
Well, I would call such an event a divine act in nature. Funny, something like that has happened twice now in the land where Islam is most concentrated….only not asteroids, but tsunamis!
Bavarians are hardcore MC but I have spent many a drunken episode with old Bavarians (mostly Wehrmacht veterans who were younger than I am now back in the 60s) where they still laugh at beating the Prussians in battle about 1870 or so.
They have more balls than most Germans but don’t like people telling them what to do. I can’t see them going fascist.
The skinheads et al in the East are the afore mentioned Saxons who comprised a majority or near majority of the former DDR.
They’re a bit too much like Anglo-Saxons on a gut or genetic level and bear watching.
I think the Westies keep a fairly wary eye on those Ossies but the Ossies might come in very handy if the Islam thing goes berserk in Europe.
And economic conditions are better for them now than in the early years after the wall fell when their economy utterly tanked because it was unviable and uncompetitive. They were very angry for some legitimate reasons among which were total powerlesness and sneering condescension from limp dicks (Westies) and they transferred a lot of that to foreigners, especially darker ones like the Turks and also Africans.
I saw them in Dresden and Leipzig in the early 90s. Pretty ugly.
I see on the news the III MEF has been issued the NEW M-50 Gas mask for their MOPP gear.
“find a culprit”
Why singular? More likely to hit every possible suspect, no?
And Fletcher in #75: what’s this about asteroids? Do you know something the rest of us don’t know about a secret deployment of Thor?
I really wish people would stop using the term fascism. Fascism is dead – it was obliterated and then tried by force in 1945-6. Fascism was the invention of Benito Mussolini; it is notoriously difficult to formulate a definition of “generic fascism” that applies to the movements which sprung up throughout Europe following the Communist revolutions immediately following the First World War.
Do you know why it’s difficult to do so? Because Joseph Stalin, Willi Munzenberg, and Karl Radek, among other Bolsheviks, are responsible for the creating the impression that there is something similar among Italian Fascism, Romanian Iron Kross, German National Socialist German Worker’s Party, French revanchists, Spanish Falange – all of which were crucially motivated by national supremacy.
Do you know what’s responsible for Joseph Stalin’s campaign to tar these various mutually exclusive movements as a single socio-political phenomenon? They were all not-Communism, yet they and the Bolsheviks/Comintern competed for the same constituencies.
Therefore, for people with a certain perverse will to power, there must be a counter-ideology.
Do you know why people keep talking about Fascists and Nazis and the Holocaust, and never ever ever talk about the Bolsheviks, the multiple Soviet genocides, and the KGB that conducted them – that is to say, the inventors of totalitarianism itself?
Because they want to distract you from noticing them. That’s why. Stop helping them.
And if you believe that I’m exaggerating – go on your Facebook page, join NPR’s feed, wait for them to do a story on Marx or Engels or one of the more romantic Communist leaders, and watch the conversation that develops. On the other hand, when have you ever seen such a display of Nazi sympathizers, so automatically, this far in the future? So – you should believe, because there it is. “Fascism” is just propaganda.
III MEF, first MEF to be issued new M50 gas masks
III MEF = third Marine Expeditionary Force
MOPP = Mission Oriented Protective Posture
Not a particularly ominous event, IMHO.
HEPT, have you ever worn an M25A1?
Eggplant, I recently read Martin Gilbert’s history of WWI and was impressed that it began almost with mass insanity among the nations, a voracious appetite for parts of the dying empires. It seemed to take on a mind of its own. Are we there now? In an age of scarcity and the suicide of American exceptionalism, are the drums starting to beat for world conflict. Sort of feels that way.
41. Whiskey
Good analysis. Just one point. If someone were to nuke DC, there would be no federal government, no Congress, no president. There would be no one in a position to surrender.
