Since Iran, Hezbollah, and by many accounts, Syria and Iraq are deciding how to respond to Israel’s assassination of Hamas negotiator Ismail Hamiyeh in Iran, its assassination of Hezbollah commander Faoud Shakr, and air strikes on Syria, and events will play out soon enough, we’ll limit ourselves to a high level overview and some updates.
As we’ll explain, the risk of nuclear war is real and all too high.
The US and EU are trying to persuade Iran to engage in yet another symbolic retaliation of the sort it engaged in last April after Israel struck Iran via hitting its consular compound in Damascus and killed seven military advisers. Even though the Western media pooh poohed Iran’s response, which was to send a very large wave of slow-moving drones and then launch precision missile strikes, the missiles not only got through but made impressively accurate hits on a supposedly super highly protected Israel airbase. In other words, in textbook conditions, with both sides agreeing on the target, Iran demonstrate its ability to surmount Israel (and US and French, who were supporting this operation) defenses, and at very low cost compared to the Western defense ($80 million to $100 million versus $1.35 billion for Israel and an additional ~$1 billion for the US).
Yet Israel continues to escalate. What is going on here?
Consider these not-mutually-exclusive possibilities.
Israel has lost its mind. Norman Finkelstein for some time has, with supporting detail, depicting Israel as having gone crazy. Notice below how the interviewer keeps trying to shut him up by persistently interrupting:
the genocidal Israeli regime has been assassinating people in Iran for decades now openly, thinking that doing so will have zero consequences. But those times are gone. There will be consequences for what Norman Finkelstein rightly called the Israeli lunatic state pic.twitter.com/I3RzkRPeIB
— ☀️👀 (@zei_squirrel) July 31, 2024
Israel believes the US can effectively protect Israel if it gets in serious trouble. Lloyd Austin saying that the US will defend Israel if attacked and the US being able to successfully defend Israel are two entirely different matters. Yet Israel confidence seems undiminished despite the US and Western failure in the test last April.
Recall Israel’s vulnerability is well known to the IDF even if the political leadership tells itself otherwise. Scott Ritter, who worked in Israel for many years and has contacts in the region, has repeatedly described how Israel lost both of its last two war games against a Hezbollah-like opponent. You are not suppose to lose your own war games. And every time they simulated Iran joining the fray, per Ritter, “Israel was wiped off the map.” And those war games included US support.
Israel believes the Axis of Resistance will not meaningfully escalate. Chatham House provides a version of this view:
Events in the Middle East during July point to a striking paradox: Israel and the Iran-led ‘axis of resistance’ are inching closer to a catastrophic regional war – yet the war remains unlikely, because neither side wants it. Is that mutual apprehension enough to prevent the worst from happening?
Even the most seasoned observer of the region can’t answer that question with confidence. But one thing everyone can agree on is that Israel’s alleged killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Iran, and its assassination of Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in Lebanon do nothing to lower the temperature.
The big factor favoring Iran and Hezbollah continuing to exercise restraint is that both their economies are weak, Lebanon’s disastrously so and Iran’s only now reportedly being able to deliver some improvements in living standards.
A second factor, as Chatham House points out, is that neither Hamas nor Hezbollah were hurt much by these attacks. Both organizations have a lot of bench depth in their leadership ranks. And they no doubt also recognize that Israel reverting to assassinations is an admission of weakness, of being caught in a Gaza quagmire and unable to prevail in northern border area despite launching strikes at a far higher rate than Hezbollah.
A third factor is that Iran and Hezbollah have both been calculated and measured in their responses, so Israel and the US may tell themselves that after they cool off, they were revert to form. But that ignores the Nassim Nicholas Taleb warning, that the turkey has the most confidence the farmer is his friend the night before he is killed, because that is when he has the most observations of the farmer feeding him.
Iran and Hezbollah are signaling this time will be different, that they will escalate. But even so, how serious will the ratchet up be?
This Iranian commentator suggests that since Israel is already losing, Iran and the Axis of Resistance merely need to inflict more, but not radical, pain:
🇮🇷 Tehran's response to Haniyeh's killing will be harsher than the previous strike on Israel, Iranian analyst warns
Iran’s retaliation to Tel Aviv for killing Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran “will be more severe, more painful to the Israeli regime than what Tel Aviv… pic.twitter.com/qhfonTsyeW
— Sputnik (@SputnikInt) August 1, 2024
Some commentators have made much of Iran hoisting the red flag of revenge. However, the red flag by itself signifies retaliation, not necessarily escalation:
❗️🇮🇷⚔️🇮🇱 – A red flag was raised at the Jamkaran Mosque in Iran.
The last times this happened were on January 3, 2020, after the death of Qasem Soleimani, and on January 5, 2024, after the Kerman bombing.
Based on the nature of the various official statements, especially from… pic.twitter.com/jGpsZAbSi4
— 🔥🗞The Informant (@theinformant_x) July 31, 2024
Hezbollah is clear it will Do Something:
"It is now an open battle in all fronts.”
Iran-backed Hezbollah’s leader said the group’s battle against Israel has entered a new phase and vowed to respond following the killing of a top commander of the militant group in Beirut (translation via AP) https://t.co/erVyoGdMVV pic.twitter.com/6y2IjWKmSQ
— Bloomberg (@business) August 1, 2024
Arab News reports the British Foreign Secretary and Defense Secretary flying to Beirut to try to talk Hezbollah out of its resolve. Such a senior delegation is meant to impress, but I am not sure that will cut much ice.
And Israelis seem pretty worried:
🇮🇱ALERT BREAKING – People trying to flee Israel in a hurry, ahead of a major military escalation with Iran.. @lifepeptides
pic.twitter.com/sfIf0El6TU— Dr. Anastasia Maria Loupis (@DrLoupis) August 2, 2024
JUST IN
The Tel Aviv stock exchange is plummeting as Iran's retaliation is becoming certain
Let’s hope it’s permanent🤞🏼 pic.twitter.com/ofXvU6yypC
— ADAM (@AdameMedia) August 1, 2024
One consideration favoring a harsh Axis of Resistance response is active US duplicity. From The Cradle:
Senior White House Adviser Amos Hochstein led a “diplomatic disinformation campaign” and deceived Lebanese officials into thinking Israel would not attack Lebanon’s capital or its southern suburbs, Lebanese daily Al-Akhbar reported on 1 August.
Hochstein “informed officials in Beirut that the Israeli strike would be outside Beirut and the suburbs. He insisted on leaking this information under what he referred to as ‘the success of American diplomacy,’” according to the newspaper, calling the US official’s talks with the Lebanese state a “deception operation.”
The report adds Hochstein was trying to obtain a guarantee from Lebanese officials that Hezbollah would not respond to any potential Israeli attack in response to the strike on Majdal Shams last weekend, which Tel Aviv pinned on Hezbollah as a pretext for escalation.
Too many in Israel are itching to hit Hezbollah with a tactical nuke
Contrary to the idea above, that Israel is betting on the Axis of Resistance not moving much up the escalation ladder after the latest attacks is the idea that the Israel government is determined to gin up a wider conflict. From Middle East Eye:
In killing Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas’ political bureau in Tehran, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has sent the clearest message yet to Iran and the resistance movements that he wants a regional war.
It’s not pretty to see commentators pumping for “do dumb shit and see what happens” moves like this:
Prediction: Israel 🇮🇱 is waiting for Islamic Republic's 🇮🇷 “retaliation” to give it an excuse to destroy Iran's nuclear facilities in response.
Israel's long range bombing of Yemen (2200km distance) proved that it can easily destroy Iran's facilities too (1600km distance). pic.twitter.com/1Uye0M35Kn
— Dr. Eli David (@DrEliDavid) July 31, 2024
By all accounts, Iran has more than enough in the way of conventional missiles very well bunkered (and some claim set to launch on a dead hand basis) to destroy Israel. A strike like the one described above looks primed to trigger an Israel-devastating salvo.
It seems worryingly possible that if Hezbollah or a coordinated Axis of Resistance response were deemed by Israel to be excessive, Israel could respond by striking Hezbollah with a tactical nuke. Since Hezbollah’s operations are all in deep underground tunnels, that would result in disproportionate civilian deaths above ground.
Colonel Macgregor discusses this scenario in a disconcertingly calm manner below, starting at 16:15. He points out that Israel will face its toughest opponent ever in a full-bore conflict with Hezbollah and he therefore thinks Israel is prepared to make a strike with tactical nuclear bombs. He states matter-of-factly that a tactical nuclear weapon could be as small as 5 kilotons. That would be about 1/3 of the blast power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
Macgregor continues by observing that if Israel were to make a nuclear attack on Hezbollah, that Iran would enter with vehemence and has more than enough conventional weapons to overwhelm Israel defenses and inflict great damage on Israel. He anticipates that Israel would then launch a nuclear attack on Iran.
Macgregor also mentions briefly starting at 6:00 that due to the conflict, Israel’s population has largely left the northern and southern border areas, making it even more concentrated than usual. This creates an incentive for Israel to engage in a pre-emptive attack.
This scenario may seem a bit linear, when the possible outcomes are bushier. Nevertheless, it seems too likely that if Hezbollah and/or Iran engage in anything more that a proportional response (and per above it is Israel and the US that sit in judgement of where a response is excessive), Israel could use that at a pretext to launch a war in Lebanon, or simply skip “Go” and strike a part of Lebanon it contends to a prime target, as it it claims the strike would significantly damage the Hezbollah tunnel network. If that does happen, it seems far too likely that, as Macgregor anticipates, Iran launches no-holds-barred missile attacks and Israel retaliates with a major nuclear attack.
Now if Macgregor and yours truly can work out this risk, so can Iran.
So the next question is: what is Iran’s and the Axis of Resistance’s ability to destroy, in a massive, tightly time-compressed attack, to take out all or nearly all of Israel’s ability to launch a nuclear attack? Remember, nuclear bombs don’t get up and walk to their targets. They are sent by ground or submarine launched missiles or aircraft.
