Israel to World: "Suck It."

You are participating in a program that is designed to kill many people

in the US we call this joining the army

Yes?

in the US we call this joining the army paying taxes

fixed courtesy of HD Thoreau

Can we not turn this thread into Morbz-Nonsense-Comedy-Hour? There are already half a dozen threads for that.

But Goldberg believes that Israel should have them for the same reasons that Iran wants them and shouldn't have them.

He also believes Iran would misuse theirs and that Israel has (and will) not. I agree with him. I think Iran will possibly misuse nuclear weapons.

well the odds that Iran might leak nuke stuff to a proxy seems pretty high. Israel's not gonna do this, since all their allies already have nukes lol

"misuse"

Does the whole mutually-assured destruction thing not hold for everyone in the world? If Iran nuked Israel, wouldn't some other ally (probably us lol) destroy them immediately? Or are they counting on other countries being more afraid of the loss of life than they are?

I guess I mean hypothetically. If they were ever to use them, which can't really be established.

If Iran nuked Israel, wouldn't some other ally (probably us lol) destroy them immediately?

hence my ref to likelihood of proxy. MAD scenarios only apply to states. if you don't know who just nuked Jerusalem, you can't nuke them back.

Oh hmm.

There is a discussion about whether mutually assured destruction applies here being as how Israel is a small enough country that there might be a potential to destroy them without retaliation. Mutually assured destruction doesn't classically apply to an ally responding. Also, I believe there is a concern that Iran might use nuclear weapons through a proxy.

aka what Shakey said

why does sullivan have hair on his daily beasy avatar

The theory that Iran might use nuclear weapons at some stage is pretty much reliant on the idea that they don't particularly care if Iran is detroyed as well. It's meant to be a grand armageddon scenario. There's not much to back it up.

The US would nuke Iran in retaliation, even if Israel couldn't. Iran doesn't want secret weapons it can use through proxies, it wants big fancy ones it can parade through the streets.

there might be a potential to destroy them without retaliation

oh come on. Israel sees some missiles in the air headed their way you think they aren't gonna press the button?

it wants big fancy ones it can parade through the streets.

this is obvious. it's a nationalism thing, and a deterrence thing as well.

People forget that Iran's defining foreign relationship is with Iraq, not the US or Israel. The Iran-Iraq war, which was started by Iraq and fuelled by the US and UK, killed a million Iranians. Their nationalism and deterrence policy is determined by the need to be in a position to stop that happening ever again.

eh I doubt they're worried about Iraq nuking them. they've got other ways to manipulate Iraq, thx to shi'a presence in Iraq's new gov't

I would buy that entirely without caveat if they didn't fund military groups to attack Israel or take numerous opportunities to discuss destroying Israel and wiping it off the face of the map. If it's just about protecting themselves from a resurgent Iraq, why even bother with Israel? If it's (as is popularly assumed) just to appease their citizens with rhetoric, I think you have to ask why they would appease their citizens with rhetoric and proxy military action but not with direct military direct.

that's xp to ShariVari

To some extent everyone misuses nuclear weapons. Having them means being able to stuff you wouldn't otherwise do and when you're neighbors whinge, well you tell them to suck it. That has certainly been the case with Israel and it most certainly would be the case w/Iran. Otoh, they have Saudi and the Sunni Gulf States and Israel to deter, ntm the US. I can totally see why they don't want a repeat of the British, or the Arabs or the Greeks or Timurlane, or Saddam Hussein, etc..., to ever happen again.

xp Proxy military action gives them influence with other regional players. Hizb'allah on their side gives them weight in Lebanon. It's also part of the domestic rhetoric - they can play up the idea that they're giving vital support to their Shi'ite brothers which goes down well with part of the audience at home. There's a huge jump between giving guns and money to a terrorist group and putting the entire future of your nation on the line with nuclear war. Iran, like all other countries in the region, doesn't really care about the Palestinians, or Israel, enough to do that.

xxp, it's not so much a fear of Iraq nuking them, it's to ward off the possible threat of invasion from a Sunni-dominated Iraq in the future. They're finding other ways to do that at the moment but this is a beef that has been going on for hundreds of years.

They're surrounded (if you count across the Gulf) by 9 Sunni States and one tiny Christian one.

Really beautiful piece in the NYT today about a small market soccer team in Israel:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/sports/soccer/in-israel-a-stunning-rise-for-kiryat-shmonas-soccer-team.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all

If they make it to the CL, I will totally root for them

American politics, but given the South Carolina primary upset, it's worth reviewing the Likud / Sheldon Adelson / Newt Gingrich ties that might swing the Republican primaries (esp. Super Tuesday).

