I'm not saying we won't get our hair mussed

The U.S. and Israel are operating from very different assumptions.

The results of the war game were particularly troubling to Gen. James N. Mattis, who commands all American forces in the Middle East, Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia, according to officials who either participated in the Central Command exercise or who were briefed on the results and spoke on condition of anonymity because of its classified nature. When the exercise had concluded earlier this month, according to the officials, General Mattis told aides that an Israeli first strike would be likely to have dire consequences across the region and for United States forces there. 

The two-week war game, called Internal Look, played out a narrative in which the United States found it was pulled into the conflict after Iranian missiles struck a Navy warship in the Persian Gulf, killing about 200 Americans, according to officials with knowledge of the exercise. The United States then retaliated by carrying out its own strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. 

 The Israelis, apparently, view this differently.

I am not capable of sorting through the elaborate layers of bluff and counterbluff that may lie behind the Israeli assumptions, or assertions, that Jeff Goldberg reports. And neither I nor anyone else can prove what I strongly believe: that such "best-case" predictions, assuming that the Israeli officials really hold them, are wildly unrealistic. The first, in particular, smacks unmistakably of Dick Cheney's "we will be greeted as liberators" forecast about invading Iraq, or the earlier CIA fantasies that the downtrodden people of Cuba would rise to welcome the Bay of Pigs landing party in 1961.

What I can say is this: if Israeli officials really have adopted best-case-ism as their military "planning" doctrine and basis for decision-making, we are fully into "March of Folly" territory, and the "psychological inversion" that a reader described recently has in fact taken place.

When Barbara Tuchman coined the phrase March of Folly, she meant self-destructive behavior on a collective, organizational scale, as a group walked into a disaster it could easily have avoided.To qualify as epic-scale folly, by her standards, a ruinous decision had to:
  -arise from a sustained set of policies, not just one instantaneous wrong choice;
  -involve many people's agreement and collaboration, not just the excesses of one madman;
  -prove clearly destructive to the long-term interests of the group involved; and
  -have been warned against in real time, before the bad consequences happened, not just in retrospect.

If Netanyahu's team goes ahead, they will have met those tests.

Meanwhile, back to the Times report:

Israeli intelligence estimates, backed by academic studies, have cast doubt on the widespread assumption that a military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities would set off a catastrophic set of events like a regional conflagration, widespread acts of terrorism and sky-high oil prices. 

“A war is no picnic,” Defense Minister Ehud Barak told Israel Radio in November. But if Israel feels itself forced into action, the retaliation would be bearable, he said. “There will not be 100,000 dead or 10,000 dead or 1,000 dead. The state of Israel will not be destroyed.” 

Folly, indeed.

Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb bomb Iran...or not?

The drumbeat to attack Iran after 10 years of clusterfucks in Afghanistan and Iraq is eerily similar to the lead in to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.  So, it's good to see articles like this rather than "analysis" by Judith Miller.

Talk of war over Iran’s nuclear program has reached a strident pitch in recent weeks, as Israel has escalated threats of a possible strike, the oratory of American politicians has become more bellicose and Iran has responded for the most part defiantly. With Israel and Iran exchanging accusations of assassination plots, some analysts see a danger of blundering into a war that would inevitably involve the United States. 

Echoes of the period leading up to the Iraq war in 2003 are unmistakable, igniting a familiar debate over whether journalists are overstating Iran’s progress toward a bomb. Yet there is one significant difference: by contrast with 2003, when the Bush administration portrayed Iraq as an imminent threat, Obama administration officials and intelligence professionals seem eager to calm the feverish language.

Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in a CNN interview on Sunday that the United States had advised Israel that a strike now would be “destabilizing,” adding that Iran had not yet decided whether to build a weapon. And American officials are weighing an Iranian offer to renew nuclear talks as a stream of threats from Tehran continued on Tuesday and international nuclear inspectors reported their mission to Iran had failed. 

The difference between the Bush administration's flogging of the press, the military and the intelligence community, and Obama's quiet imposition of stricter sanctions while not making an invasion seem inevitable can't be overstated.