Bob Murphy & MarieClaude
Interesting discussion about contemporary Germany – thanks both of you. For the record, though, my question to Promethea was merely rhetorical. It’s not for me to say what the Jewish people as a whole or Israelis in particular should or shouldn’t feel about Germany today. I’m not Jewish. But I seriously doubt if Promethea is either. In fact it was the incessant reference to being a “not-good-Jew” while suggesting that biological warfare is the “hope” of “average people” that made my BS antennae twitch like crazy. In my experience, Jewish people, whether American or Israeli, don’t talk like that, no matter how hawkish they might be.
Rereading this thread this morning, I can’t help but feel that, somehow, the threats to Europe are being WAY understated.
So, to cut to the chase, I’ll simply say that, it is an enormous mistake to assume that Wahabbi, Sunni and Shia Islam aren’t co-operable. Any country that institutionalizes coercive “religious police” has let its mask slip in this regard, and is already primed to dove-tail institutionally with its regional co-religionists – sectarian differences be damned.
To focus on Gulf Cooperation Council nations vs Khomeini-Shia nuclear war is to distract oneself from these parties’ potential for interoperability, to amplify their cryptic tactic of deniability, and to let Southern and central European policy makers slide in the face of impending, and dare I say, imminent, nuclear blackmail.
The question I’m left with is “Why?” The answer isn’t shrouded, either: the EU is addicted to denial; denial about endemic corruption, denial about its corporations’ non-competitiveness (ie, their reliance on state subsidy), denial about its taxation, energy and labor policies, denial about its immigration policies, and denial about the ultimate utility of its institutional pacifism. Add denial about the nuclear-armed, Khomeinist threat to this pungent mix, and you’ll realize that, to act decisively on any of these fronts would break the entire denial log-jam, and permanently destroy the conglomerate’s essential assumptions about itself – assumptions that, its founders feel, set it apart from its foil, the food ol’ U.S. of A.
Maybe our continental commentators can add some context here. It seems the leaders of France, Germany and Italy may want to take the proliferation issue up with the UN’s dithering IAEA this month. That is, if they’re interested at all in national preservation.
Simply posing as the un-America may have worn thin finally. It’s getting high time for Europe’s “leaders” to take a firm stand: denial is not just a river in Egypt.
And dwelling on a fantasy nuclear conflict among co-religionists isn’t going to force them to face-up to their duties any more quickly.
Ooops! Typo-alert:
“assumptions that, its founders feel, set it apart from its foil, the good ol’ U.S. of A.”
-Steve
73. dtmack: “History is full of episodes where the players had no idea of the forces they would unleash by their actions”
55. wretchard: “In complex systems, things don’t fall apart in a linear way. They slowly collapse at first but when they reach a certain tipping point, the collapse speeds up and becomes violent.”
Your comments make me thing about a question raised by Tolstoi in War and Peace: ” What force produces the movement of the nations?”. Tolstoi answer the question by saying that what causes the movement of nations is neither Power nor Intellectual activity, nor even a combination of the two, but the activity of ALL the people who participate in the events.
In some way, I believe that what you both are saying is that Leaders do not have control over the situation when a tipping point is reached and that freewill is violated to an unthinkable, unstoppable, and inevitable chain of causation. IMHO, it seems that Leaders are helpless after the “system” has reached certain inertia. Would you agree?
#68 and #87 marymcl . . .
My reference to being called a moby was in reference to a previous thread where I reported that 6 of 12 strangers that I met were hopping mad at Obama’s policies and were discussing things that aren’t good for the long-term unity of the United States.
My reference to bioweapons is along the lines of Bill Whittle’s recent discussion of game theory. If the bad guys don’t think they’ll suffer, then they’ll act worse than if they think there are consequences. I didn’t say that the average American thinks in terms of revenge and bioweapons. I said that I hope Israelis, if their country is destroyed, would use them for revenge, even though revenge is not a Jewish ideal.
I’m sorry I wasn’t clear.
Regarding the fact that I no longer hate Germans–it’s because I understand how a citizen is caught up in the times he or she lives in. Don’t you ever feel helpless to prevent the downfall of our beautiful America? I certainly do.
