hdgreene/31,

I think the guy who really needed the warning was Putin, and I think he was delivered it by Netanyahu. There are a lot of things in life we have to trust to luck, but will Putin trust his luck to the ABM system that defends Moscow? Israel is not stupid- they know who supplied those weapons and that nuclear material to Iran, along with diplomatic cover. If they ever needed to use their nuclear arsenal, several warheads would be arcing towards the Kremlin in a manner that makes them difficult to even track.

The more I see international politics, the more I think it’s about who can out-thug someone else, for good or for ill.

Subotai Bahadur/30,

The funny thing is that a lot of problems can be solved in 26 minutes plus time for commercials- it’s just that there is a terrible finality to that solution, and there are lots of bits and pieces of cities to sweep up afterwards. Note that I didn’t say it was a good solution, and I agree with you that the need for quick fixes is a major problem for us all.

Personally, I don’t believe that we’ll see nukes detonated in Western countries (other than perhaps Israel) any time soon. This is because while our enemies can be quite evil, they just plain aren’t that dumb. Or at the very least, they have patrons who aren’t that dumb and therefore won’t let them do it. The secret to defeating the West is to lull it into complacency and decadence, not prick it and make it really mad. I just don’t see our enemies (I live in America’s hat, but they’re my enemies, too) giving us such a golden opportunity to fix them forever.

Iran is playing a giant game of chicken, because they believe we will always blink first. I just don’t think they will give us anything that gives us a strong reason to deal with them decisively. It will always be bit by bit, until they have a fully functioning nuclear-tipped ICBM complex. Then we get to play the Findlandization-proxy war-UN negotiations dance.

This means Israel will have to take the world’s opprobrium when it strikes first, but I can’t see them being punished too severely, and especially not militarily. If no one is willing to deal with Iran, no one will touch Israel. They’ll just get tut-tutted for a while, maybe with a few targeted sanctions to go with it. Why the heck would the elite want to upset the applecart that badly? The faster things can get back to normal, the faster they can get back to sitting around Versailles and scheming behind the King’s back.

I recall seeing some theory on the Internet some time ago that Europe would pre-emptively strike Israel in order to prevent “the middle east going up in flames”. All I could think was, with *what*? They have no aircraft that can get there and back with any decent warload, and no way to get past Israel’s AD. That’s even assuming they have enough munitions suitable for the main task. No, the only way they could do it would be to use either France or Britain’s nuclear arsenal, which is so far out of reality that there’s no point even noting it.

The best way to characterize the modern elite is that they want to be in charge, but they just plain don’t feel like doing anything about it.