The last day (Israel:Iran)

[fng13]

Originally Posted by Sigaba

fng13 and tonyz--

MOO, you both are raising important points that our national political leadership failed to debate adequately after 9/11 and continues to avoid debating to this current day.

In regards to your concerns, I do think that our own post-World War II experiences provide guidance (but not necessarily "lessons") on how to respond to rogue states using terrorism.#

By referencing Brodie's Strategy in the Missile Age, I'm not endorsing all of his conclusions. Rather, I'm pointing out that the possession of nuclear weapons introduces levels of complexity to strategic planning. The Islamic Republic of Iran will to wrestle with many of these issues. No matter how irrational its political leadership seems to us as Westerners, there remains an underlying rationale to Iran's behavior. Even the Soviet Union--a regime that embraced an ideology predicated on violence--figured out that atomic weapons are not a magic carpet that one can ride to global revolution.

By referencing the "spectrum of conflict," I'm suggesting that even if they do learn how to build nuclear weapons, rogue states of all stripes will encounter similar learning curves.

During these intervals, Western states, if they can avoid panic, profound strategic miscalculations, and intelligence failures, will have advantages in military capabilities but also (and more importantly) in armed service professionalism. (Other advantages include the Westphalian system, liberalism, market capitalism, and cultural values centered around the primacy of the modern self.)

That is, while some may argue that we're in a new age of warfare that requires entirely new ways of thinking, Western nations, especially the United States, have already put in a lot of thought on how to deal with the threats we face today. In the years following the Vietnam War, SMEs debated fiercely the best way to fight the Soviet Union in a general war. Over arching questions throughout these brawls centered around the impact of technological change on modern warfare and the vicissitudes of regional conflict. Consequently, in addition to the Soviets, these SMEs also spent a considerable amount of time talking about terrorism and regional conflict sparked by third world governments.* (I would say "surprising" but that would be an ahistorical observation. Historians are never surprised by the past.)

While not all of the proposed solutions were implemented, not every contingency was foreseen, and no consensus was reached, I think the emphasis on alliances, diplomacy, deterrence predicated on "escalation dominance," and holding to the values and best practices of western civilization still fit in today's geostrategic environment.

Here's why. Even if a "nightmare scenario" along the lines you two eloquently painted out were to occur, our armed services would still have the means and the professional expertise to identify, to engage, and to defeat decisively the perpetrators. And while the will of "we, the people" and of our political leadership are hot button issues these days, I think that even in a nightmare scenario--which I think will occur at least once--we'll still be "us" and, equally significant, they'll still be "them."**

MOO, we do ourselves a disservice and we may even play into the hands of our opponents--be they radical Islamcists, communists, or fascists--when we allow them to dictate the terms of conflict, or when we fall into a "this changes everything" frame of thinking, or when our thinking about nightmare scenarios overshadows our understanding of our own historical experience.

My uncaffeinated $0.02.


_________________________________________________
# FWIW, one could make a very strong argument that the American military experience has had relatively few examples of "well defined goals".
* In this regard, the Carter administration was ahead of its time. However, its modest contributions to these debates do not get the man from Plains, GA off the hook. During the Cold War, military effectiveness required modern capabilities across the spectrum of conflict--not just the first third. He needed to be a Cold War president, not the first "post-Cold War president."
** With all due respect to the memory of Edward Said--one can blame the west and Israel all one likes, but at some point, responsibility for the fact that much of Arab "street" has open sewage trenches eventually devolves onto the people who live there.

Green Highlighted portion:

With all due respect this seems to rely on the premise of Iran being a rational state, with rational and logical leaders, who upon careful consideration and a steep learning curve will come to the same conclusion as other nuclear states. (that it's always better to leave the nukes on the launch pad then put them in the air)

That to me seems like a large leap. Nuclear arms are a relatively new weapon and to put faith in the idea that all countries who develop nuclear arms will upon doing so realize that actually using them is a bad idea is itself IMHO a bad idea.

Blue :

I agree with this entirely although I would argue that we have seen evidence over the last 15-20 years that rogue defiant states will maintain defiance up to the point of war no matter what deterrent has been clearly laid out before them.

Many U.S. Alliances also in some cases seem to only have a prima facie value that become ineffective in times of conflict. Pakistan is a good example of my point here and I think that the argument could be made that the U.N. as an organization to some extent is ineffective as an alliance.