Wrichard writes: “My US dollar earnings have lost 40% of their value vis a vis the Australian dollar. And there’s no end in sight. The current administration has been redistributing the heck out of the economy and international security. The “world without nuclear weapons” is the security equivalent of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Too many mouths are issuing checks their asses can’t cash.”
Bingo.
Or to put it another way: “Sh*t talks, money walks.”
Rational choice actors at this point, given an option, would move their assets to a safe, non-dollar-based haven. But the options are opaque, the risks of individual action are great, and the political environment leads us to lament, with Hamlet, a situation that
“. . . . puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought . . . .”
Rational choice in international matters should have led Obama to continue pressure on Iran, fomenting internal dissent, aiming for a 1989 Berlin Wall replay in the Islamic Republic.
But rational choice takes place in the fun-house hall of mirrors, whose distortions are of an ideological and psychological curve. For Obama the Narcissist, the world is a stage, not a battlefield. The props must be in place for the show to go on.
The U. S. financial and global charade can’t go on forever. Obama is getting to be like Blanche Dubois in “Streetcar,” mortgaging Belle Reve, living in a fantasy world:
“It’s a Barnum and Bailey world/ just as phony as it can be/ but it wouldn’t be make-believe/ if you believed in me.”
Wretchard@55 said “That whole massive edifice … which looks so solid and secure, may in reality be only a very short distance from an epic failure.”
Agree. I fear that our national leadership in the WH and Congress is blind to the immediate dangers you identify. Whether the collective blindness stems from ideology, partisanship, personal limitations and/or other failings is secondary. The primary fact is that our country faces unprecedented risks.
Dan #83
I must beg to differ with your assertion that Mussolini invented fascism. Although he did reportedly invent the term totalitarian to describe his governmental goals, much of what he implemented in the beginning was a hybrid combining traditional European socialism, (he was a long time star on the Italian socialist political scene before he “saw the light”), and an extension of the Woodrow Wilson administrations unconstitutional power grabs surrounding the First World War. Much of the hand-in-glove control of major industry by the government was copied from the Wilson administration. The total control of media and nearly ironfisted suppression of political dissent were also copied from the Wilson administration. Likewise, many of the socialist / fascist societal goals were straight from the American progressive playbook of the early 20th century, although there is some debate where many of the socialist ideas originated. If Mussolini can be described as a fascist before he joined up with Hitler, and I certainly think it is an accurate description, then Woodrow Wilson was a fascist as well. Read up on their ideals of a perfect government and you’ll see two sides of the same coin.
President Obama is merely the latest out of touch idealist “progressive” socialist leader we’ve foisted upon ourselves. He really isn’t anything new. Like all the other “progressive” presidents we’ve had, tens of thousands of Americans will die violent deaths in battle before this socialist is voted out or otherwise removed from office. Like many of the other folks here at the Belmont Club, I am very concerned that the U.S. doesn’t have the fiscal, technological, or moral currency to weather the storm relatively unscathed this time.
#77 Marie Claude
The resistance increased when french people happened to know about the death camps, and hide Jews,under falsh identities, ever wonder why 3/4 of them were spared, even after that Germany occupied the whole country ? while in Poland 95 % of them were eliminated, fast idem for Holland…
There are other views. Over a decade ago, the record archives of the Vichy regime were released. They included the record of the regime’s willing cooperation with the “Final Solution”. They were given quotas of numbers of Jews to furnish for the death camps. The records show plainly that the French government considered it an absolute priority to not only meet, but surpass, those quotas. They succeeded in doing so, and were quite proud of the fact.
Petain’s Crime: The Complete Story of French Collaboration in the Holocaust by Paul Webster
Publisher: National Book Network, Inc.
* Pub. Date: September 1999
* ISBN-13: 9781566632492
Not to underestimate the moral and physical dilemma of being in a country that is occupied by foreign troops and/or a hostile government [a situation that we may learn first hand here]; while everyone had to reach their own modus vivendi with the occupation and that necessarily involved some cooperation with the enemy, history is written by the winners. There were far fewer active members of the Resistance than those who claimed that distinction after Liberation. And there were far more who actively sided with the occupiers than is admitted. Which is why the records were not released until the generation that did the deeds recorded were mostly dead.