Israel has five nuclear subs and they are believed to carry 200 kiloton nuclear missiles. The innertubes also report that Israel has nuclear weapons buried deep enough to be able to make a second strike even in the face of a nuclear attack. So the Axis of Resistance looks unable to make a successful preemptive strike unless they were also able to interfere with targeting, and they don’t look able to do that. The only option along these lines that could work on the scale needed might be an electomagnetic pulse bomb. But there’s no evidence Iran has developed, let alone tested, one, and it would be too high stakes to try a maiden run now.
So it looks all too likely that Israel not only will use nuclear, but even worse may be trying to set up events to justify deploying them. As I often say, it would be better if I were wrong.
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There may be method to the madness, mentioned by a recent Prof Mearsheimer interview. A wider war gives Israel the cover it needs to ethnically cleanse Gaza and the West Bank. I believe Mearsheimer is correct. Trading the cost, carnage, chaos and fallout for finally getting rid of their Palestinian population is probably a net win for the present Israeli leadership and electorate.
Witness the army indulging itself in a orgy of genocide in Gaza while the north of Israel has been left to the mercies of Hezbollah rockets. Scale this up to war with Iran levels and the logical conclusion is that the entire Israeli population is expendable as long as the Palestinians are killed or driven out.
I think you missed the end of the post, which launched early.
Israel will lose a conventional war, and badly. That is what its own war games have repeatedly shown, even with US assistance. It is losing now at only a moderate level of intensity even with US assistance.
Israel will lose a wider war with Hezbollah alone unless it uses nukes. When that happens, it pretty much assures the destruction of Israel. Iran will come in with force, Israel will attack Iran with nukes, Iran’s remaining and large conventional dead hand strikes will destroy what is left of Israel.
There are wild card scenarios, like Pakistan being primed to hit Israel with a nuclear attack the moment it makes any nuclear strike. But it’s still the end of Israel.
YS: Israel will lose a wider war with Hezbollah alone unless it uses nukes. When that happens, it pretty much assures the destruction of Israel. Iran will come in with force, Israel will attack Iran with nukes, Iran’s remaining and large conventional dead hand strikes will destroy what is left of Israel.
All correct as far as the probable chain of events. Nor is it clear that if Washington roused itself, it could stop Israel at this point. God help us.
Ironically, one last small hope is that one driver of what’s brought matters to the precipice has been Netanyahu’s drive to survive — that is, to evade prosecution as soon as he’s out of office — and his drive to survive may impel him now to turn aside. But it’s unclear that he has scope to any longer, whatever he may imagine–events and greater forces have momentum.
Bibi doesn’t want only to survive, but to have his name just a peg below Messiah, the one that cleared the land of all Israel of its enemies…
Or which led its enemies to clear the land of all Israelis.
From what you know do you think the Israelis believe that using nuclear weapons in Lebanon will bring destruction? I think they believe that they can get away with it. We’ll see. I see the so-called axis of resistance as weak in the face of both the US and Israeli power. They are not, it appears, in a fanatical frame of mind like the Israelis and, it seems, the US.
Both Norman Finkelstein and now Paul Krugman think Israel is crazy. I am not psychic and I do not read the Israel press, and the Hebrew press in particularly sometimes reports on truths like war deaths that are quickly scrubbed by the censors.
However, my best guess, based on past behavior and not any special insight, is that Israel is operating from two fallacies: that the US can rescue them from whatever military trouble they get in and the Taleb turkey fallacy, that because the Axis of Resistance has only at most mildly and gradually escalated, they won’t make any big retaliatory moves.
I think all bets are off if Israel uses tactical nukes on Hezbollah. And it looks too tempting if they escalate with Hezbollah and then are visibly losing.
https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/24/the-crisis-of-zionism/
April 24, 2012
The Crisis of Zionism
By Paul Krugman
Something I’ve been meaning to do — and still don’t have the time to do properly — is say something about Peter Beinart’s brave book “The Crisis of Zionism.”
The truth is that like many liberal American Jews — and most American Jews are still liberal — I basically avoid thinking about where Israel is going. It seems obvious from here that the narrow-minded policies of the current government are basically a gradual, long-run form of national suicide — and that’s bad for Jews everywhere, not to mention the world….
How would the disappearance of “israel” be bad for the world? Ever since its illegal creation the country has brought nothing but death and destruction to the region and to the world.
So, please explain what you mean.
that because the Axis of Resistance has only at most mildly and gradually escalated, they won’t make any big retaliatory moves.
I think this is accurate. The Israelis see this as weakness in the same way that the West sees Russia’s carefully calibrated escalation as weakness.
It’s also probably true that the Axis has digested this and is now going to look to escalate in a way that causes genuine harm to Israel, because Israel isn’t getting the message, so to speak.
Israel probably thought, “yeah sure, you demonstrated back in April that you can reach out and hurt us if you really wanted to do so, but you won’t because we’ve got 1) nukes and 2) we’ve got USA”. They’ve been waving around 2) for all to see, politically, in case the Axis thinks our government might be hesitating.
I think the right amount of escalation is one that gets the as much of the civilian population of Israel fleeing to the airports, without triggering an immediate war.
Israelis fleeing the country weakens Israel for the short and long term. If Israelis are already leaving, the Axis might wait for a little while and let them flee some more before responding. They might even take some time and hype up the response a little more, too, to help cajole Israelis to leave.
This fits into how the Resistance operates…they want to keep improving their strategic position vis-a-vis Israel, with as little risk as possible.
Don’t be surprised if the Houthis hit some more cities to help get the Israeli people running a little harder.
The pieds-noirs “won” the Algerian War. When their methods of ethnic cleansing, torture, and extrajudicial killing became apparent to voters in metropolitan France, they were abandoned politically and the army that propped-up their society was withdrawn. During the course of 1962 ninety percent of them fled the former colony.
Settler-colonialism leads to a special kind of madness. Israel is a de-facto U.S. colony. If the propaganda and cover-ups were to be exposed and the U.S. withdraw its military support, Israel would collapse just like French Algeria did in 1962.
I think that analogy fits.
It would be a wonder to see all those empty luxury apartments in NYC get filled up in a hurry! There’s probably quite a few absentee owners living in Israel.
It does not quite fit. The Europeans in Algeria represented about 10% of the population; 90% were Arabs/Berbers. Left to themselves, settlers did not have a chance demographically.
As another example, white South Africans attempted to ensure their supremacy without a supporting mainland: they represented about 10% of the South African population — and lost too.
In Rhodesia, whites amounted to 6.5% of the population — and, alone, lost even faster.
In the whole of Palestine and Israel, the ratio is about 50% Jews 50% Arabs of Muslim/Druze/Christian faith. Purely on numbers, it is a toss up. Which partly explains why Israelis are so rabidly ferocious — they believe that a supreme exertion in genocidal cruelty will ensure the scales tip in their favour.
I agree that this is the settlers’ explicit calculation. Choosing only to include the 1948 borders and the Occupied Territories creates a false ratio that makes great Zionist propaganda and false hope that the settlers can bully their way to peace by forcing half the population onto ten percent of the land.
The Palestine Central Bureau of Statistics estimates about 14.3M Palestinians in the diaspora, including the stated 5 million in the Occupied Territories and 2.5M in 1948 Israel.
However the region is also made up of 22.M Syrians, 11.3M Jordanians, and 5.5M Lebanese.
7.2M Jewish settlers hugging the coast looks a lot more like 1962 Algeria against a regional population of 50M.
The pieds-noirs per se were not involved in ethnic cleansing, torture, and extrajudicial killing during the war of independence.
Those activities were carried out by the French army, so any pied-noir participation was as collaboration with or as part of the colonizers’ army.
I vote for the wáter works. Again, what goes around comes around.
Looks like the “Samsonite” option is in play. Does BiBi put a stop to the fleeing? Also, I often wonder and suspect and certainly HOPE that Israel’s nukes need a USA key/code too.
Since you bring up Scott Ritter it’s also worth noting what he said with NIMA…. no way USA backs Israel. Not a chance. I agree.
Israel is cooked. When the DUST settles can you imagine what we will all see ? Complete destruction and how many more thousands dead? 10’s? 100’s?
I have been thinking about Israeli nukes in Lebanon.
To begin Hezbollah has dug in. Most of its assets are dispersed all over and deep, some hardened, but piled sand is good and does not transmit shock from a weapons explosion that well.
An analogy is the US’ Minuteman ICBM force: it is dug in, dispersed from Minnesota through Montana and Wyoming. It is in hardened silos well below surface. To knock out a silo requires a very big blast (several hundred kilotons very close.
Hezbollah is similarly dug in and dispersed!
For Israel my question is: how many “warheads/bombs” are encased in hard shells to dig in several dozen meters to take out a target they need to know where and get pretty close! How big the kilotons?
I doubt Israel has the number of warheads to get big enough explosions, close enough, deep enough. (3d circular error).
That said the reason humans can live near ground zero at Hiroshima and Nagasaki is the two bombs were air bursts!
For Israel to take out any amount of Hezbollah they would use so many sub surface bursts that radioactive dust would poison immense areas down (to the east) wind.
IOW the “Samson response” so lightly discussed is the end of human use of several countries loaded with oil platforms down wind through the Persian Gulf.
The two recent assassination are immensely evil, Hezbollah and the Ayatollah should say “we won’t take your bait”, evil ones!
That’s one reason. Another is the relatively small explosive force of the weapons (16 and 21 kt), which can be topped easily.
And then japan even in 45 was a functioning state, able to clean up afterwards. That will most likely not be true for libanon.
Both nagasaki and hiroshima are coastal cities in valleys, meaning a lot of polluted air and earth went into the sea. That’s also not true for libanon.
Don’t interpolate anything from these two WWII nuclear bombings. Things will be different the next time.