Red:

I'm certainly not going to get drawn into a straw man argument about the effectiveness of our military on a military forum.
I do think that our military is the best in the world and our capabilities are unmatched.

Having said that thinking that we could rapidly identify all the perpetrators of a nuclear attack and then summarily kill all the enemies involved in a timely manner, without having to get drawn into another 10 year war fighting an enemy that is free to move in and out of other nations or violate a number of
treaties or long standing policies by invading "friendly" nations seems a little too feel good for me. Killing the enemy isn't a question here we have plenty of badass m'fers that can kill the enemy. It's the political nightmare that is involved with getting those men to the enemy which is the concern.

Furthermore, I am more interested in the Socio-Economic impact this would have and I think the military response is only a part of that. I am not advocating a this changes everything type mindset (although if a nuke going off in America doesn't change everything I don't know what would). Rather I am concerned that such an attack could have a major impact on the economic stability of the world and especially the U.S.

If the U.S. suffers a major economic upheaval during an already fractured financial state. There may very well be many more problems than simply just finding and killing the enemy.

Which not to get too far into the weeds, might very well be a motivation for such an attack. If the U.S. fully tanks in global markets Iranian allies are free to thrive as many western nations will follow the U.S. down the tube.

Furthermore, IMHO relying on SME debates during the height of US power may not be the best base for global strategy during a time when we are in the weakest economic state we have been in nearly a century.


ETA: Iran doesn't have to be the perpetrator I.E. loading an ICBM with a nuke and sending it out into the blue, what happens if an Iranian convoy carrying nuclear material is high jacked and lost. I'm not expert by any means but that seems to be a feasible way to give Iran plausible deniability.

[The Reaper]

Originally Posted by scooter

The US appears to have the capability to detect the country of origin of any nuclear device detonated on US soil, so deniability won't really come into play.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/02/politics/02nuke.html

As far as Iran acting rationally, I'd stipulate that regardless of what rhetoric they throw out there most of their actions to date have been fairly calculated and rational in recent years. Using suicide bombers doesn't mean the one employing them is off their rocker, any more than the kamikazes in the pacific meant that Japan was an irrational actor fighting blindly.

Okay, let's play into that assumption.

We lose our national electric grid from an EMP and discover that the fissionable material was Russian in origin. Half this country will die in the next year.

Do we then nuke them, and enact MAD?

What if it turns out to be Pakistani?

North Korean?

TR

[Dusty]

BiBi, Bro-don't deal with this character-hold off 'til the middle of January...

How intimidated could the BG's be, anyway, with all the bowing and scraping and apologizing?

And have you seen the picture of the guy on a bicycle? Oy Vey. Somebody send him some Ageless Male.

[tonyz]

I sure miss this man.

IMO, many aspects of this speech are as applicable today as they were back then - merely the players change.

Keep the faith.

http://criticalpolitics.wordpress.co...-we-surrender/

[Richard]

Some interesting points for consideration.

Richard

Top Ten Media Failures In The Iran War Debate
ForeignPolicy, 11 Mar 2012
Part 1 of 2

I did a brief interview for All Things Considered last Friday, on the topic of media handling of the current war scare over Iran. The interview got me thinking about the issue of media coverage of this whole business, and I'm sorry to say that most mainstream news organizations have let us down again. Although failures haven't been as egregious as the New York Times and Washington Post's wholesale swallowing of the Bush administration's sales pitch for war in 2002, on the whole the high-end media coverage has been disappointing. Here are my Top Ten Media Failures in the 2012 Iran War Scare.

#1: Mainstreaming the war. As I've written before, when prominent media organizations keep publishing alarmist pieces about how war is imminent, likely, inevitable, etc., this may convince the public that it is going to happen sooner or later and it discourages people from looking for better alternatives. Exhibits A and B for this problem are Jeffrey Goldberg's September 2010 article in The Atlantic Monthly and Ronan Bergman's February 2012 article in the New York Times Magazine. Both articles reported that top Israeli leaders believed time was running out and suggested that an attack might come soon.