#88 steveaz
“I and my brother against my cousin. I and my cousin against the world.” — Arab saying.
I agree wholeheartedly. The different varieties of Islam WILL cooperated against the Infidel. They may hate each other, but they hate us more. And they will defer the inevitable reckoning amongst themselves until we are no longer a threat.
Thus, the suicidal insanity of Buraq Hussein’s belief that if he looks hard enough he will find “moderate” Taliban who will side with us against Al Quada.
Subotai Bahadur
I remember reading something about the Spanish Empire that has stuck with me for years. It was that everyone in power knew that the Empire was corrupt and unsustainable, but that since they all owed their power, prestige and wealth to the Empire, no one wanted to be the first to change anything.
I think even the Barney Frank’s of this world have their doubts, but what are they gonna do but soldier on and hope everything will work out? The Left is also relentless at punishing apostates.
Oh, bugger!
Forgot to close the “strong” tag at the end of the book title above. Sorry.
Subotai Bahadur
Subotai yeah, but why don’t you investigate the declassified documents of Holland, Poland, Ukraine, Yougoslavia… too, you’ll see more disturbing collaborationists that didn’t care to slaughter Jews !
Now, as far as Petain administration, this is in what they exelled : administration !!! (also the speciality of France since Colbert), and priority was given to foreign Jews to be deported for some reason : France was hosting more economical refugiees than any other country in the world since the 1930 depression (as explained in my above link, above 350 000, then even more than the US had to support). And when Hitler and his accolytes were expelling their own’s, this made it to much to support for our society.
Now, my dear supporter, I know how you’re fair concerning french affairs, but let me tell you that your beloved FDR didn’t care of jews too, though he knew about their fate since 1942, bombing railways and death camps was possible, but never forecasted !
“what moves the nations?”. The common man and woman. The tipping point comes when their unvoiced or merely-mumbled disquiet is eched in the headlines, in the op-eds, in the pulpit, in their neighbors’ acts. When their personal bubble of denial is torn open by foreclosure or job loss or bank failure. Then the tipping point is passed and the stampede of market crash and bank run begins with deceptive quiet and terrible silent acceleration. Like planes low over the city on a beautiful fall morning.
Me, I think we’re just about there economically. Given the powerful showing of the Tea Party stuff, I think we’re almost there in domestic politics as well. And geopolitically? I can’t gainsay the comments above on how close to midnight we’ve gotten on the nuke clock, particularly for Israel and it’s neighbors. The interplay of these areas –domestic and international economics and politics– is complex but is now I think synergistic. So they are feeding each other and the nonlinearity increases as we speak.
Christmas would be a good time not to visit the tree in Rockefeller Center.
“what moves the nations?”. The common man and woman. The tipping point comes when their unvoiced or merely-mumbled disquiet is echoed in the headlines, in the op-eds, in the pulpit, in their neighbors’ acts. When their personal bubble of denial is torn open by foreclosure or job loss or bank failure. Then the tipping point is passed and the stampede of market crash and bank run begins with deceptive quiet and terrible silent acceleration. Like planes low over the city on a beautiful fall morning.
Me, I think we’re just about there economically. Given the powerful showing of the Tea Party stuff, I think we’re almost there in domestic politics as well.
And geopolitically? I can’t gainsay the comments above on how close to
midnight we’ve gotten on the nuke clock, particularly for Israel and its neighbors. The interplay of these areas –domestic and international economics and politics– is complex but is now I think synergistic. So they are feeding each other and the nonlinearity increases as we speak.
Christmas would be a good time not to visit the tree in Rockefeller Center.
Iran will use the nuclear bomb as soon as they are cpapble of. Shia Islam teaches that the only way to usher in their 12th Imam, or Mahdi, they need to start the a Wordlwar (nuclear war). It’s been known for years, Ahmadenijad has been building extra wide roads for a number of years, all part to reive their 12th Imam (Mahdi). To them their Mahdi is our Jesus. They will scarifice their own nation.