That said, the overheated rhetoric shows little sign of decreasing, if last night's GOP "debate" is any indication.  There seemed absolutely no awareness of the two wars we've just spent 10 years losing, to countries without an airforce or navy.  Andrew Sullivan calls it "amnesia."  Roy has a more obvious explanation.

The debacles of 2006 and 2008 were rougher on them than I thought. The Republican Party clearly suffers from a traumatic brain injury.

 

The most popular headline of the last fifteen years

"Iran is closer to building a nuclear weapon than previously predicted.'

Who could have predicted...?

If Iran falls and there are no conservatives to see it...

I know the wingnutosphere is ADD Central, but it is astonishing to me that attention to what is happening in Iran is simply nowhere to be found. I mean, what to make of the silence to this?

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Three prominent clerics criticized the Iranian authorities on Monday for failing to condemn the recent killing of Muslims in western China. Their comments often seemed aimed at the Iranian government’s own conduct during the crackdown after the disputed June 12 presidential election.

One of the clerics, Ayatollah Youssef Sanei, a reformist, drew a sardonic parallel, suggesting that Iran, which considers itself the defender of Muslims worldwide, could not criticize China’s repressive tactics while it was doing the same thing. He also said Iran’s silence was related to its commercial, military and political links with China.

“How could China suppress the Muslims so violently and seek good relations with Muslim countries, and sometimes dominate their markets?” Ayatollah Sanei wrote, in comments published on news services and reformist Web sites.

Several Parliament members and a member of the Tehran City Council have invoked the same comparison, Web sites reported. Although some seem genuinely upset by the deaths of Muslim Uighurs in western China, the issue has clearly gained a special resonance in light of the violence in Iran, where many opposition protesters have been killed and wounded since the election.

Is it because the right actually opposes the democracy movement in Iran as that might...might...diminish the blood lust towards bombing the country?

Or is it because they're siding with China anyway?

You say you want a revolution? Really?

DH Riley, on the latest burblings from the DPL himself (of which we've spoken earlier):

Really, if eight years of disaster is not enough of an answer to the perpetual campaign for hollow insincerity, then someone kindly remind this fuck just how much it accomplished when his side was in control. Weren't we all Georgians just last August? Weren't we Orange Revolutionaries and Cedar Revolutionaries before that? Is is at all peculiar that We weren't all Kurds as well, back when that would have been inconvenient for a Republican administration? Isn't it bad enough that a large chunk of American foreign policy is dedicated to the proposition that we can control the rest of the planet with our high-powered brain emanations? Does it have to be Jonah's brain?

Watching the news from Iran play out, I find myself unsurprised that the same self-absorbed fucks who led the chearleading for invading Iraq now want President Obama to be more "forceful" in renouncing the 12th century religious regime in control of the government and in announcing our BFF status with the students risking their lives to demand a fair election. With the same blissful ignorance with which they supported unleashing six years of hell on Iraqis, the neo-onanists now demand that we throw the full obese weight of American support behind a political campaign we'd paid no, none, nada, attention to one month ago, since all our attention then was on bombing those selfsame Iranians.

Now, I am no "Iran hand." I do not speak Persian, Farsi, or, truth be told, English. But I will venture that, as I look at the pictures and listen to the voices that manage to escape out of that country, our support -- or the UK's -- is the last thing the protesters want or need. Nevermind the obvious fact that in inserting our own goutish nose into their affairs will only give ammunition to the fundamentalists' charges that the students are, at best, dupes of the West and, at worst, provacateurs employed by the West (consider the response on the Right if the USSR had proclaimed its solidarity with the protesters in Chicago in 1968). The truth is they are protesting for a politician who is perhaps a moderate when it comes to the laws and values of the Islamic Republic. These protests are not an attempt to undo the revolution against the Shah or to overthrow the mullahs. They are protests to demand that their votes are counted fairly (something we ought to consider trying sometime). I don't know if the many women seen in the photos want to throw off the veil or simply to throw out a politician who seems to hate their sex, supporting legislation to permit a man to unilaterally announce his divorce and to outlaw alimony. I don't know if the students are marching for Whisky Sexy Democracy or simply to support a politician who might use a slightly less heavy hand and might have a slightly better clue about improving the Iranian economy.

I don't know. What I do know is, this ain't about us.