You might be right after all. However you seem to forget the other international actors like Russia, China, India and Pakistan. Times are different from Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear attacks. Nobody is going to get away with it, since a nuclear attack sets a precedent. God help Israelis being so gung ho about going after hapless Gazans, West Bank Palestinians and being so sure of themselves with these fancy ideas. I think this scheme of nuclear attacks on Lebanon and Iran is a death warrant for Israeli settler state. I pray saner minds will prevail.
My argument is that Israel would be prepared to lose the war if it nevertheless resulted in ethnically cleansing Greater Israel (or what’s left of it) of most or all Palestinians. So long as territorial losses were minimal, and Jerusalem at least could be pogromed clean, I believe the present Israeli government would be prepared to trade the rest of the country being smashed asunder under rocket fire. The logic of their position demands it.
Despite Hezbollah’s supremacy in newer drone tech, I don’t believe they have the capability to retake land in Galilee. The United States will enter a ground war if that happens and they will be facing most or all of what is left of the US armed forces if they try. So I think Israel is making the bet that all the Axis can do is launch rockets/artillery/etc, which will cause massive damage but not result in lost territory. But the damage will give cover to Militias in the West Bank to launch a Rwanda-scale ethnic cleansing campaign. Palestinians will be driven into Jordan, where perhaps UN troops will be deployed un-vetoed to contain the fallout.
There is no other strategy or policy on the western side beyond the will of the Israelis, and their highest will is to rid themselves of Palestinians. All other concerns are secondary: Ukraine, oil, normalization, stability, US finances or military readiness, you name it it’s way down the list. The war and Israeli/US policy will proceed in that direction. I think that’s the method behind the “madness”.
Scott Ritter, who knows the IDF, disagrees with you. He thinks they are third rate and are optimized for breaking the arms of and shooting Palestinian teenagers.
Hezbollah has gotten a lot of battle experience in Syria. They have a force they can deploy estimated at 100,000. They would be operating in a small area and have the advantage of being able to use their tunnel network, which extends into Israel, which gives them a form of fortifications of the box. He says if Israel tries to invade Lebanon, Hezbollah will not make the mistake it made in 2006, of letting the war take place in Lebanon. They would quickly and successfully push all the way to the Galilee.
Scott is wrong. Hezbollah isn’t going to abandon its greatest military asset, its fortifications in Southern Lebanon, in order to fight the IDF in Israel.
Similarly, and for the same reasons, Hamas isn’t going to abandon its tunnels and attack the IDF on open ground. Same as it does with Hezbollah, it negates Hamas’ greatest strength. It’s also suicidal.
Hezbollah is an infantry force. It has no armor, no helicopters and no Air Force. Using an infantry force alone, no matter how well trained and experienced, to invade a nation that has armor, artillery and an Air Force is suicidal.
I don’t know the basis for Scott’s belief that Hezbollah will successfully invade Israel from the north, but it makes no sense.
Hezbollah has tunnels that extend into Israel, among other things.
This seems to assume US ground forces are a super formidable adversary – which they decidedly are not. Western military power is based on air superiority and attacking civilians, which in a attritional situation like this isn’t going to succeed.
The Settler militia in the West Bank cannot overpower 3 million Palestinians. And at that point, the Palestinian security forces will start intervening. And likely at that point, Israel will stop receiving military support (ammunition and weapons and spares) from the west…
What concerns me is that Israel does not seem to be a rational actor at all in this, which is the ultimate fear when it comes to nuclear weapons, besides the usual miscalculation that a bird is really an ICBM or whatever. And liberals thought Trump was nuts and would just lob nukes around for fun… but are all-in on Israel.
If I understand Rashid Khalidi correctly Hezbollah´s capabilities are mainly tied to defending Iran. Unless Iran is harmed they are supposed to lie low. None of the UN-SC members has an interest in an escalation of that scale. Ritter is okay militarily but his scenarios are often pieces of doom on a rather speculative basis.
Huh? Hezbollah is not defending Iran but Lebanon.
Yes. They have an Iranian patron, they coordinate the attacks with Iran, Iran arms them as a deterrent for their own sake but as a militay body they of course function as Lebanon´s shield/sword. Obviously complicated network which would make a major war only the result of a big misunderstanding, Bibi going suicidal or major coordination and planning by an entire set of states which would mean those states and their governments willingly walk into WWIII.
Iran arms Hezbollah, but that does not mean that Hezbollah has no autonomy. Iran also arms the Houthis, who have shown they have a high degree of autonomy.
You are suggesting a centralized structure controlled by Iran, which is NOT the way it is.
Typo, I think you meant Norman.
Given the context, Normal works fine.
I was just glad the world had avoided nuclear war long enough for you to provide this post this morning.
The thing about supposed israeli insanity is that it actually benefits Netanyahu to spread hatred and misunderstandings – if it’s true that he faces prison once the war is over, he has every personal incentive to escalate till israel wins or dies. Collective insanity due to personal selfishness by the topmost leaders which the population is unable to hold accountable.
Also, your track record is frighteningly good when you say you hope you’re wrong.
Thanks for the update.
It’s worth recalling that President Richard Nixon felt there was utility in having other nations believe that he was slightly crazy. Is Netanyahu playing that game? As I see it, his actions suggest that he is more likely than not out of his mind.
The BBC HARDtalk interviewer is using a questioning style that is very popular there. They arrange to interview a guest that dissents from the orthodox/BBC narrative and do this. Paxman was an early exemplar (perhaps the OG, idk). Mehdi Hasan is a well-known practitioner. While it looks a lot different from what Americans are used to, it doesn’t in itself mean all that much. The difference is that in American MSM TV news, Norm wouldn’t be invited. One method actively tells the audience what opinions to discount and the other omits them.
Paxman was the OG. He’s most famous for this more reasonable browbeating interview with Michael Howard https://youtu.be/pyqnu6ywhR4?si=oPgyl48WA3bjJDIx
Since then a load of BBC journos (especially Newsnight types) have been doing inferior imitations
I watched that Paxman interview live. Twas the most heart-warming evisceration of a Tory scumbag of my life and it haunted him forever (haunt, geddit? I’ll get me coat).
Twas ironic that that ghoul Ann Widdicombe used it to torpedo him later by saying he had “something of the night about him”. Well I guess she’d know (allegedly).
Journos these days should keep repeating the question until the timeslot runs out then say “well there we have it, the politician X refused to answer the question.” The BBC is rubbish at it these days and the US media stopped doing it before I was born.
I’m in favor of combative journalism. But when the Pax style is deployed simply as a style for style’s sake and for ratings, as in this example with Norm, it’s annoying. But I’ll take that over the American technique of suppressing such dissent. Norm managed to say his bit on HARDtalk and some in the audience will have heard it. What really gets me is Mehdi, who combines extreme Pax with cleverly constructed disingenuousness. His hatchet job on Taibbi was “You made two errors therefore nothing you write can be trusted. Thank you and goodbye.”
Similar to others feel the Howard interview was a nadir not a peak, it’s ‘winning’ in terms of Oxbridge-style debating points where the aim is to defeat your opponent, but putting a minister in a position where they are issuing repeated denials, is just empty theatrics, where the interview is absconding their duties as an interviewer to tease out the truth and inform the audience in order to rhetorically virtue signal, it’s the dead end of the antagonistic style, “why is this lying B****** lying to me” mentality (which though flawed was preferably to what followed namely Laura Kuenssberg flirting with Boris Johnson), all theatric no substance, a failure of communication being held up as some kind of ethical victory. You want a real masterclass I give you Gay Byrne vs Pádraig Flynn.
I get where you’re coming from. It is indeed arguable that Paxman went too far. However, I would argue that he may have been right for the wrong reason: Howard was objectively an inffective odious Tory. Paxman, in an ideal world, would have used alternative methods to show this. But unfortunately nuance was lost in the early 1990s. The makers of “Spitting Image” got thoroughly annoyed when their caricature of Thatcher as a horrid dictator only served to make her more popular and increase her election victories.
Thus Paxman just went for the jugular. It was newsworthy because nobody had had the guts to do it before. Howard deserved a thorough dressing down but we can probably agree that “doing it that way” was not ideal, but it was certainly novel and therefore newsworthy.
I’m not convinced this is worse than 73 or the 6 day war, no conventional forces have been readied in neighboring countries as far as I know, and they didn’t lob nukes even back then.
Macgregors record is…spotty at best on predicting outcomes.
I get they are nuts but nemesis never arrives
Huh? Macgregor has had the most accurate take on Ukraine war dead than any other source, by virtue of having intel from Pentagon and European military contacts. He’s also provided credible figures on the current population of Ukraine from those sources.
You may not have listened carefully when Macgregor has teased out scenarios. He have been very clear that the most the West could do in Ukraine was a coalition of the willing of >100,000 ground troops, with the US and Poland providing about 70,000 and Romania and the UK helping to fill out the total. He was clear that would be such a clearly inadequate force that would probably not get done. So pray tell, you are saying he had that wrong? He has also refrained from offering timetables about when the Ukraine war would end.
Similarly, he described long form how practically useless the deployment of the 101st Airborne to Moldova was.
Macgregor has also provided important tidbits that I have not gotten anywhere, like Hungary refusing to allow troop transit, which would make any NATO or coalition of the chumps operation out of Moldova incredibly difficult.
Where he is wrong is on economics but that’s not his beat and I don’t cite him on that.
I guess I was only referring to his continuous predictions about Ukraine collapsing militarily, I seem to remember he kept insisting the war was almost over from week 2 onwards
I do not recall Macgregor saying that. Ritter did.
There were also some prominent, current US military officials who were saying the same thing then.
Even then, I believe Ritter (generally) uses ‘over’ in the sense of inevitability… once the floodgates open, the result is foregone. His initial timescales on Ukraine assumed Russian blitzkrieg.