Those who think, they will be restraint obviously do not read up on the extremist Islam of the Shias.
trangbang68 #85 said:
“I recently read Martin Gilbert’s history of WWI and was impressed that it began almost with mass insanity among the nations, a voracious appetite for parts of the dying empires. It seemed to take on a mind of its own. Are we there now?”
We’re darn close. The mechanisms leading to WWI were very complex and John Keegan’s “The First World War” spends considerable time examining this (the book is informative but not entertaining).
I have a couple “pet hates” about how history is taught:
One is that people always present Hitler as a ranting fanatic in a uniform and always assume this is the mark of a demagogue. When Hitler was in full demagogue mode, he came across as the very ordinary and mild mannered Grandpa Walton or Uncle Fritz. Successful demagogues are by definition likeable, non-threatening and very approachable. My demagogue detector instantly went Code Red when I first saw Obama.
My other pet hate is that people focus too much on the beginnings of WW-II and almost completely ignore the causes of WW-I. This is understandable because the causes of WW-I were very complicated and difficult to understand while the causes of WW-II could be comprehended by almost any idiot. Unfortunately, WW-I was the preventable war while WW-II was not. One does not really learn anything that’s actionable by studying the causes of WW-II.
Bob Murphy #80 said:
“Bavarians are hardcore MC but I have spent many a drunken episode with old Bavarians …. They have more balls than most Germans but don’t like people telling them what to do. I can’t see them going fascist.”
I like the Bavarians. They’re a decent bunch of people. The Prussians are a bunch of cold fish. However the Prussians are very good at what they do and pig headed stubborn. The tragedy of Germany is the Bavarians did not beat the Prussians in the Austro-Prussian War (1866).
Bob Murphy also said:
“The skinheads et al in the East are the afore mentioned Saxons who comprised a majority or near majority of the former DDR. They’re a bit too much like Anglo-Saxons on a gut or genetic level and bear watching. … They were very angry for some legitimate reasons among which were total powerlesness and sneering condescension from limp dicks (Westies) and they transferred a lot of that to foreigners, especially darker ones like the Turks and also Africans.”
The former inhabitants of the DDR spent many decades being lied to and impoverished by their communist government while living in mortal dread of the Stasi. The “Osties” can instantly see through all the politically correct nonsense being spewed by the Westies. Deep down inside, Germans (like most of us) are racists even though they are too politically correct to admit to it. The Turkish Gastarbeiter living in Germany are on the lip of a volcano. They could easily find themselves trapped in concentration camps awaiting execution and conversion into bars of soap or lamp shades like their Jewish predecessors. If I was a Turk in Germany, I’d get my hind end out of there “muy pronto” and immigrate to Australia, Canada or New Zealand.
Eggplant,
“The Prussians are a bunch of cold fish. However the Prussians are very good at what they do and pig headed stubborn. The tragedy of Germany is the Bavarians did not beat the Prussians in the Austro-Prussian War (1866)”
they were militarised since Frederic II : 160 000 disciplined and well trained men made Mirabeau writing in 1786 when the prinz of Saxe died : “Prussia isn’t a state that has an army, but rather an army that has a state” Prussia militarism was in place for reshaping Germany in the next centuries
What gains Iran to attack Israel?
Their real competitor is Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states. The saber rattling towards Israel always seemed a bit misdirected to me.
Of course, the Israelis take it seriously, as they should, but Iran would gain more from attacking the Saudi oil fields, collection points, and terminals.
Please put away your fantasies about pulse and EMP weapons. They have little effect and are easily guarded against.
As to Israelis testing thermonuclear weapon designs, this is useful but not necessary. The US testing program was to calibrate certain state equations and plasma properties. These were then used in design calculational programs. Hence, they reduce to a few specific values that are certain to have leaked out by now.
I’d trust the Israeli hydrogen bombs with my life.