Whither the mullahs?

I know that this is about as insightful a comment as...well...anything Cokie Roberts has to say each Monday on NPR, but what the hell: This is great news.

TEHRAN (Reuters) – U.S.-born journalist Roxana Saberi is to be freed soon after an Iranian appeals court cut her eight-year jail sentence for spying to a suspended two-year term.

A judiciary source said Saberi, whose jailing on April 18 on charges of spying for the United States became a new source of tension between Tehran and Washington, had already been released and would be allowed to leave Iran.

But her father Reza said she had not yet walked free after more than three months in detention, saying he was waiting in front of Evin prison in northern Tehran.

"She will be freed today, hopefully. The papers are ready ... it is just a matter of time, a couple of hours," he told Reuters by telephone. "We are very happy."

This seems to be in response to the Obama administration's outreach and upcoming Iranian election, and what makes it remarkable is that there doesn't seem to have been any public attempt by hardliners to screw the deal.

It's a mad, mad, mad, mad world

Drum is right. Conservative nostalgia for the Cold War and the Soviet Union is sure a nice thing to see for us ol' commies. But what makes Iran, or it's "mullahs" apocalyptic?

Which again raises the issue of motivation. Ahmadinejad and his cohort are apocalyptic jihadi revolutionaries. Shouldn't what they believe be analyzed and factored in as we try to assess the threat that they pose? Or would that offend moderates too much? It seems awfully silly to compare them to the Soviet Union when, with the latter, we had a deterrence policy — Mutually Assured Destruction — that was explicitly based not only on the size of the enemy arsenal but on whether, given his motivations, he was likely to act. Obama appears content to calculate based on the size of the arsenal, period. That's not MAD, but it's madness.

Iran's war with Iraq was, in many respects, apocalyptic in the sense a huge number of Iraqi and Iranian men died. But, frankly, Iran had a huge population that their leaders felt were expendable. Iranian leaders. on the other hand, probably don't think their own power -- or their own lives -- are. Besides, they've got bigger problems than the existence of Israel: food prices.

Our preference

Ominous.

"I actually am very hopeful that we don't get into a position where we have to get into a conflict," Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Israel's Channel Ten television when asked if he might recommend that U.S. forces strike Iranian nuclear facilities preemptively.

All the signs and portents are there for a massive U.S. strike against Iran in the next few months, say, October.

UPDATE: And, like clockwork, the New York Times plays its accustomed role.

Good for Israel

The Times is concerned about Jewish voters' concerns over Obama because of Louis Farrakhan -- someone who's antisemitism Obama has famously "denounced and rejected."

Mr. Obama called Mr. Farrakhan an anti-Semite and denounced his support, but was pressed to go further by his rival, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, an experienced hand at Democratic politics who herself has been on the defensive with Jewish voters after an encounter in 2000 with Suha Arafat, the wife of the Palestinian leader.

Mr. Obama has also faced criticism over remarks he made about the suffering of Palestinians — remarks he says were incorrectly reported — and about who is advising him on foreign affairs. And he has had to beat back false tales, spread in viral e-mail messages, that he is a Muslim who attended a madrassa in Indonesia as a boy and was sworn into office on the Koran. In fact, he is a Christian who was sworn in on a Bible.

Winning the trust of Jewish Democratic voters is all the more difficult for Mr. Obama because of the tenuous relations between blacks and Jews. He addressed that very issue at the Cleveland debate when he used the answer to the Farrakhan question to call for a renewal of the ties between blacks and Jews.

But other issues he faces arise from his newness to national politics. While his positions hew to mainstream Democratic views, some critics have expressed concerns that they are not heartfelt.

“His record is relatively sparse, so I want to look at the totality of influences that might bear on Senator Obama,” said Ed Lasky, news editor of the online magazine, American Thinker, whose criticisms of Mr. Obama for aligning himself with allegedly anti-Israel advocates have been widely circulated among Jewish voters.

Apparently, the Times is not so concerned what Jewish voters might think of this prominent McCain backer -- one whom McCain refuses to "renounce."