MacGregor has been consistently on the money and he is clear – Netanyahu’s aim is to create Greater Israel. That’s what he wants for his legacy and why the slaughter in Gaza is quite deliberate. He believes dragging the USA in is the best way to achieve Greater Israel. The USA MAY get involved IF it looks like Israel is losing in order to stop him using nukes because if this happens it will open Pandora’s Box. Israel may have neutron bombs…this has been hinted at by Scott Ritter. On the other hand it is possible (according to some Israeli sources) that killing Haniyeh may restore Netanyahu’s political reputation and allow the IDF to declare victory and pull out of Gaza where they have been severely mauled. The videos on Electronic Intifada show that resistance fighters are very accomplished. They are destroying a substantial number of IDF troops and machines. My own feeling is that Netanyahu is going for broke. He cares more for Greater Israel than he does his own future.
Massing forces is a high risk event in an environment with real time surveillance and precision guided weapons. I think this is obvious to everyone except maybe the US.
I’m not convinced this is worse than 73 or the 6 day war
Respectfully, I think you genuinely don’t understand the strategic situation. That was 50 years ago. Things have changed. These aren’t even the same players. Back then, it was Egypt, Jordan and Syria. None of those are at the center of the current conflict.
Hezbollah’s got better equipped and better trained fighters and fortifications than anything the Arab countries had in 1967 or 1973.
That is a very valid point, but also doesn’t that mean nukes are less relevant since massed forces seem to be a thing of the past?
I respectfully disagree.
If one uses ground bursts (as opposed to the usually assumed air bursts) the effect radius is smaller, but the local contamination makes a stationing of troops unfeasible, for a long while. A scorched earth policy in southern Lebanon does not require many nukes, and may be viewed as a long term solution to threats from the north.
Also it sends a pretty strong message to everyone involved about further escalation options.
So i would agree with Yyes that the military circumstances today are very different from thoe decades ago.
A lot has changed. Iran’s April demonstration of a fraction of its capabilities was impressive. Operation Prosperity Guardian is a bust. Ansar Allah can hit the Med. There appears to be little doubt about Hizbollah’s distributed and well bunkered stock of arms and they demonstrated their targeting surveillances in a recent video.
Israel cannot achieve the “Total Victory” that the politicians in charge have promised the voters and that the voters want more and more (and that the young want even more than the old – let that sink in). So those politicians cannot change course and seek a path to peace. Nor can they let things ride since the current predicament is untenable: they are losing economical, militarily, diplomatically, and in Western public opinion.
As Seyed Mohammad Marandi explained to Sputnik (tweet above) only the Americans can stop Israel but American leadership is strikingly absent this week. Biden is probably incapacitated and/or disinterested. And last week the US Congress embarrassed the entire nation and by extension its vassals by giving a radical show of support to Netanyahu and Israel in exchange for bribes.
So Israel is in a corner. Can’t back down and nobody is going to make them. Can’t maintain the status quo because it’s unstable. They have nukes and may believe they provide deterrence. Maybe Israel has its mind.
Even relatively sane countries like Germany allow crazy stuff, like letting the Americans destroy their energy infrastructure and put new strategic missile systems on their land.
I am not feeling comfortable this morning.
Oups. I missed a “lost”
How would you see them if they are positioned underground? Nobody saw Hamas forces so far, but the game of wacamole is still playing all over Gaza. They don’t have tanks and planes, but anti-tank and AA defense systems.
if there was an adult in DC, the US would find a sympathetic Israeli army commander and discreetly announce support for an anti-Bibi coup.
Very “Guns of August” feel. sleepwalking into the abyss with a lame duck White House.
“if there was an adult in DC, the US would find a sympathetic Israeli army commander and discreetly announce support for an anti-Bibi coup.”
Honestly, the Biden admin tried to do this, already, with Bennie Gantz earlier this year. Team Dem rolled out a whole barrage of “Netanyahu must go” talking points, Chuck Schumer said he had to go. They tried to charm Bennie Gantz as a more reasonable alternative. The understanding from the Gantz visit was that he pretty much told US officials, “If I were in charge, I’d be doing the same thing” and from there, the whole idea fizzled out. Netanyahu launched a big rhetorical offensive saying, “I’m not going to let officials in DC boss me around, I’m going to do what it takes to defend Israel.” and his polls went up in Israel.
We can’t regime change Israel. We’ve probably already given it our best shot.
We could send our secret service to protect the Israeli leadership.
I like that idea. A decapitation strike by Hezbulah (what goes around comes around) may have mérit.
Maybe we can deport a few school shooters over there, too? We’ve got plenty to spare and we produce them in droves!
I am semi- serious about decapitation. It is not like “Israel” is a united country.
I wondered about that the other day, in a different thread. There are potentially interesting consequences to someone taking out Netanyahu, as, for various reasons, he is at the lynchpin of Israeli politics: for his current coalition partners, he is their only ticket to power (yes, the pro-settler loonies may be threatening to pull their support from the cabinet, but they are pariah that other Israeli politicians wouldn’t want to coalesce with); for his enemies, he’s a convenient scapegoat for projecting their own genocidal fantasies on without having to come up with any plan of their own–I suspect, possibly, most Jewish Israelis still in Israel now are basically genocidal, but they can point to Netanyahu and just blame him for all things that are wrong, and more important, that’s even more true with Jewish populations in the West and their Goyim allies who still hold on to the fantasy of an idealized Israel that never was and think that, without Netanyahu, everything would somehow magically become wonderful. If Netanyahu goes, they’ll have to either back down (unlikely) or drop the pretense (which will have consequences)–or, if they were just delusional, wake up and deal with reality in some fashion (or have everything crumble while they waddle in delusional stupor). In other words, for what it is worth, Netanyahu is the only one that can pass as anything of a real leader with a “workable” agenda (with a lot of stretching of the definition involved) in the West today (Zelensky might want to take that role, but the guy is a deluded idiot, while Netanyahu, though he may be evil, is at least smart.) Without Netanyahu, all of the West will fall into a state of confusion without a sense of direction, at least as far as Middle East goes.
I’ve been skeptical of the fairly common suggestions that this is all about Netanyahu but you seem to be offering a different angle to it. Lemmy check I get it right. It seems you’re saying he’s the only Israeli who can get the West to indulge the current level of crazy?
I am thinking about the response. It might leave them paralysed due to infighting long enough to turn off the wáter and lights in the west bank and begin the ethnic cleansing there.
Perhaps a little bit more than that: he is the only one who seems to be able to direct that madness into something resembling a real goal, however evil it is, ie he can manipulate the mad “productively,” without falling to madness (or, at least, the delusions emanating therefrom) Everyone else is just mad, without a clear sense of direction, I think.
One has to wonder how many of those Russian emigres are FSB agents. I doubt we are the only people who have agents there, and a clean sweep of the Israeli war cabinet would benefit them every bit as much as it would us at this point.
Indeed. And perhaps get a few files leaked in the process … (Russian interference for Trump has been debunked multiple ways, but not the Israeli interference that James Bamford reported…)
A few months ago, I thought a possible escape for the US might be to trigger some kind of “color revolution” in Israel, through NGOs and the media. Then install a pliant government and institute reforms to turn the situation around.
I no longer know if there is the will or the constituency in the US for anything remotely like that. Whatever dovish sentiments are left in the donor class or jewish community that would favor a harder line on Israel in general, they’re not translating into policy or frankly even into msm newspaper coverage. The seal-clapping at Netenyahu’s address in congress has convinced me that the US will back this catastrophe to the end, no matter the cost. Short of a political revolution in Washington (the likes of Magas, wokes, and groypers certainly do not count) it will remain a supergiant trapped in the Israel black hole.
they’re not translating into policy or frankly even into msm newspaper coverage. The seal-clapping at Netenyahu’s address in congress has convinced me that the US will back this catastrophe to the end, Jeffrey Epstein’s legacy, no? Good to remember House Republican Claims Every GOP Colleague Has an ‘AIPAC Babysitter’ Pressuring Them to Cast Pro-Israel Votes, from June 7 and covered on NC thereabouts.
the one positive is that the Iranian Establishment remembers the 80’s Iran-Iraq War. They are not itching even for a “modest” war. So the likeliest path is the incremental slow boil from Hezbollah
That’s been true the whole time. The players involved misunderstand each other. The problem is that Hezbollah and Iran have been showing restraint to avoid war, because they understand that war is bad and destructive. But, in classic bully-style, Israel sees ‘restraint’ as weakness: “These guys aren’t up for a real fight because they know we’d wreck them!”
Honestly, it looks like Israel has a similar flaw as the rest of the west where the elites shovel out lots of bullshit propaganda, and it ends up actually taking root among the population and, more importantly, among important officials and power brokers within the government.
By comparison, Russiagate genuinely took hold within parts of the ‘deep state’ of the US government. I think it’s entirely plausible that Israeli propaganda of “we’re the toughest in the region and no one around wants to tangle with us” has also taken hold of key parts of the Israeli government (not the IDF, of course, since it’s become clear that they seem to know better).
But, with such profound divisions in Israeli society, can the IDF continue to act as a restraining force? And yes, consider the insanity of the idea that IDF is a RESTRAINING force on a maniacal Israeli society, as Finkelstein correctly points out.
>>>> I think it’s entirely plausible that Israeli propaganda of “we’re the toughest in the region and no one around wants to tangle with us” has also taken hold of key parts of the Israeli government
One of my personal “iron laws of institutions” from observation…
an institution “distills” its personality to an extreme (via promotion, mentoring, self-selection, survivorship bias, etc.)…..so eventually it will either wind up being very civil, cordial or back-stabbing, ruthless.