#2: Loose talk about Iran's "nuclear [weapons] program." A recurring feature of Iran war coverage has been tendency to refer to Iran's "nuclear weapons program" as if its existence were an established fact. U.S. intelligence services still believe that Iran does not have an active program, and the IAEA has also declined to render that judgment either. Interestingly, both the Times' public editor Arthur Brisbane and Washington Post ombudsman Patrick Pexton have recently chided their own organizations for muddying this issue.

#3: Obsessing about Ahmadinejad. A typical insertion into discussions of Iran is to make various references to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, usually including an obligatory reference to his penchant for Holocaust denial and his famously mis-translated statement about Israel "vanishing from the page of time." This feature is often linked to the issue of whether Iran's leaders are rational or not. But the obsession with Ahmadinejad is misleading in several ways: he has little or no influence over Iran's national security policy, his power has been declining sharply in recent months, and Supreme Leader Ali Khameini -- who does make the key decisions -- has repeatedly said that nuclear weapons are contrary to Islam. And while we're on the subject of Iranian "rationality," it is perhaps worth noting that its leaders weren't goofy enough to invade Iraq on a pretext and then spend trillions of dollars fighting an unnecessary war there.

#4: Ignoring Iranian weakness. As I've noted before, Iran is not a very powerful country at present, though it does have considerable potential and could exert far more international influence if its leaders were more competent. But its defense budget is perhaps 1/50th the size of U.S. defense spending, and it has no meaningful power-projection capabilities. It could not mount a serious invasion of any of its neighbors, and could not block the Strait of Hormuz for long, if at all. Among other things, that is why it has to rely on marriages of convenience with groups like Hezbollah or Hamas (who aren't that powerful either). Yet as Glenn Greenwald argues here, U.S. media coverage often portrays Iran as a looming threat, without offering any serious military analysis of its very limited capabilities.

#5: Failing to ask why Iran might want a bomb. Discussions of a possible war also tend to assume that if Iran does in fact intend to get a nuclear weapon, it is for some nefarious purpose. But the world's nine nuclear powers all obtained these weapons first and foremost for deterrent purposes (i.e., because they faced significant external threats and wanted a way to guarantee their own survival). Iran has good reason to worry: It has nuclear-armed states on two sides, a very bad relationship with the world's only superpower, and more than three dozen U.S. military facilities in its neighborhood. Prominent U.S. politicians repeatedly call for "regime change" there, and a covert action campaign against Iran has been underway for some time, including the assassination of Iranian civilian scientists.

#6: Failing to consider why Iran might NOT want a bomb. At the same time, discussions of Iran's nuclear ambitions often fail to consider the possibility that Iran might be better off without a nuclear weapons capability. As noted above, Supreme Leader Khameini has repeatedly said that nuclear weapons are contrary to Islam, and he may very well mean it. He could be lying, but that sort of lie would be risky for a regime whose primary basis for legitimacy is its devotion to Islam. For another, Iran has the greatest power potential of any state in the Gulf, and if it had better leadership it would probably be the strongest power in the region. If it gets nuclear weapons some of its neighbors may follow suit, which would partly negate Iran's conventional advantages down the road. Furthermore, staying on this side of the nuclear weapons threshold keeps Iran from being suspected of complicity should a nuclear terrorist attack occur somewhere. For all these reasons, I'd bet Iran wants a latent nuclear option, but not an actual nuclear weapon. But there's been relatively little discussion of that possibility in recent media coverage.

#7: Exaggerating Israel's capabilities. In a very real sense, this whole war scare has been driven by the possibility that Israel might feel so endangered that they would launch a preventive war on their own, even if U.S. leaders warned them not to. But the IDF doesn't have the capacity to take out Iran's new facility at Fordow, because they don't have any aircraft that can carry a bomb big enough to penetrate the layers of rock that protect the facilities. And if they can't take out Fordow, then they can't do much to delay Iran's program at all and the only reason they might strike is to try to get the United States dragged in. In short, the recent war scare-whose taproot is the belief that Israel might strike on its own-may be based on a mirage.

#8: Letting spinmeisters play fast and loose with facts. Journalists have to let officials and experts express their views, but they shouldn't let them spout falsehoods without pushing back. Unfortunately, there have been some egregious cases where prominent journalists allowed politicians or government officials to utter howlers without being called on it. When Rick Santorum announced on Meet the Press that "there were no inspectors" in Iran, for example, host David Gregory didn't challenge this obvious error. (In fact, Iran may be the most heavily inspected country in the history of the IAEA).