He argues that a strike against Iran will cause Arab nations to unite under Russia's leadership, as outlined in chapters 38 and 39 of the Book of Ezekiel, leading to an “inferno [that] will explode across the Middle East, plunging the world toward Armageddon.” During his appearance on Hinn's program at the end of last March, for example, the host enthused, “We are living in the last days. These are the most exciting days in church history,” but then went on to add, “We are facing now [the] most dangerous moment for America.” At one point, Hinn clapped his hands in delight and shouted, “Yes! Glory!” and then urged his viewers to donate money faster because he is running out of time to preach the gospel.

That would be good for Isreal?

"Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb bomb Iran..."

The Filipino Monkey?

You never know what -- or who -- is going to cause World War III (or is it IV, or V?) these days.

Cheney don't care

War criminals.

It must be understood that since our intelligence agencies don't believe Iran has a nuclear weapons program, it also means that they don't know where such a program would be physically located if it did exist. This means that any desires of Dick Cheney and his people to bomb Iran simply involve... bombing the shit out of Iran.

Lying liars

So, the axis of incompetence has known for a year that the intelligence community judged "with high degree of confidence" that Iran had halted its nuclear activity in 2003.

It's ironic that while K-Lo explains the National Review's journamalism by citing “The Arab tendency to lie and exaggerate about enemies," Bush/Cheney/Rice were doing just that with Iran.

Worried?

This seems ominous, particularly if you happen to live anywhere near an Iranian government building.

LONDON, Nov. 6, 2007 (Thomson Financial delivered by Newstex) -- Gold hit its highest level since January 1980, as wider economic stress prompted safe haven buying, the dollar hit another record low against the euro and high oil prices stoked inflation jitters.

Those who decide why markets go up or down are saying it's more fallout from the subprime lending disaster, but nothing makes gold and oil look better than an imminent third front in the war against people whose language we don't understand.

What to do about the invevitable

If I were working at the cable news, I'd start working on those "War With Iran" graphics.

But his most serious comments were aimed squarely at Iran, which he accused of being “the world’s most active sponsor of state terrorism.” Experts at the conference said the vice president’s language, while stopping short of threatening military action, seemed designed to prepare Americans for what the administration might do if Iran did not cooperate. “The language on Iran is quite significant,” said Dennis Ross, who served as a Middle East envoy for both the first President Bush and in the Clinton administration, and is now a scholar at The Washington Institute. Referring to Mr. Cheney’s remark about “serious consequences,” Mr. Ross said, adding that it was a strong statement and that “does have implications.”

It's such a crazy plan, it might just fail.

Fighting below our weight?

Yes, Matt, this isn't just "inane," this is insane.

Our President: "So I've told people that if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon."

...This is inane. World War III? Against Iran? Really? Because Iran seems a lot like a medium-sized middle income country with few military capabilities rather than a near peer-competitor of the sort against which you might fight a world war.

Let's take stock. Six years and 30 some odd days ago, we were the world's lone superpower, a colossus, the world's policeman. But because 19 socially maladjusted, creepy assholes were able to hijack four planes and kill 3,000 people, we are now competing with Iran for world domination?

It has become clear what Bush's last remaining supporters (and hawks of both parties) believe: we should not so much promise we'll keep Americans safe as we should keep Americans in a constant state of fear.

Mission Accomplished

Again!

Weaklings

Exactly.

But I'd like to return to my earlier post on Ahmadinejad's attempt to visit Ground Zero and some of the responses to it. The most common argument advanced as to why we shouldn't allow Ahmadinejad at Ground Zero was, 'How could we allow him such a huge propaganda victory?' Either vis a vis his own people or on the world stage.

Many readers put this argument forward in good faith. So I don't want to disrespect that. But when did we become such moral weaklings? And how brittle do we think our national reputation is that it's going to be damaged by Ahmadinejad going down to Ground Zero and at worst spouting off about whatever he wants to spout off about. To put to succinctly, who cares? Why should we care what he says? If there are any propaganda victories to be had I think the spectacle of our national overreaction has provided him with quite a nice one. But again, who cares? Am I alone in thinking that our national greatness and stature is best displayed by our indifference to these things? Especially when free speech and letting even the obnoxious have their say are supposedly central to who we are? But again, indifference. Who cares what he says?