Much like the sociology of Polynesian cultures….each island tended to find one “trait”/”high status commodity” and extreme-ize it. (bird feathers, shells, rocks, etc)
Robert Fisk used to contrast modern Western leadership to their WW2-era predecessors in terms of combat experience. He posited that, in the 40s, many leaders had first-hand experience with war being hell, and so wouldve rather avoided it, or at least knew how to plan for it. Incidentally, reading biographies of Churchill doesn’t leave one with the sense that wartime trauma universally grants reasonableness. The larger point, which applies here, is that gruesome, personal trauma and suffering real hardships make war real to many of the older generation in Iran and in Lebanon in a way which air-war fighting, urban Israelies can’t imagine, which effects how it is thought of and planned for. Recall also how the US, having not been attacked beyond its colonies since 1812, spasmed with bloody rage for 20 years after 9/11/01. These I dispensable nations act in the same way as a teenager who felt invulnerable until he or she experienced his or her real vulnerability; they are now acting out of a sense that their entitlement to consequence-free life has been offended.
If being hopeful, we can remember Nixon promoting the idea that he/the US were totally mad as a deterrent factor. If being less hopeful, we’d also remember that he pushed for nuking Vietnam. Because the Israeli leaders have at least made us think they’re completely nuts, with ample evidence, perhaps a safer method of retaliation than something bright and kinetic would be in order, like counter-assassination without taking credit.
Recall also how the US, having not been attacked beyond its colonies since 1812…
Point taken, but let’s be honest. It was the US that did the attacking in 1812.
Recall also how the US, having not been attacked beyond its colonies since 1812….
Well, the Japanese invaded some of the US Western Aleutians in WWII.
I have read that many of the “Hilltop Settlerists” have infiltrated the IDF over the last some years. They may have infiltrated it to the point of taking over some of the chains of command within it.
If Israeli society divides to the point of open civil war, the IDF will divide into opposing factions, each faction supporting its own side of the civil war.
That’s just a feeling, of course.
I have another feeling. The Iran/Hezbollah/Hamas group will keep its/ their retaliation just restrained enough so as to keep the war going at the current level. The AofR approach is to keep attriting and degrading Israel from without in order to keep advancing Israel’s delamination from within. The only member of the AofR side which might do something overly risky would be the Houthis, who might just want to be famous. I have no way of knowing whether the IranGov is concerned about that or not.
Craig Murray is usually more measured in his analysis than this:
https://consortiumnews.com/2024/08/02/craig-murray-the-israeli-nihilist-state/
Not a good sign, I think.
Thx for link, I have great respect for Craig Murray.
Reading Murray’s Blog, it seems like he has become more radical recently. Where he once would have spoken of Israeli actions in Gaza as “ethnic cleansing”, he is now more likely to call it “genocide”; and where he previously spoke of the Russian “invasion” of Ukraine, he now views it as a [necessary/reasonable?] response to US/NATO aggression. In both cases, the policies, actions, and duplicity of British governments seem to have played a big part in his radicalization.
The information that has come up since 2023 increasingly has confirmed those more understanding towards Russia (negotiations from day 1 of the attack and so on.) And in Gaza the situation has in fact become worse by the hour after Oct.
In winter when Murray´s shift on Ukraine occured in his assessments (I personally never understood why it took so long for him to see it) he in fact wrote a post explaining what you point out. He argues that with the “West” (i.e. people and personnel he knows one way or the other I guess) abandoning Gaza in such criminal way and furthermore actively supporting mass murder he came to the conclusion that the same West was also dishonest with everything it did regarding Ukraine. Which probably wiped away his doubts about those events. He probably just lost the last remnants of his illusions. And I don´t think anyone could have foretold with certainty that Berlin, Paris, Brussels, London etc. would all in lockstep behave in such a disgusting way. Lying, undermining and denouncing even the ICJ, ICC, the UN, and UNRWA. This is indeed unprecedented.
p.s. Murray´s change of heart on the UKR issue was one of the most remarkable things I have encountered in this area of commentary and activism in recent years. He corrected his view and apologized for it and gave a reasonable explanation.
I don´t know when and where it was the last time that a “former British Ambassador” (ffs) would publicly correct himself?! And apologize. (There was no reason for an apology of course.)
Outstanding.
They should have elected him into Parliament for this alone.
I don’t agree about Murray. I think he’s often at least half way to Caitlin Johnstone and Chris Hedges levels of sermonizing. I love them all for it. Analysis is important but so is this kind of declarative moralizing that emboldens.
Yes and his appraisal of the Israeli presentation at International Court of Justice and Netanyahu’s Congress speech was not positive.
The Presence of Evil.
A tactical nuclear bomb is still a nuclear bomb. Once used, all bets are off and the rubicon is crossed. Battle lines are drawn and global alliances are crystallized.
What have China and Russia been saying? What are their red lines? I can’t get past the offerings of the media-fed spoonfuls of Kamala v Trump and jingoistic Olympic gruel on the few news-sites I regularly visit.
I hope that along with the negotiations with Russia that resulted in a prisoner swap, we discussed with Russia the possibility of the Israelis going nuclear. It is easy to imagine insane Israel doing that. We need to absolutely not have that blow up into a global nuclear war. Do we have such sane individuals in the US government?
I can only hope there are voices of reason in the national command apparatus and the diplomatic corps.
I don’t think people voted for “tactical nukes are okay”
It was a straight CIA/FSB negotiation. The only sane and rational voice in the USA is Burns. The USA is nervous – BUT nuclear sabre rattling may work for Israel. At any rate, if I was in Tehran I wouldn’t risk escalation. In a few more years IF the US/UK are knocked back in Ukraine things will become a lot more favourable. Let’s be clear about this – Ukraine and Israel are part of the same battle. The need to bring an end to US unipolarity. Netanyahu know this and this may be another reason for him playing so ruthlessly for such high stakes now.
Tactical Nuke will really mess up the Trump Kushner beachfront development plans.
Gaza is about as far as you can get from the Lebanese front. It’ll increase the value since they’re not making more non radioactive land.
Ha! And here I thought closies only counted in Horse-shoes and Hand-grenades.
I had no idea a nuke could be anti-septically clean and that the ground would be habitable right away. Might be a cost- effective way to redevelop urban blight areas in the US?
Then the stockpile gets delpeted, MIC gets to build and sell more arms. Verrrrry S L I C C
I wouldn’t put it beneath our billionaire overlords. Make most of the country unliveable for some reason or another to improve the price of property under their control.
I think the Overlords are counting on global warming, carefully turning pandemics of opportunity into permademics of desire on their part, etc. etc. to achieve the control and depopulation they seek. Operation Long Jackpot, if you will.
They wouldn’t have as much control over a runaway nukewar process. Only the Rapturanians and the Armageddonites actively want to create a runaway nukewar process, so that Jesus can return to Earth to establish His Thousand Year Kingdom of Heavenly Righteousness . . . in Fulfillment of Prophecy.
I believe that a decade or two ago, the USAF was chock-full of Rapturanians. But I’ve been out of touch, maybe things are different now.
How far did radioactive fallout drift from the Chernobyl accident? And in how many different directions at different times?
Fallout from Chernobyl was detected early on in Sweden, leading to bans on berries and wild meat.
The prevailing wind direction is west to east. Only in about one day in ten thousand would dust blow from Ukraine and rain down over Sweden the way it did that day.
If the Israeli government thinks it is safe for them to drop nuclear bombs in Libanon they are out of their minds.
Chernobyl is not comparable to a nuclear detonation. It was a meltdown, so an ongoing hot site emitting extremely high amounts of radiation until it was sealed. There was an explosion on April 26 and fires until May 4, so radioactive contaminants were spreading the entire time, and not just as a result of the blowup. There was also fantastically more radioactive material involved that you could evah get in a bomb.
See here for a reminder.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster
I am NOT trying to say fallout is benign.
However, I am saying the falloutfor a tactical nuke on the small end of the spectrum may be/probably is more contained than most readers are assuming….which means Israel can deploy them in Lebanon, away from the border….say in Beirut.
~180km is not that far. It’s about a long day’s bicycle ride or maybe a two hour drive in good conditions.
I also wonder about Russia and China’s options. Russia? What immediately comes to mind is further development of Syrian and Iranian air defenses. Their better missiles are already installed in both areas, and I believe Russian pilots are flying in Syria. No idea about Iran.
Yves covered a lot of ground well, but I think if we add Sino-Russian forces, serving both as real defense assets and as trip wires, Israeli use of nukes becomes more complicated for them.
And what if Iran doesn’t take the military escalation bait and instead chooses to frighten oil markets? The Israelis would gain another layer or two of welthistorische Scheisse on their face if they use nukes and their opponents respond with relatively humane economic disruption that happens to tank Dem electoral prospects.
Yes, a 5 kT nuke is equivalent in explosive power to 2200 5000 lb bombs, all dropped on one spot.
But a 5 kT nuke generates all kinds of radioactive fallout whereas 2200 5000 lb bombs generate no nuclear fallout at all.
It is suicidal to nuke a neighboring country. Radioactive air will be dispersed and black rain will fall across the border into neighboring countries. Soil and water sources will be contaminated and the land will be unfit for human habitation for years to decades.
Agreed, but then there is the Masada complex… It why I pray for a Russian EMP if the Rubicon is crossed.
ciroc: It is suicidal to nuke a neighboring country … the land will be unfit for human habitation for years to decades
You are naive. Do I have to do this again … ?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mordechai_Vanunu
“Mordechai Vanunu (Hebrew: מרדכי ואנונו; born 14 October 1954) …is an Israeli former nuclear technician and peace activist … revealed details of Israel’s nuclear weapons program … in 1986. He was subsequently lured to Italy by the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, where he was drugged and … secretly transported to Israel and ultimately convicted in a trial held behind closed doors … Vanunu spent 18 years in prison, including more than 11 in solitary confinement … Released from prison in 2004 … In 2007, Vanunu was sentenced to six months in prison for violating terms of his parole … In May 2010, Vanunu was arrested again and sentenced to three months in jail on a charge that he had met foreigners, in violation of conditions of his 2004 release from jail …American whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg has referred to him as “the preeminent hero of the nuclear era”.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_bomb
“By 1984, according to Mordechai Vanunu, Israel was mass-producing neutron bombs.”
And here in 2025, more practically ….
