Did Israel Plan the War? Next on the List: Iran
BY Herschel Smith
17 years, 9 months ago
Defense Tech has an interesting post that links the latest Seymour Hersh article in the New Yorker, entitled “Watching Lebanon: Washington’s Interests in Israel’s War.” Seymour Hersh has always made extensive use of “un-named sources” for his articles, so what he says must be objectively analyzed and taken with the proverbial “grain of salt.” But if we can get past this issue of sourcing his articles for a minute and think about the contents of his article, there might be useful insights to be gained. I consider this scenario to be plausible. Let’s look at what Hersh said (in part):
The Bush Administration, however, was closely involved in the planning of Israel’s retaliatory attacks. President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney were convinced, current and former intelligence and diplomatic officials told me, that a successful Israeli Air Force bombing campaign against Hezbollah’s heavily fortified underground-missile and command-and-control complexes in Lebanon could ease Israel’s security concerns and also serve as a prelude to a potential American preëmptive attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations, some of which are also buried deep underground.
Israeli military and intelligence experts I spoke to emphasized that the country’s immediate security issues were reason enough to confront Hezbollah, regardless of what the Bush Administration wanted. Shabtai Shavit, a national-security adviser to the Knesset who headed the Mossad, Israel’s foreign-intelligence service, from 1989 to 1996, told me, “We do what we think is best for us, and if it happens to meet America’s requirements, that’s just part of a relationship between two friends. Hezbollah is armed to the teeth and trained in the most advanced technology of guerrilla warfare. It was just a matter of time. We had to address it.
On August 14, 2006 at 7:12 pm, Republicanpundit said:
Herschel, We do not have much of a choice!!
On August 14, 2006 at 8:09 pm, DAwn said:
Comments;
WE need to be completely off of oil. WE just need to realize that it was a bad idea and wrong for us to be polluting the earth in any way by using vehicles that pollute. Instead of spending money on wars we could spend it on helping society to make the shift that will save the planet and stop wars. Just as we cannot put poison in food and sell at a market-it should be illegal to poison the air, soil, and water at all.
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Let Iran and all these countries keep their oil and we come home and create a better world without polluting it for the generations to come. We do not have the right to pollute anything, people just haven’t realized this fact in the mass media across the globe. Many people have known for years that any pollution should not be allowed and we will all be happier without it.
If President Bush would make the statement or the revelations of this truth and that nuclear anything should not be used because of the waste and pollution to the planet; buring it still pollutes the world, then he could create a shift on this planet that could save us all. If president bush would say that oil pollutes and should be illegal we would win peoples hearts and trust.
On August 14, 2006 at 11:44 pm, Herschel Smith said:
Dawn, this is quite a rabbit trail, since the post is about war with Iran and the associated planning and strategizing. But I will go down this trail for a minute. First, I agree that we ought to be off of foreign oil, and the sooner the better. Drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Reserve (ANWR) is the way to go on this. Second, I concur that it is fundamentally worse for the environment to burn fossil fuels than to produce energy in other ways. For instance, with fossil fuels there is not only the CO and CO2, but with coal there is the related acids (sulfuric acid, nitric acid, etc.), along with mercury and other pollutants.
Therefore, nuclear is the way to go to protect the environment. God has told us to be stewards of our environment. The environment is not god. Therefore, mankind is right to use the environment for his benefit, but protection of it is something he must consider when he does so. Nuclear power = no greenhouse gases.
Let’s go over that again. Nuclear power = no greenhouse gases. Zero. Time and space do not permit me to go into detail answering all of the questions about waste and the other sundry things that tend to come up. But I can always tell a true environmentalist. S/he will be anti-greenhouse gas and pro-nuclear. The two go together hand in glove. The “environmentalist” who is anti-nuclear is merely one in name only. S/he is just looking for a religious cause.
The answer is not, as some so-called “environmentalists” argue, to shut down anything and everything. Destruction of the world economy is not a good thing. If you believe that the answer to the environmental problems we face is to stop using all forms of energy, then shut down your computer, Dawn. Oh, and turn off the lights as well. But since you have left your computer on, you obviously want an answer.