Even worse, when Israeli ambassador Michael Oren appeared on MSNBC last week, he offered the following set of dubious claims, without challenge:

"[Iran] has built an underground nuclear facility trying to hide its activities from the world. It has been enriching uranium to a high rate [sic.] that has no explanation other than a military nuclear program - that has been confirmed by the International Atomic Energy Agency now several times. It is advancing very quickly on an intercontinental ballistic missile system that's capable of carrying nuclear warheads."

Unfortunately, MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell apparently didn't know that Oren's claims were either false or misleading. 1) Iran's underground facility was built to make it hard to destroy, not to "hide its activities," and IAEA inspectors have already been inside it. 2) Iran is not enriching at a "high rate" (i.e., to weapons-grade); it is currently enriching to only 20% (which is not high enough to build a bomb). 3) Lastly, Western intelligence experts do not think Iran is anywhere near to having an ICBM capability.

In another interview on NPR, Oren falsely accused Iran of "killing hundreds, if not thousands of American troops," a claim that NPR host Robert Siegel did not challenge. Then we got the following exchange:

Oren: "Imagine Iran which today has a bunch of speedboats trying to close the Strait of Hormuz. Imagine if Iran has a nuclear weapon. Imagine if they could hold the entire world oil market blackmailed. Imagine if Iran is conducting terrorist organizations through its terrorist proxies - Hamas, Hezbollah. Now we know there's a connection with al-Qaida. You can't respond to them because they have an atomic weapon."

Siegel: Yes. You're saying the consequences of Iran going nuclear are potentially global, and the consequences of a U.S. strike on Iran might also be further such attacks against the United States..."

Never mind the fact that we have been living in the nuclear age for some 60 years now, and no nuclear state has even been able to conduct the sort of aggressive blackmail that Oren suggests Iran would be able to do. Nuclear weapons are good for deterrence, and not much else, but the news media keep repeating alarmist fantasies without asking if they make sense or not.

Politicians and government officials are bound to use media moments to sell whatever story they are trying to spin; that's their job. But It is up to journalists to make this hard, and both Mitchell and Siegel didn't. (For another example of sloppy fact-checking, go here).

(cont'd)

[Richard]

Top Ten Media Failures In The Iran War Debate
ForeignPolicy, 11 Mar 2012
Part 2 of 2

9. What about the human beings? One of the more bizarre failures of reporting on the war debate has been the dearth of discussion of what an attack might mean for Iranian civilians. If you take out some of Iran's nuclear facilities from the air, for example, there's a very real risk of spreading radioactive material or other poisonous chemicals in populated areas, thereby threatening the lives of lots of civilians. Yet when discussing the potentially dangerous consequences of a war, most discussions emphasize the dangers of Iranian retaliation, or the impact on oil prices, instead of asking how many innocent Iranian civilians might die in the attack. You know: the same civilians we supposedly want to liberate from a despotic clerical regime.

10. Could diplomacy work? Lastly, an underlying theme in a lot of the coverage is the suggestion that diplomacy is unlikely to work, because it's been tried before and failed. But the United States has had very little contact with Iranian officials over the past thirty years, and only one brief set of direct talks in the past three years. Moreover, we've insisted all along that Iran has to give up all nuclear enrichment, which is almost certainly a deal-breaker from Tehran's perspective. The bottom line is that diplomacy has yet to succeed-and it might not in any case-but it's also never been seriously tried.

I'm sure you can find exceptions to the various points I've made here, especially if you move outside major media outlets and focus on online publications and the blogosphere. Which may be why more people are inclined to get their news and analysis there, instead of from the usual outlets. But on the whole, Americans haven't been well-served by media coverage of the Iran debate. As the president said last week, "loose talk" about an issue like this isn't helpful.

http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/...ran_war_debate

[tcb09d]

For anyone more interested I would suggest some books that talk extensively about these topics
Arms and Influence by Thomas Schelling
Dying to win by Robert Pape (anything by Pape is great)

Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon leads to many obvious things:
1) Countries with nukes don't get invaded
2) Iran's sphere of influence in the ME is extended
3) The bargaining range increases in Iran's favor
That is to say by increasing the cost of going to war with Iran that people are more willing to bargain and concede a little bit because war is that much more costly.