“All thermonuclear dial-a-yield warheads that have about 10 kiloton and lower as one dial option, with a considerable fraction of that yield derived from fusion reactions, can be considered able to be neutron bombs in use, if not in name.”
“.. Such weapons have been described as “Capitalist Bombs”, because the lethal radiation kills people, but has minimal heat and blast effect on structures, as compared to conventional nuclear weapons.
[3] https://www.britannica.com/technology/neutron-bomb
‘A neutron bomb … might have a yield, or explosive strength, of only one kiloton … its blast and heat effects would be confined to an area of only a few hundred metres in radius, but within a somewhat larger radius of 1,000–2,000 metres the fusion reaction would throw off a powerful wave of neutron and gamma radiation. High-energy neutrons, though ***short-lived***, could penetrate armour or several metres of earth and would be extremely destructive to living tissue. Because of its short-range destructiveness and the absence of long-range effects, the neutron bomb might be highly effective against tank and infantry formations on the battlefield but might not endanger nearby cities or other population centres.’
***
The question becomes: Hezbollah’s tunnel networks are known to run as deep as 55 meters, so would thermonuclear weapons set to a neutron bomb-style radiation release and detonated overhead kill everybody in those tunnels?
I don’t know. But they’d have a better chance of doing it while leaving less damage topside than regular tactical nukes detonated in a regular thermonuclear blast.
Just as much to the point, this conflict is now seen as a matter of survival by most Israelis. As Yves says, they cannot win it with conventional weapons and see themselves as God’s chosen people. So this is eschatological.
> Released from prison in 2004 … In 2007, Vanunu was sentenced to six months in prison for violating terms of his parole
That is a lie (as you would expect from WIkipedia). Here is a more reliable source
No parole. He refused to accept conditions for an early release.
Thanks for the correction on Vanunu.
If Israel is expecting the US to go in and fight their battles for them, then they may be in for a rude shock. Both in the First Gulf War and the Invasion of Iraq, the US was able to assemble huge armies to go in and get the job done. But Scott Ritter has pointed out that the US military of the 90s no longer exists. Too much has changed and the US spent too long in the sand-boxes of Iraq and Afghanistan. They have not really been practicing combined arms operations and are slow to adapt to the new realities of war. The US Army is much smaller now, less disciplined and the US Marines are only specializing in the Pacific. So what could they send? It would take many months for them to assemble an army and stockpile supplies but where would they do so apart from Israel? And they would be under constant attack by the Resistance if they tried to do so. In any case, do they have the ammo any more to to fight a long campaign? Most of it has been sent to the Ukraine and Israel itself and they may only have enough ammo for a short campaign – maybe. Do American soldiers really want to die to save Netanyahu’s career? So at best there would be only limited US help so this time the Israelis are on their own.
Even if the US tried, it cannot ramp up in time to intervene. One thousand marines stationed off shore aren’t going to do $h!t, even if we could get them into the fight.
The question is…once Hezbollah and Iran make the decision that Israel has now gone full on, nuclear armed mad-man…can they hit all the airfields in Israel hard enough, fast enough to ground the Israeli Air Force for any length of time?!?!
It seems like the answer is….maybe, but not definitely. But, if they’re convinced that Israel is going to go nuclear eventually, then at least you’ve got a shot if you go for the “maybe” option. That’s where the real risk lies.
JohnnGL: can they hit all the airfields in Israel hard enough, fast enough to ground the Israeli Air Force for any length of time?
Irrelevant. Israel has four submarines as nuclear weapons platforms. As Yves stipulates in her post.
Nor are Israeli missile launch sites going to be any more vulnerable to strikes than those of Iran, the US, Russia, North Korea, or one of the other nuclear powers.
It seems like the idea that these subs are nuclear capable, ballistic missile submarines is still speculative, and not proven.
https://www.jns.org/israel-news/israeli-navy/23/8/30/314636/
To ensure the US will be totally out of the equation, the Axis of Resistance should send in a couple of suicide bombers (they will claim themselves to be part of ISIS or whatever) to a number of US cities. The resulting suspension of civil liberties in the middle of a hotly contested election on top of the stock market crash will make sure that US soldiers will remain home to police the right wing who will be attacking Muslims, patrol subways, etc. Heck, chaos in the US might cause Israel to back off. If you don’t like the game being played, where your leaders are being picked off one by one, then change the game.
These Lebanese officials sound just like Russia’s Lavrov, who finally conceded that “the West is not trustworthy” earlier this year, YEARS after Maidan and the Special Op. Like seriously? That’s your conclusion after years of deceit from you know who? No wonder he got “promoted”.
When will these people realize that they have a common problem and its solution lies somewhere else?
Part of the Samson Option is to take out everyone else by using strategic nukes as the Israeli state goes down. A preliminary step might be to blackmail the West into full logistical/tactical/strategic support with all forces “or else”.
Israel blackmailing the West with the threat of using nukes has likely been their trick for many years.
The US Navy versus the Houthis in the Red Sea has been a good real world example of how these kind of things would play out. Major US military vessels can only fire a few dozen missiles before they are “empty” and need to “reload.” Since they cannot reload at sea (!), they need to travel great distances to find a friendly port stacked with enough materiel to get them ready for another round.
My point being that any ship based warfare involving the US is not going to have the staying power to do anything important. Land based warfare involving the US is not going to exist long enough to do anything important.
I think there’s another element here which is that it is now apparent that israel, and by extension the US, are not interested in peace. Prof Hudson, Dr Stein and Danny Haiphong were speaking about this the other day. The corollary of that is the end goal of ethnic cleansing or even a full blown holocaust of Gaza. The axis of resistance have already stated that the defeat of hamas or the liquidation of the Palestinian cause is a red line so the space for negotiation is rapidly diminishing, if at all existent.
Western talk of the ‘need’ for a ceasefire is all performative at this point and echoes the ‘need’ for a two state solution. Both are used as deflections whilst keeping these ‘needs’ forever allusive and out of reach.
“the defeat of hamas or the liquidation of the Palestinian cause”
How’s that been going so far? Hamas are still fighting, and effectively so, it seems. The zionists have managed to kill or maim thousands of Palestinian women, children and male civilians, but they have not defeated Hamas, and there is no particular reason to suppose they can ever do so. Plus Hezbollah defeated them last time they tried that on Lebanon, and will do so again.
The only way Israel can win is by, as described above, using neutron bombs to kill everyone they want without physical fall-out. But there will be political fall-out. Israel is already labelled as a genocidal state by world opinion. For them to be the first country to use nuclear weapons apart from the US 80 or so years ago in WWII will brand them forever as completely evil. It may even prompt the Saudis and Turks to take some effective action, and perhaps the downfall of the comprador regime in Jordan, and eventually the demise of the sate of Israel.
I also seem to recollect that Russia and Iran signed some kind of mutual security treaty not so long ago. I’m not sure of the details, but any attack on Iran may have wider consequences.
This was an excellent and informative post, which laid out some frightening scenarios. Now, I don’t normally do predictions, but I have to say that it appears to me that the current strategy being employed by the axis of resistance is WORKING. Under the current paradigm, the axis of resistance is winning the conflict, and Israel and the US are losing the conflict. This is, sadly, separate from the genocide being inflicted upon the Palestinian people. The US and Israel are desperately trying to get the axis of resistance to alter the current conflict paradigm (the existence of actions calculated to alter the current paradigm are evidence that Israel actually does understand the current strategic situation, and such actions attempting to force a change are indicators of rationality, not lunacy, IMO). All evidence, that is visible to me at least, shows that the resistance leaders are shrewd and intelligent strategic planners. So, in light of the evidence I see, I cannot envision the leaders of the axis of resistance giving over to emotion and lashing out, thus changing the paradigm of the conflict away from a strategic situation that favors the resistance, even as much as they must truly desire to righteously give the Israeli leadership the retribution they so deserve. I think the retaliation will be very carefully calibrated, and that the current slow, measured destruction of the Israeli Zionist project will continue on it’s course, and that retribution will arrive along with final strategic victory (I am continually amazed at the non-western world’s consistent ability to take the long view, and plan for the more distant future). Regardless, I guess we will see in time as events unfold.
I will add that I have noticed a pattern among the actors- they seem to have adopted a strategy of operational zones in the conflict sphere, which is incredible, given the number of sovereign actors that consistently communicate among themselves to achieve consensus, and also stay within their zone of responsibility (I can only conclude that this is very seriously coordinated). Allied forces in Gaza are destroying Israel’s conventional military forces- they are the meat grinder in this conflict. The resistance forces in the west bank are performing pinning operations. Hezbollah are also performing pinning operations. These pinning operations are basically metering the flow of Israeli military forces into Gaza, ensuring that the flow of Israeli military into Gaza cannot overwhelm the work of the Gazan resistance (I hypothesize that the resistance has accepted the total destruction of all Gazan infrastructure as a given-as Israel has form, and with that acceptance, they are gambling that they can confine the bulk of the destruction to Gaza, and that once the conflict ends, the surviving population of Gaza will then be able to utilize the remaining infrastructure in greater Palestine/Israel, as it is a given that the bulk of the settlers will decamp from the colony-I really do think that the axis of resistance is going for broke). Hezbollah is also systematically destroying Israeli ISR and air defense, while shaping the future battlefield in northern Palestine (and I very seriously believe there will eventually be a ground conflict in northern Palestine-even if the Israel manages to survive, it will lose all territory it captured from Lebanon and Syria, but likely parts of historic Palestine also). Ansar Allah is the escalator for the Axis of Resistance. They are constantly and consistently underestimated, so almost all of their actions are blindsiding the the US/Israel, and all of their escalations have been of a horizontal nature. The Iraqi resistance is working to pin US forces, as well as serve as a strategic deterrent to the US, preventing US ground assets in the theater from involvement. I do not think they will force a US exit until after the conflict in Palestine is resolved (pushing the US ground forces out of Iraq actually alters the current strategic paradigm- US assets are effectively surrounded and forced to huddle within the perimeter of their fortifications and are not a real threat to the surrounding areas in Iraq, as much as they are a visual slap in the face of Iraqi sovereignty). Iran is the chief supplier of economic and materiel support for the resistance, serves as a strategic deterrent to Israel, and also very importantly provides high-level ISR (satellite) intelligence to the rest of the resistance axis. These all seem to have become very well defined roles, and I find that very interesting. I sincerely hope they axis of resistance continues with what appears to be a very effective strategy, while not being too rigid tactically to take advantage of any situation that may bring about a change in their favor.