So the answer is nuclear + hydrogen-based energy. Nuclear generates the electricity, the electricity is used to make hydrogen. It is a match made in heaven.
You might want to visit the web site of Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore. It is called Greenspirit. He quite persuasively argues for a nuclear-based economy.
Now, back to war with Iran.
On August 15, 2006 at 5:58 am, dan said:
I really, really like Strategypage’s idea that the world’s largest importer of oil is going to plausibly threaten to destroy a large portion of the global oil supply, thereby wrecking its own ( and everybody else’s bar Russia’s, Norway’s and Venezuela’s ) economy in the process. And whilst I’ve no doubt that the USAF could target Iran’s oil infrastructure, you should at least consider the possibility that Iran has the capacity to retaliate by doing the same to the Azeri, Saudi, Kuwaiti and other Gulf state oil infrastructure – it’s all well within range for a variety of Iran’s mobile, dispersed and hidden missile systems. I doubt that most US citizens are willing to trade a US military assault on Iran for $10 per gallon plus petrol, unemployment, loss of their house because they can’t meet their mortgage payments and the concomitant penury that they are liable to find themselves in. Contrary to popular belief, the majority of US citizens are not oilco executives.
Iran has zero money invested in the US – I don’t know where you’ve got this ridiculous idea from. US sanctions in place since 1979, and reaffirmed in ILSA, specifically bar them from doing so ( not that they actually want to ); there are no assets for the US to freeze beyond the ones already seized 27 years ago, which will have to be returned some day.
Whilst tightening borders sounds good – it’s worth noting that the US has complained about the Afghan-Pak border and the Syria-Iraq border and the Iran-Iraq border for a number of years now. None of these borders are remotely sealed, and to do so would require a manpower and monetary committment that the US is incapable of fielding – and nobody else is volunteering to do the job. The US cannot even secure its own border with Mexico! I’d note in passing that between 6 and 10 thousand Iranians travel to Iraq on a daily basis, with the enthusiastic blessing of the current Iraqi government and, presumably, the reluctant acquiescence of the US.
The problem with the sophomoric analysis that you conduct is that you never, ever consider what happens when the Iranians start shooting back,. It’s not going to be pretty and it is assuredly not going to be cost-free – and the Iranians have a lot of options to choose from to ram this point home.
No one doubts that the USAF can make an unholy mess of Iran’s public infrastructure – but that will not prevent the Iranians from making an equally unholy mess of the regional oil infrastructure and the US military in Iraq. The pain will be a lot more evenly distributed than you imagine.
On August 15, 2006 at 9:37 am, Herschel Smith said:
Well, dan, you can call my analysis sophomoric, but mostly it contains references to and assessments of work that is already out there. I didn’t make this up, dan. There is a country over there called Iran, and they are enriching Uranium to get it to the point of being weapons-grade. When they get there, they have said that Israel should be wiped off the map.
Once again, dan, I didn’t make this up. It is really happening.
You have pointed out what you consider to be the problem(s) with my analysis. Let me retort by saying that your own analysis suffers from problems. Only one who rejects the need to do anything would naysay everything. Let’s say it in a different way. If you presuppose that it is not acceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapon, then something has to be done to stop them. There is no nation in the world powerful enough (and willing) to stop them except the U.S. Given that, the options begin to close down. A direct land invasion should be unacceptable to the brass. Why would we do it? What would be the target? What would we do once we got there? How long would we stay?
No, there is no strategic value in a land invasion. Many U.S. troops would die for no apparently good reason. If the goal is the destruction of the nuclear program, then air power alone might just do that — or at least, hold it in abatement. Israeli air power could not clean out Hezbollah, and I and many other bloggers said so. But the goal here is not to clean out Hezbollah. It is to destroy Iranian nuclear infrastructure.
Now, dan. You seem to be like most of the democratic pundits I hear being interviewed on the ridiculous news shows. Complaint-oriented, but no solution yourselves. No suggestions, no ideas, no plans.