Washington Post

Time

Ian Masters interview with Max Blumenthal on Adelson and Gingrich (mp3)
Like this interview, as it details a series of actions via which Likud & Israel could oust Obama.

Too tired + distracted to listen to an mp3 right now but can you summarize how Likud & Israel could possibly oust Obama?

Blumenthal's scenario is a unilateral Israeli attack on Iran, followed by Iran closing the Straits of Hormuz (and 13% of global oil supplies) in the months prior to the general election. Israel's political allies then blame both the skyrocketing gas prices and U.S. inaction prior to their attacks on Obama.

The Bibi Connection by Max Blumenthal, which focuses more on Likud intervention in U.S. domestic politics rather than another October surprise.

Blumenthal's scenario is a unilateral Israeli attack on Iran, followed by Iran closing the Straits of Hormuz (and 13% of global oil supplies) in the months prior to the general election.

lol this is not going happen

also presupposes that the GOP will be in a position to exploit said hypothetical events for electoral gains in key states, which is a huuuuuuuuuuuge stretch

If (huge if) any of those things happened, the International Community wouldn't stand idly by while Iran closed the Straits of Hormuz. But it's a cute theory.

Also, I defy anyone to read this: http://globalspin.blogs.time.com/2012/01/26/will-israel-attack-iran-and-if-it-does-can-it-really-stop-tehrans-nuclear-program/

And tell me what it means. Far as I can tell, either Israel is planning on attacking Iran tonight, Israel is never planning on attacking Iran, or shit is just crazy over there.

“I informed the cabinet we have no ability to hit the Iranian nuclear program in a meaningful way,” the official quoted the senior commander as saying. “If I get the order I will do it, but we don’t have the ability to hit in a meaningful way.”

The defense official told Time, that according to an estimate by the Atomic Energy Commission, Israel will only be able to push back Iran's nuclear program by several months to a year, after taking into account the wide geographic dispersion of Tehran's nuclear facilities and the the limits of Israel's air force.

I just can't figure out why on January 26, 2012, defense officials are giving quotes to Time Magazine about how they can't hit the Iranian nuclear program in a meaningful way.

misdirection...? yeah I dunno

It would be easy and cheap to for Iran close to close Hormuz to VLCC traffic for a period of weeks. Just launch a few hundred untethered drift mines in the vicinity and very large crude carrier (VLCC) insurers will make transit prohibitive. There aren't that many minesweepers available to U.S. forces, and while NATO probably still has quite a few (I should check Janes), most are deployed in Northern Europe.

Now whether the parties will go through with what they've been threatening for years now is another matter entirely.

"a period of weeks" /= Obama defeated gimme a break. there are so many "big ifs" in this scenario

I think it's silly, but even sillier is assuming that if such a chain of events played out it's because Bibi wants to throw the election to the Republicans. Such a course of action could have huge repercussions for Israel and wouldn't even guarantee Obama would lose. Not to mention that the advantage to Israel of having a Republican candidate in office over having Obama is so minuscule as to be non-existant. I don't understand why everyone (aka Iran) gets to be treated as a rational actor, but people speculate that Israel will do all kinds of stupid shit.

what Mordy said. this is like some next-level conspiracy-theory nonsense.

Should Bibi try it, it would do immense damage to Israel.

The curious question remains, why would Adelson throw his money behind Gingrich, when Romney already has Elliot Cohen, one of the chief neocon archtects of the Iraq invasion, as his national security advisor. Either candidate would be more Likud-friendly than Obama.

Adelson goes back decades with Newtie iirc

I don't see why the explanation has to be anything more complicated than that the two have a personal connection going back to the early 90s.

Iraq invasion was not a coup for Likud.

But also, Adelson isn't a secret operative for Likud. He's a guy who feels very (crazily) passionate about Israel and has a lot of money to drive his agenda. There isn't like a big conspiracy.

Saudi Minesweepers - 3 at least, maybe up to 7

Long, interesting article in NYT: Will Israel Attack Iran?

Yeah, reading that right now. Can I just O_O at this description of Dagan?

As Sharon put it at the time: “Dagan’s specialty is separating an Arab from his head.”

Yeah I was O_O reading that

some random thoughts + quotes that i thought were particularly interesting from the article:

In January 2007, several insulation units in the connecting fixtures of the centrifuges, which were purchased from a middleman on the black market in Eastern Europe, turned out to be flawed and unusable. Iran concluded that some of the merchants were actually straw companies that were set up to outfit the Iranian nuclear effort with faulty parts.