Whitehall: “I’d trust the Israeli hydrogen bombs with my life.”
Thats an interesting formulation.
Masterpiece Theater and other shows have, perhaps, romanticized the fin de siecle world of pre WW I Europe. Still, even if it is exaggerated, civilization lost a great deal in the trenches.
The Politburo did not, officially, believe in the afterlife, a fact I always found comforting.
Hitler is said to have begun his speeches as if he were your neighbor stopping by with some good advice.
I recall one of his statements to the effect that three hundred years’ effusions of blood stands in no relation to the state of Germany. IOW, war was a crazy idea. Perfectly true. I imagine the war-stunned among his listeners–almost every adult–was relieved to hear it.
I hate to listen to Obama. Because he’s good. It takes a real intellectual effort not to be borne along. Rather read his stuff.
@91Promethea-
Nice try (a little too nice, in fact) The BS antennae are still twitching.
Not to belabor the point, but the possibility of your being a moby was raised on the thread titled The End in response to your comment @80 which began as follows:
~ “I recently had a sign of hope.
I was recently in a group of 12 people, strangers from all over the United States. After a few days, when we got to get to know each other, I learned that six of them absolutely hated Obama and were willing to join a revolution against communism in the United States…” (end quote)
As I said @68 above, I wasn’t sure at the time if the charge was warranted. However, putting your first remarks together with your defense of them @65 here, I take you to mean that “things that aren’t good for the long-term unity of the United States” are a “sign of hope”. Or did something in the past 48 hours change your perspective on the content and purpose of this revolutionary cabal?
Second, if your introduction of biological warfare to the conversation here (which I still maintain was reckless and ill-advised) was derived from something Bill Whittle said, you should provide us with a link to back up that assertion.
Which brings me to your conclusion @65 above:
“If we’re going to discuss world affairs, we should all be prepared to think about what average people like me are thinking.”
The discussion of Iranian-Israeli relations on this board, which you seem not to have noticed, is about the lowering of the nuclear threshold (#1 of wretchard’s Three Conjectures – google it up), which is a grave geopolitical reality with repercussions far beyond the ME. There’s no good reason for dumbing down the conversation in order to facilitate the revenge fantasies you are projecting onto “average people”,(and in the name of the Jews, no less) which btw contributes exactly zip to an otherwise serious discussion. And in deference to that discussion, that is all I have to say to you.
“What gains Iran to attack Israel?”
Exactly. Which is why it is nonsense – the same sort of nonsense that Khrushchev was going to nuke USA from Cuba. Of course they Could do it, considering Israel’s size, and the delivery systems available to Iran, but why would Iran blow its stack – particularly since the Muslims would immediately forget Israel and turn their Hatred on the Persians, or anywhere else. Not to mention the other incoming Iran might have to experience.
No, like the Cuban Missile Crisis, this is about establishing a new strategic actor, so that other strategic actors can take advantage of the shifting of the kaleidescope that had been set up to deal with the creation of the last new strategic actor. This is a good moment to do so: USA has chosen to follow Bezmenov’s path to crisis, Europe is having some sort of psychiatric event, and most importantly NATO has demonstrated its emptiness. By the way, did anyone see Rasmussen’s recent speech? About half of it was devoted to how hurt the European’s feelings were that some USA types were disparaging their contribution to Afghanistan! Lol! If I remember correctly, so were soldiers, such as the Dutch.
Finally, fascism is a neologism derived from fasces, the Roman symbol of conquest. Of course Mussolini invented it. And it had little to do with the German Worker’s Party out of which National Socialist German Worker’s Party evolved, except that their common ideological roots were Marxist. So what? Marxism is the uber political ideology. Anyway this is not the place to dispute fascism’s meaning or lack thereof; we must disagree. You guys should do a lot more reading about the Comintern though. Fo sho.
As long as the despots of the Middle East are living off of oil money from the west, there will be a problem like this. The only long-term solution is to cut off the flow of funds. OPEC got a record one trillion dollars for it’s oil in 2008.