I think you’ve summarized the broader strategy of the ‘axis of resistance’ quite adroitly, in as much as they’re able to adopt a cohesive strategy among a loose group of players with divergent interests and widely divergent capabilities.
“So, in light of the evidence I see, I cannot envision the leaders of the axis of resistance giving over to emotion and lashing out”
I don’t think this is the risk.The risk is that:
1) Israeli leadership DOES NOT THINK it’s in a vice-grip (or pretends it’s not) as you’ve described (even if the IDF leadership does). They think they’re able to intimidate all the players involved through military means. A big part of the usefulness of putting your opponent in a vice-grip is that the opponent recognizes the situation the same way, and then, rationally, looks to de-escalate.
2) Israeli leadership DOES THINK it’s in a vice-grip, and it’s looking for a way out…possibly through escalation. But, if you can still escalate at will, as Israeli leadership seems to think they can do…that’s possibly a sign you are NOT ACTUALLY in a vice-grip.
To summarize, with a crude analogy…if I get you into one of those Jiu-Jitsu-style arm-bars and threaten to break your arm, you’re supposed to ‘tap’, right?
But, Israel doesn’t see it that way. Israel says, “I’ve got this grenade in my other hand, if you break my arm, I will blow the both of us to bits”.
And, to take it further, I’m going to start punching you in the nuts and you cannot do anything about it, because you know if you break my arm, I’m going to pull the pin on this grenade and kill us both. So, you’re just going to sit there and deal with getting punched in the nuts! Your arm-bar doesn’t impress me much.
The Axis of Resistance is probably saying, “we can break his arm, why doesn’t he just submit!??!!”. The next question immediately becomes…”Can we get that grenade away from him!?!?!?”
Whadaya think? Are you feeling lucky, punk??!?!
To be clear, “get that grenade away from him” means to wreck Israeli airfields beyond use so that they can’t put planes in the air to launch a nuclear strike.
The Axis of Resistance MIGHT be able to do this…or might not?!?!?!
Irrelevant. Israeli nuclear missiles get launched from their four submarines or from underground silos.
Fair point on the ballistic missile silos. The submarine launched ballistic missile like it’s speculative, at this point. But, point well taken, nonetheless.
I actually think it probably doesn’t change the logic of smashing Israeli airfields that much, because that’s where the capability of doing such massive damage, conventionally, lies.
The Axis may be thinking, “we’re going to shut them down, conventionally, if they want to go nuclear, well…god help us”.
Submarines have nuclear-tipped cruise missiles.
No Making Shit Up.
While I appreciate many of your comments, I take umbrage at have to spend time rebutting reader-submitted bogus assertions.
https://www.quora.com/Do-all-US-Navy-submarines-carry-nuclear-weapons-Have-they-ever-been-used-in-combat
The house rule is you need to provide links.
I won’t approve further unsubstantiated assertions by you.
Electricity.
Or water.
That is a damn good explanation of what we are seeing, IMO.
Yes- I think we are in more agreement than you realize. I see your situation #2 as applying. Israel understands the issue, and they are trying to escalate their way out of it, believing that they can force the US to intervene. Taking this a bit further- the US leadership seems willing to intervene, but the populace is not. Thus, the Israelis are making provocations (minimized in western media), in the hope that the axis of resistance will respond with an escalation (that will be hyped/maximized in western media) in order to bring western/mainly US popular support around.
Now, the big mistake both Israeli leadership, and much of US leadership is making, is assuming that US intervention can turn the tide.
I do not believe the axis of resistance will take action that will be useful in the way that the Israelis desire- that is my point, I suppose. I think this cycle will repeat itself over and over (Israeli provocation followed by axis response that is below the threshold Israel needs) until the ongoing war, at the current attritional level, drops Israeli society below a level in which it can function at all. Then we will see whether Israel capitulates, or lashes out and destroys everything else along with itself. Israel literally has no winning hand.
Russia has shown the world how to defeat the empire- there is a winning formula that is basically based upon industrial attrition with a steadfast refusal to take the violent bait aimed to provoke irrational responses, that can then become catalysts for alteration of strategic situations. This refusal in the face of western cruelty has the added benefit of being it’s own propaganda, which turns more and more of the world toward greater and more concrete opposition to the US empire.
I think you’ve put it well. Look at the crowds leaving Israel – Nasrallah is clear about this. Keep up the pressure but DON’T allow them to provoke you. This is Putin’s great strength.
This is an intelligent strategic analysis, Mr. Bogdanov.
I hope reality proves to be as obligingly intelligent.
I think the problem with that logic is that Israeli leadership is expecting that the US will be able to react decisively to whatever it does, to pull them out of the mess if they escalate enough. Right now, US has no leadership worth speaking of and we are short on resources, at any rate–and Israeli leaders must know this (Netanyahu just saw it with his own eyes). Whatever we do will be confused and understrength. Perhaps the deployment of US and other Wesetern air assets to help intercept Iranian missiles and drones indicated to Israelis that we still have resources to spare and that we are willing to use them (perhaps true, at least up to a point), but if so, it was a terrible mistake, I think, for US to have lent them that help.
The irony of Israel’s ethnic cleansing is that, instead of Palestinians leaving Gaza and the West Bank, Israelis are the ones voluntarily cleansing Israel of Jews.
Estimates of Jews leaving are very wide, up to 550,000. But who knows? https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20240719-285-spike-in-israelis-leaving-country/.
And even the Times of Israel admits emigration is up 285% .
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/israelis-leaving-country-permanently-spiked-285-after-oct-7-but-stabilized-since-data/
Really nice analysis. Thank you.
Hard to avoid the comparison with the way Russia is triumphing over Ukraine and its Western supporters: Be very patient, keep your eye on the ball, and recognize your opponent’s weaknesses and exploit them.
Netanyahu is a criminal but I don’t think he’s stupid. And for that reason, I don’t think he wants a wider regional war because, as mentioned, it will likely lose.
Netanyahu et al., want to seize the opportunity and use the war in Gaza and threats of a larger war as distraction and cover to rapidly cleanse the West Bank, and soon greater Israel, of non-Jews.
According to Al Jazeera on July 19, 2024, “In 2024, Israel has illegally claimed 23.75 sq km (9.15 sq miles) of (West Bank) Palestinian land, exceeding the total land seized over the past 20 years combined.”
“As Israel carries out a devastating war on Gaza, settlers are exploiting the lack of global attention on the occupied West Bank to expel Palestinians from their land there.” “That makes 2024 the peak year for Israeli land seizures over the past three decades.”
Furthermore, “Palestinian farmers are often unarmed and have no means of defending themselves.” Yet, “Shortly after October 7, Ben-Gvir played a significant role in encouraging these attacks by distributing thousands of semiautomatic rifles and other weapons to settlers and far-right Israelis.”
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2024/7/19/how-israeli-settlements-are-taking-over-the-west-bank-as-gaza-war-rages
On the other hand, Netanyahu et al. are bound the fact that the who raison d’être of Israel is a safe space for Jews. And they have selected the path of absolute dominance to achieve that. Ethnic cleansing of Gaza or West Bank is meaningless, if the Axis of Resistance can hurt Israel at will.
That’s the long game by the Axis of Resistance, to prove, beyond doubt, that the Zionist project has come to it’s conclusion, and that it can go silently into the night, or it can disappear in the flames that burn most of the West Asia. Axis would prefer the first option, but are preparing for the second one if it must be endured. The first strike was a show of force (we can hurt you), this one will be use of force (we will hurt you). There’s not that many steps left after this: basically “we can destroy you” and “we will destroy you”.
The way I read the tea leaves at the moment is that we’ve arrived to a point in history, when Israel has to decide whether it rejects Zionism and retains the things that Israel is without racism, segregation and a police state, or whether it’s “relegated to the pages of history” as the most bloody chapter in the Zionist annals.
This is not a decision which “Israel” can make as a unitized whole. This is a decision which half of Israel could make against the other half of Israel, but only if the ” retain the things that Israel is without racism” half is the bigger half and the more powerful half. And only if it is prepared to exterminate the Netanyahu-Smotrich-BenGvir half from existence, which means killing the several million Israelis who support Netanyahu-Smotrich-BenGivr-etc. And only if it can get them exterminated within a matter of days or a week before that other half can get organized to fight back. Neutron bombs ( “neuts” ) could be useful in such a Civil Extermination excercise . . . especially micro-neuts and nano-neuts . . . if such things exist and if the ” save the good things” side can get its hands on all of them first.
One settler outpost – one nano neut.
I’m not saying that I am a nasty enough person to want the problem solved. I’m just saying that that is the only way the “nicer half” of Israel can solve the problem . . . by physically deleting the “nasty half” of Israel from physical existence.
Of course the “nicer half” of Israel might decide to emigrate instead, leaving the “nasty half” of Israel in sole charge of the country. In which case the AofR might well choose just to keep slow-degrading and slow-attriting to see what happens. The remaining “nasty half” of Israel might counter that by inviting millions of Rapturistians and Armageddonistians to move to Israel and take part in the Immanentization of Eschatological Prophecy up close and personal. If America has become a National Christianist Gilead Republic by then, then such a National Christianist Gilead Republic of America would support such an iteration of Israel to the outermost limits of its ability.