I'm sure Mossad is thrilled that every setback w/ Iranian nuclear project is blamed on them, but it seems to me that if you're purchasing insulation units on the black market, you might get stuff sometimes that is flawed and unusable without any conspiracy.

Israelis cannot enter Iran, so Israel, Iranian officials believe, has devoted huge resources to recruiting Iranians who leave the country on business trips and turning them into agents. Some have been recruited under a false flag, meaning that the organization’s recruiters pose as other nationalities, so that the Iranian agents won’t know they are on the payroll of “the Zionist enemy,” as Israel is called in Iran. Also, as much as possible, the Mossad prefers to carry out its violent operations based on the blue-and-white principle, a reference to the colors of Israel’s national flag, which means that they are executed only by Israeli citizens who are regular Mossad operatives and not by assassins recruited in the target country. Operating in Iran, however, is impossible for the Mossad’s sabotage-and-assassination unit, known as Caesarea, so the assassins must come from elsewhere. Iranian intelligence believes that over the last several years, the Mossad has financed and armed two Iranian opposition groups, the Muhjahedin Khalq (MEK) and the Jundallah, and has set up a forward base in Kurdistan to mobilize the Kurdish minority in Iran, as well as other minorities, training some of them at a secret base near Tel Aviv.

I have no doubt Mossad is responsible for some of the assassinations (particularly the magnet bombs) but this does sound a lot like trying to discredit any resistance to the Iranian administration by linking it to Mossad.

“An Iranian bomb would ensure the survival of the current regime, which otherwise would not make it to its 40th anniversary in light of the admiration that the young generation in Iran has displayed for the West. With a bomb, it would be very hard to budge the administration.” -- Barak

This is pretty much my opinion of nuclear Iran -- there's no way to keep Iran from eventually getting nuclear weapons. But a nuclear Iran under the current administration is much more dangerous than a replacement administration (ideally based on Green movement ideals) with nuclear weapons. Not least bc of what Barak says above -- it'll be very hard to topple Khomeini if he has nukes.

The Meir Amit - 6 Day War story (where he meets with Hadden and McNamara) is really fascinating and worth reading the article just for that. And I think Barak's response to the story is really interesting too:

Barak, a history buff, smiled at the comparison, and then he completely rejected it. “Relations with the United States are far closer today,” he said. “There are no threats, no recriminations, only cooperation and mutual respect for each other’s sovereignty.”

Ehud Barak dislikes this kind of criticism of the United States, and in a rather testy tone in a phone conversation with me on Jan. 18 said: “Our discourse with the United States is based on listening and mutual respect, together with an understanding that it is our primary ally. The U.S. is what helps us to preserve the military advantage of Israel, more than ever before. This administration contributes to the security of Israel in an extraordinary way and does a lot to prevent a nuclear Iran. We’re not in confrontation with America. We’re not in agreement on every detail, we can have differences — and not unimportant ones — but we should not talk as if we are speaking about a hostile entity.”

Off-topic of this article, but I'm pretty certain that Bibi is going to lose the elections next year. I think charedim is Israel (and esp the Israel Beitenu / Beit Shemesh / Shas right-wing collection) are really unpopular at the moment and that Bibi is seem as being responsible for the degradation of the relationship between secular + charedi Israelis. I think Kadima is going to win next year pretty decisively and Livni will be PM. Which might explain some of Bibi's bluster + even hastiness re Iran if he thinks this is his last shot.

In later conversations Dagan criticized Netanyahu and Barak, and in a lecture at Tel Aviv University he observed, “The fact that someone has been elected doesn’t mean that he is smart.”

oh snap

Asked if it was possible to stop a determined Iran from becoming a nuclear power, Eitan replied: “No. In the end they’ll get their bomb. The way to fight it is by changing the regime there. This is where we have really failed. We should encourage the opposition groups who turn to us over and over to ask for our help, and instead, we send them away empty-handed.”

If this is true, it's really the most tragic piece of the whole matzav.

Saudi Arabia's oil production appears to be "ramping up" and can fill some of the demand shortfalls caused by sanctions on Iranian exports, CIA Director David Petraeus said on Tuesday.

Sanctions on Iran oil imports appear to be biting much more in recent weeks, he said at a Senate intelligence committee hearing.

China has reduced its imports of Iranian oil and "it remains to be seen whether that continues. It appears that Saudi Arabian production is ramping up and can fill some of the demand that might have been met by Iranian exports now that there are the sanctions on the Central Bank of Iran," Petraeus said.

Saudis fucking hate Iran. Why don't they attack Iran?