Saddam was not a Muslim radical, he was an imitator of Stalin. Yet he had a nuclear weapons program for quite a while, and would have used them if possible.
We may have to seize the oil fields to do it, but we must cut off the flow of money.
Richard Aubrey #106 said:
“I hate to listen to Obama. Because he’s good. It takes a real intellectual effort not to be borne along. Rather read his stuff.”
This is so correct. Listening to Obama is like listening to the devil. His words are soothing and beguiling. Oddly enough when one reads his message, it becomes immediately apparent that there is nothing there (no intellectual content). Obama is easily among the ten most dangerous demagogues of American history. It was suicidal madness that he was permitted to become President.
Richard, Eggplant,
What you need to remember when listening to the charlatan in the WH is what you need to remember whenever you hear a politician talking: the old joke about how you can tell when a pol is lying to you.
“How can you tell when a politician is lying to you? Easy. His/her lips are moving.”
I’ve been watching them since LBJ. The only way anyone could believe this jerk about anything is to be completely bereft of information about him, his past behavior and his future intentions. Unfortunately, too many Americans are in exactly that position and the nation will pay dearly for their ignorance.
#107 marymcl . . .
I always thought you were a thoughtful poster, but you seem a bit quick to condemn me.
I checked the post, and there is a discussion of bioweapons. I’m not hijacking the thread. The Israelis have bioweapons. Many Jews have revenge fantasies. Many Americans are angry with Obama’s plans to destroy the United States. You are twisting my words a lot, but I’m not going to write any more on this “moby” subject and your twitching antennae.
Why are you lecturing me about what constitutes a “serious discussion”? You should try to avoid calling people names if you want to be part of a serious discussion.
I think Dan’s nailed it. I don’t see the mullahs risking Jerusalem. They’ll use the nukes as a license to step up their unconventional war against Israel and leverage a position as regional hegemon. I believe Russia’s anticipating greatly increased influence in the Middle East through a much more powerful Iranian client state that largely owes their WMDs to Moscow. With the Tehran-Caracas axis Putin’s trying to claw back into superpower status with another client state in the Western Hemisphere.
For Putin, the Cold War’s not over; it’s only half-time.
Mac. I know he’s lying. I know it when I see his lips move.
Point is, whether by accident or training, he has a compelling delivery.
I first heard him during the campaign and found myself being reassured.
Do you recall George C. Scott’s speech at the beginning of “Patton”? He was talking to a bunch of Third Army guys who were about to go into death ground. You might worry about being killed. “Don’t worry about it.” At the time, I was on orders to another death ground and saw this movie at the post theater. Scott’s “Don’t worry about it.” was so authoritative that I stopped worrying, for a bit.
Obama is like that. Much less trouble to read his words.
‘Eathen said:
“I think Dan’s nailed it. I don’t see the mullahs risking Jerusalem. They’ll use the nukes as a license to step up their unconventional war against Israel and leverage a position as regional hegemon. I believe Russia’s anticipating greatly increased influence in the Middle East through a much more powerful Iranian client state that largely owes their WMDs to Moscow.”
This is a rational analysis and it might even be correct. Where the analysis falls short is in the assumption that Ahmadinejad is a rational actor motivated only by cynical politics and not by religious faith. He’s probably motivated by both. Also, Ahmadinejad’s main political power base is the with the unwashed highly religious underclasses of Iran. His power base may compel Ahmadinejad to be stupid with the Israelis. Finally, one must wonder how long the Israelis will continue to remain passive and allow others like Ahmadinejad and Obama to dictate their fate. At some point the Israelis may feel compelled to seize the initiative. If Ahmadinejad is feeding bad intelligence back to the Israeli leadership through a Mossad double agent then anything could happen.