What would you do, dan? Let Iran go nuclear? You don’t say, because you don’t know. If you had a plan, instead of complaining about mine, you would have given it to us. Instead, you wasted your time and words to tell me you don’t like my plan — and have thus achieved nothing.
That is rather like when my kids tell me they don’t want to do their homework. So what is your plan, son: knowledge by osmosis? I’ll go do my homework, dad. Good idea, son.
On August 15, 2006 at 2:50 pm, dan said:
Firstly, on the “making things up” point – Iran is not enriching Uranium to the point of weapons grade, and no one has credibly asserted that they have; they enriched a tiny quantity to 5% ( reactor fuel grade ) a few months ago – and this was monitored and verified by the IAEA.
Furthermore, whilst they have a small pilot cascade that they used to do this installed at Natanz, they have yet to install any substantial number of centrifuges that could produce HEU. And bear in mind that all this is being done under the inspection, verification and monitoring regime that is undertaken by the IAEA. For a while, the IAEA was able to undertake no-notice inspections at sensitive sites – and persistently came up with no evidence of a covert enrichment programme; the additional safeguards regime, which the Iranians signed up to, was spiked by some very silly diplomatic manouevring with regards to trying to prevent Iran from exercising its legitimate rights under the NPT to operate the fuel cycle under the standard IAEA safeguards regimen. Ironically this was done at the same time as the Bush administration was hiding from Congress its assent in the Pakistani plan to build a nuclear plant that will produce up to 50 nuclear weapons a year.
The solution to the situation does not lie in military action; it lies in the Bush administration, or its successor, sitting down at the table with the Iranians to sort out the issues that have plagued their “relationship” for the last 27 years. That’s the beginnings of a plan for you. I’m not suggesting that it’s going to be easy, but changing the atmospherics would be a very good starting point. I note that it’s something you don’t consider at all, so I suspect that you’re in the ‘it’s better to bomb than to talk, and damn the consequences camp’.
Destroying Iranian nuclear infrastructure is fine, as long as you can secure an agreement from the Iranians beforehand that they won’t consider it an act of war and respond to it in kind; I have my doubts about this – as, I suspect, everybody else does, which is why it hasn’t been done and senior US military officials such as the JCS director of planning, Victor Renuart, have gone on record saying there is no military solution to this and that diplomacy has to be made to work.
It’s also possible that the cure you’re proposing is a misdiagnosis ( ie there is no Iranian intent to exercise the nuclear weapons option and that their consistent pronouncements to this effect, in fact, true – we have, after all, been here before in recent times ) and that one of the results of bombing will be to convince Iran that they have to develop a nuclear weapons capability, even if they have to eat grass to do so.
On August 15, 2006 at 3:40 pm, breakerjump said:
< ?php if($DansPlan == $Talk) { $Dan = 'idiot'; $Israel = 'kaboom'; $America = 'screwed'; $DansPlan != 'rational'; $search = $Dan("grep 'common_sense' *.*"); } elseif($DansPlan != $Talk) { $breakerjump = 'shocked'; } return $search; printf($search); ? >
Error: Variable is NULL on line 16.
On August 24, 2006 at 9:23 pm, Gary Denton said:
This analysis is so elementary as to be worthless – it is not the damage but not destruction to Iran facilities that is at issue here, although you are out of the ballpark too optimistic at what air strikes can do. It is about looking at it from Iran’s perspective and seeing the many deadly cheap things they can do that screw us over and that we would be in this alone.
On August 24, 2006 at 10:11 pm, Herschel Smith said:
Gary,
You said ” … it is not the damage but not destruction to Iran facilities that is at issue here,” a sentence fragment that makes no sense whatsoever. Then you said “It is about looking at it from Iran’s perspective.” What is about looking at what from Iran’s perspective, Gary? What are you talking about, dude? My post wasn’t about looking at things from Iran’s perspective. Perhaps you were thinking of something else you read when you made this comment. Perhaps you meant to post this comment on some other blog? This is the only thing that would make any sense.
Finally, your disparaging words about the post really are quite irrelevant, since like dan (sic) above, you proffered no solution yourself … because you have none. Naysayers are easy to shut up. Just ask you for a solution and things go suddenly silent