I don’t much care what the Times says

Pulses are continuing to flutter over yesterday’s story in the Times of London that Israel is preparing for a nuclear airstrike on Iran:

ISRAEL has drawn up secret plans to destroy Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities with tactical nuclear weapons.

Two Israeli air force squadrons are training to blow up an Iranian facility using low-yield nuclear “bunker-busters”, according to several Israeli military sources.

The attack would be the first with nuclear weapons since 1945, when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Israeli weapons would each have a force equivalent to one-fifteenth of the Hiroshima bomb.

Under the plans, conventional laser-guided bombs would open “tunnels” into the targets. “Mini-nukes” would then immediately be fired into a plant at Natanz, exploding deep underground to reduce the risk of radioactive fallout.

The Times has followed up with a lengthy analysis of the context and implications of the strike:

NO nuclear weapon has been fired in anger since the American bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Should Israel take such a drastic step, it would inflame world opinion — particularly in Muslim states — and unleash retaliation from Iran and its allies. But Israelis have become increasingly convinced that a “second holocaust” of the Jews is brewing, stoked by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president and chief Holocaust denier, who has repeatedly called for Israel to be destroyed.

Western Europe and the United States have been trying to persuade Tehran to drop its nuclear ambitions, using the carrot of co-operation with a legitimate nuclear energy programme and the stick of UN sanctions. But they have had no effect.

As a result, Israel sees itself standing on its own and fighting for its very existence. It got a taste of what Iran was capable of during last summer’s war in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah, Tehran’s proxy troops fighting from bunkers secretly built by Iranian military engineers, humiliated the Israeli army and rained missiles into northern Israel.

Every Israeli government has vowed never to let Iran acquire nuclear weapons. Ariel Sharon, when he was prime minister, ordered the military to be ready for a conventional strike on Iran’s nuclear programme. Since then, however, the Iranians have strengthened their nuclear facilities and air defences, making a conventional strike less likely to succeed.

Meanwhile, Ralph Peters has read the tealeaves of Adm. William Fallon’s move to CENTCOM in the same way I noted that Pat Lang had:

WORD that Adm. William Fallon will move laterally from our Pacific Command to take charge of Central Command – responsible for the Middle East – while two ground wars rage in the region baffled the media.

Why put a swabbie in charge of grunt operations?

There’s a one-word answer: Iran.

James Joyner notes:

While eliminating Iran’s nuclear program would be a boon to humanity, I fear a military strike–let alone one with the added taboo of a nuclear first strike–would have catastrophic consequences. Given that any action by Israel would be viewed regionally as a proxy strike by the United States, whether or not it was done with tacit approval from the Bush administration, it would almost certainly create a ripple effect throughout the Arab world and lead to more terrorist strikes. Indeed, the repercussions would likely exceed those of successful Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons.

This seems like a good time to trot out a graphic I’ve used before.

Such an attack would require more than tacit approval from the United States. We control much of that airspace. It would require our approval. There wouldn’t even be a figleaf to hide behind.

Others have addressed many of the issues in such an attack. I’ll consider just three: the likely environmental consequences, the political repercussions, and the futility even counter-productiveness of the attack.

I’ve posted before on the environmental consequences of the specific tactic being proposed for Israel. Search my archives—you’ll find it. In the meantime this article explains that the fallout from such an attack won’t be contained: people downwind (and that includes some of Iran’s largest cities and oil-production facilities) will be affected.

The political consequences are fairly obvious. Neither Israel nor the United States will find a supporter for the attack, we’ll be castigated on all sides (even by those whom the attack allows to sleep the sleep of the saved and the blest), and it will have implications for our policies.

I’m not an Israel analyst but I think if one thing is clear from the events of the summer it’s that the Israel of today is not the Israel of thirty or forty years ago. I don’t believe there will be a “rally ’round” effect as a result of such an attack, particularly if attacks on Israel re-double in the immediate aftermath. Following such an attack Iran could follow up with an attack on Israel with WMD’s of their own and they would be fully justified. I’m open to correction on this but I suspect that there are many Israelis who won’t take kindly to Israel’s becoming the first country to use nuclear weapons in anger since World War II. What effect would it have on financial support for Israel on the part of American Jews?

In the United States if there’s any question about the Congress investigating the Bush Administration now there would be none following such an attack. What did we know and when did we know it?

Worst of all the attack might well not eliminate or even slow down Iran’s nuclear development program. We’re fairly confident that there’s a second nuclear program being conducted in Iran parallel to the one we know about it. Taking out the Natanz reactor won’t necessarily touch that other program. Is Israel’s intelligence about Iran that much better than ours?

And the attack would provide every incentive for producing nuclear weapons and using them against Israel.

In my view such an attack would be worse than a crime, it would be a mistake.

4 comments… add one
  • larry berg Link

    Your server has been hacked to include links to porn sites – lots of them, invisable, …. view your home page with “View” “source” and notice at the bottom of the page. Is your host Lunarpages? I was hacked 30 days ago and didn’t know until yesterday. Lunar thinks it’s my fault – i don’t think so. I found 5 html files had been loaded into one of my rarely used subdirectories full of porn text and a tricky auto forwarding scheme that sent all visitors to a hard core porn site. Then other web sites would discover the links and link to these bogus pages on my site. 10 years I’ve worked to build a good reputation for my site and it did not include serving porn. I hope you can find all the intrusions to your site and wouldn’t it be really cool to find the slime ball who did this and prosecute him! Mybest, larry, pfranc.com (btw … when you go to one of the links you have to view-source to see the page – guess the autoforward isn’t working right).

  • Yes. I do see some extraneous links that go nowhere. Some time ago I found a number of files that didn’t belong to me in one of my subfolders. I deleted them and corrected the protections on the folder and since then I haven’t had a problem with actually being used as a host for porn sites.

    Thanks for the tip. I’ll check all the files and see what’s up.

  • Barnabus Link

    Yeah, but you are not the one on the recieving end of the “wipe off the map” promise. Ones mindset is much different if you sincerely believe that your enemy is planning on slaughtering every last one of you; i.e. it may very well be worth the cost. As to how Israel might attack, I’m not a military person but you neglect to mention Israel’s missile or submarine capabilities. They could attack from the “Persian” gulf without any consultation with the U.S. at all.

  • Yakrale Link

    Our site on Lunarpages’ krittika server was hacked earlier this month. Same thing I think — porn site script code added to 3 index.html files. Lunarpages apologized but more or less said it was our fault. (I’ve looked around, and this is definitely not our fault.) I’ve also heard that Lunarpages does not outsource. But when we recently needed a cPanel problem fixed, the “Last login from” IP address was located in Pakistan (not that I have anything against Pakistan; I’m just questioning the outsourcing claim). I don’t see a toll-free number on their site anymore either. Until the hacking incident, we had been relatively happy with their service for the past three years. It seems, however, that you are screwed if you ever need support. They can be fast and friendly, but not willing to look far enough into the problem.

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