Richard Aubrey: Agree with you on the hypnotic effect of The One’s spoken delivery. Infuriating: because I know the words are mush, the intonation is a boring groove, the hand gestures are completely predictable, that raised chin/distant look likewise an assumed vestment like his perfect suits. “Let me be CLEAR. (Pause, raise index finger of right hand). What lies before you is BULLs***. (Pause, raise index finger of left hand). Bulls*** of my own making. (Pause). Bulls*** that will poison your minds, ruin your fortunes, bleed your progeny, all to aggrandize ME and my friends. (Pause, raise index finger of right hand). But it is my destiny, your destiny, our COLLECTIVE destiny (Pause) that you be ridden like a parcel of slaves and treated like fools; because TOGETHER –together (Pause)– we can hope to change the world. (Pause for applause.) Thank you.”
How he does this, I don’t know. But it’s really a feature out of a bad end-times novel.
#82 Kirk Parker – No, no such info. Merely pointing out one possible result of advancing technology. And, as often happens, Heinlein was way ahead of me; when was “Moon is a Harsh Mistress” published again?
The technology of asteroid diversion could save the Earth in more ways than one. Or doom it; which is one reason why no Muslim should ever be allowed into space. EVER.
CANNONEER: I was a former USMC assaultman 70-74,No I was issued the M-17A1 W/ riot filters as my gas mask and our MOPP was supposedly the Poncho that was issued also.
Not Ominuos in itself perhaps considering where III MEF is (OKI) but still it’s quite a shock to see another CBRN mask get issued don’t you think?
At least someone, somewhere is thinking NBC war.
James Lewis in his article today, http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/10/vladimir_putin_and_the_russian_1.html,
asserts that it may have the Saudi’s who paid for the Paki nukes, and that those nukes are “only a phone call away”. In a rational world, that would portend a stalemate between Iran and the Saudi’s/gulf states. But as Eggplant and others have noted many of the actors involved can’t be considered wholly rational in their thinking including Dinnerjacket, Obama, Putin, Baby Assad, Hiz’b'allah, and Hamas , just to name a few.
Nukes and assorted delusional leaders. What a brew!
One can only hope the Israeli’s successfully take out Iran’s nuclear capability and soon.
Afghan Lunacy
Those who came to Afghanistan with open eyes and open minds, and who are not afraid to jeopardize access or careers by reporting truth, will have clearly reported by early 2006 that we were losing ground here.
Who are these “experts” who didn’t see this thing for what it was, early on? And now even in 2008, some people bring home messages that this place is not as bad as it really is. Yes, it’s true that we lost but one U.S. soldier to combat in Afghanistan in November of 2008, but we should not let this number confuse us.
The Af-Pak war has great potential to devolve into something far worse than what we saw in Iraq. The “experts” who did not sound the alarm by at least 2006, that Afghanistan by then clearly was slipping through our fingers, are no more useful than a fire alarm with dead batteries.
A fire alarm with dead batteries is far worse than merely useless. Let the counterinsurgency “experts” step forward, and show us that they put to writing several years ago what is today obvious. We need to know who to listen to, and who to ignore.
Putin has a terrible hand: his military age male population is crashing, his crew is standing at the ratlines, government owned entities have already defaulted on liabilities…
His air farce had to impress command level test pilots in order to prevail against the mighty Georgian air defense.
Naturally, then, he’s pushed his chips forward — he’s ALL IN!
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Metaphorically, he’s the frog transporting the scorpion across the waters.
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Stories abound about Russian and Chinese ‘assistance’ for the IRGC regime and it’s putsch. Such is consistent with the spontaneous trip to Central ( Moscow ) after the unsettling ‘election.’
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What’s really curious is the source of the mullah’s cash flow. Perhaps they’ve been long China.
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Then, it’s passing strange that Pakistan is still afloat. Perhaps Islamabad is being run as a Structured Investment Vehicle within the KSA sovereign investment fund family.
Based on the GHQ assault I’d demand more collateral if I were the King.
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If Ben ever shut off the printing press the dollar would rally. In any event, the savage decline in the American employment base ( 1,000,000 in September ) can be hidden in plain sight via the BLS — but it’s still happening.
The massive money printing is very much in the manner of early addiction to opiates. Withdrawal shall prove to be a nightmare.