Just one exploded nuke will focus minds like never before. If Israel takes this route, it will indeed be suicide. I believe the thinking is that they intend to take everyone who won’t take a side down with them, if it comes to that. How can we even be at this point? The US right now is guilty of the most egregious diplomatic malpractice possible. Why put such inexperienced ideologues in charge of diplomacy? What a failure.
I think this piece posted on The Cradle puts it in the correct terms:
Israel isn’t crazy, it’s just MAD
The authors hold that “Israel’s” “insanity” posture is actually very calculated:
The problem is, it worked before because their enemies were weak; now their enemies are quite strong, I suspect much stronger than “Israel” itself, and they can not only endure much more in the way of attacks, but also dish out an adequate response.
If the “Israelis” decide to use a nuclear weapon “Israel” will simply vanish from the map. There is no question about this. The retaliation would be so severe, and the country is so fundamentally weak, it would amount to a mass suicide.
Israel gets 80% of its drinking water from five desalination plants that are protected by anachronistic anti air defense systems. Iran, Hezbollah and the Houthis have already shown the ability to get past Israeli AA. I just don’t understand what Israel is thinking? Have they seen too many Marvel movies and now they think they’re invincible? It wouldn’t take more than a few hundred drones and missiles to take down Israel’s water supply – thus rendering the entire country uninhabitable in three days.
Do they look like they are acting rationally? I think the “Israel has gone nuts” idea is strong. High on propaganda, hate and bloodlust.
There’s also a certain strategic logic in APPEARING to be crazy, even if you’re not actually crazy, to get a strategic edge.
I think there’s also an element of faking it until you make it. You can only pretend to be crazy for so long until it actually becomes reality and then, you’re just genuinely crazy. Does anyone involved actually understand where that line is?
this question is a very good one.
and led this reader to the following musings on crazy. on the craziness of Hitler’s Germany, the pogroms, the camps, the self-destruction in the massacre of the young men of the nation in the final desperate refusal to accept defeat.
and the craziness of the manhattan project and its foul result, USA experimenting with the ultimate weapon in order to spare its politicians the stress of americans’ resistance to sacrificing any more of their young men. to keep control at home.
the craziness of building nuclear reactors in dangerous places and/or failing to maintain full safety measures.
since hiroshima/nagasaki, it’s not been a matter of whether that line will be crossed again but when. b/c we have all the information we need about humanity and industrialized colonialism to indicate almost completely beyond any doubt that as a species we are incapable of renouncing the use of the power of mass extermination.
not whether but when. for how long can we fend it off? clearly some leaders are capable of clearer thinking than others. but whether it’s this year, next year, or 30 years, or 100 years off, i do not see humanity ever managing to make this renunciation. meanwhile, leaders will at one time or another arise who are very capable of initiating armageddon. in fact, the american military government, which has done it once already, oblivious to the opening of pandora’s box, and has remained comfortable with the insanity of what it did, stands ready to do it again and i would suggest more ready than any other government.
well, this is all too “general” for the immediate situation where your unanswerable question has now come into play.
Taking out infrastructure is not as easy as people think. Desalination plants are very large, very extensive, and don’t have a ‘keystone’ element that would cause an entire plant to become unusable on a single strike. To destroy one permanently would take multiple very large and very accurate warheads. Its unclear if Hezbollah has that capacity.
As for other forms of infrastructure, electricity is obviously vulnerable, but its still a multilayered form of infrastructure that needs lots of precise strikes to cause permanent damage – power stations are very, very big and heavily engineered and unlikely to be taken out with a single warhead. While they probably have not gone ‘all out’, Russia has taken a long time and has had to devote thousands of missiles to bring the Ukrainian network to the brink of collapse, and Israel has a far better air defence than Ukraine, and Russia has far more and better precision guided weapons than Hezbollah/Iran.
They also have to consider that a deliberate strike on infrastructure will generate a response from Israel. Lebanon and Syria’s infrastructure would almost certainly be more vulnerable to Israeli strikes than vice versa, and Iran has to consider the extreme vulnerability of its gas pipeline supply network. 80% of Irans electricity is generated from natural gas, mostly transported from the Gulf area to the north. That makes it highly vulnerable.
Yeah, I think you’ve got this, PK.
No water for Israel is a strategic RESPONSE to a nuclear attack, not an escalation step before it. Not least because it’s a staged process as you describe.
There are also the Sapir Pumping Station Tzalmon Pumping Station and Eskol Filtering Station that feed the National Water Carrier of Israel. Rather small targets, two first ones with adjacent electric switching yards powering the huge pumps.
Those out of order, most of Israel’s agriculture goes without fresh water pretty soon. And most of Israel’s agriculture is based on artificial irrigation. Which means that they are probably well defended. At least they should be.
I beg to differ.
Take out the power and the intact plant shuts down. Take out the control system and the intact plant isn’t going to work for a while. Take out the right valve chamber or pumping station and the intact plant can’t deliver any water.
Water supply and treatment systems are my thing. My MS thesis is exactly this thing- mitigating disasters that affect public water supplies. The plants are indeed robust, but they are part of a system that isn’t.
Well put, Redleg!
Easily understood even by an old woman, not versed in such technical , fundamental practicalities. I think these our “strong”, still mostly male leaders, are deluding themselves and each other as to the robustness of the world as we know it, the large system they may think they can control, the natural world of which millions of species may seem expendable to a mighty few pushing levers of war and destruction in total disdain for most of the small fry – including us all. The madness on display is such that I think The Lord, not the Lord taught by the churches, whom I learnt to fear when I was a child, The Lord as forces of the Universe, may take the levers of control and start the whole process of life on earth from scratch. So many hitlers arising from our stock that we are doomed, I think, one bright morning like that august morning in Hiroshima.
Thank you, Yves! Excellent article and comments! Yours respectfully, Sleepless in Norway
Didn’t Hezbollah already issue sizzle reels showing all the potential Israeli targets? I would personally go with the gas storage the facility, which gives a big scary show and provides a nice symmetry to the suspicious Beirut fertilizer explosion that completely wrecked the Lebanese economy.
I think there’s another element here which is that it is now apparent that israel, and by extension the US, are not interested in peace. Prof Hudson, Dr Stein and Danny Haiphong were speaking about this the other day. The corollary of that is the end goal of ethnic cleansing or even a full blown holocaust of Gaza. The axis of resistance have already stated that the defeat of hamas or the liquidation of the Palestinian cause is a red line so the space for negotiation is rapidly diminishing, if at all existent.
Western talk of the ‘need’ for a ceasefire is all performative at this point and echoes the ‘need’ for a two state solution. Both are used as deflections whilst keeping these ‘needs’ forever allusive and out of reach.
The Israeli government does not want “a war” with Iran, which would lead to the destruction of Israel. It wants the destruction of Iran as a “threat”, and it wants the United States to do that job for it, while protecting Israel as much as possible, and has been manoeuvring to that effect. It presumably believes that, in the event of an Israeli attack on Iran, the United States could be counted to join in with enthusiasm.
I don’t find McGregor convincing on nuclear weapons. He talks, as do many commentators, as though there would be a war between Israel and “Hezbollah.” But for a start, the South Litani Sector, from which the majority of the Hezbollah attacks have been launched, is a multi-ethnic region, like most of Lebanon. Hezbollah is strong among the Shia community there (as it is strong in other parts of Lebanon where there are sizeable Shia communities) but there are also significant Sunni, Druze and Christian communities of different flavours. Most ordinary Hezbollah fighters live at home and keep their weapons with them. I really don’t see how you could use nuclear weapons in such a context without causing massive loss of life among Lebanese civilians of all confessions. And don’t forget, there are ten thousand UN troops from nearly fifty countries there, as well as two Brigades of the Lebanese Army. In effect, therefore, this would be a nuclear attack on a soverign state, putting at risk military and civilian staff from some of the major countries of the world (there are even a handful of Americans.) In any event, whilst Hezbollah has tunnel networks and underground storage sites, trying to destroy them with nuclear weapons would mean a ground-burst which would spread radioactive fallout over the entire area, and make much of it uninhabitable. Then, of course, the IDF, which is not trained or equipped to fight in a nuclear environment, would not actually be able to move in.
I’ve always assumed that in the unlikely event of Israel using nukes on Hezbollah, they would aim for the north, maybe Baalbek. For the reasons you outline, there is nothing vulnerable in the southern area – although I doubt the Israeli’s would be too bothered about killing lots of Druze or Christians if it was convenient for them. For that matter, they’ve not hesitated to kill UN soldiers in the past either directly or via proxies.
But I doubt if that calculation applies to a direct strike on either Iran or Syria. Obviously, they would much prefer for the US to be stupid enough to do their dirty work there, but given recent behaviour, I really wonder if a direct warning strike is out of the question. Especially as the US elections adds a wild card into everyones calculations.
Sorry, I can’t remember whether it was you or Aurelien with contacs/knowledge of Lebanon, so this is for both of you:
Is the prime minister Mikati”s stament about Israel’s arrogance haaving no limits and that Lebanon has right to defend it’s sovereignty against Zionist escalation just local way of talking, giving Hezbollah (and others fighting in the south) his blessing to retaliate or warning that Lebanese army is about to join the fray?
Mikati is a caretaker PM of what is essentially a “non government”. The value of Lebanon’s military is little more than as canon fodder. In short, only those countries that still cling to ideas like national sovereignty and the concept of a nation state–maybe former colonial power France?–would be concerned about the demise of Lebanon as such.
Aurelien: …trying to destroy them with nuclear weapons would mean a ground-burst which would spread radioactive fallout over the entire area, and make much of it uninhabitable. Then, of course, the IDF, which is not trained or equipped to fight in a nuclear environment, would not actually be able to move in.
Not necessarily true. See my long response to ciroc above. The tl;dr is that: –
(A) All thermonuclear weapons with 10 kiloton or below potential blast yield capability can be set to produce a neutron bomb-style release. e.g. minimal heat and force, maximum but short-lived neutron and gamma radiation release.
(B) There’s strong intelligence that at least since the early 1980s the Israeli nuclear weapons effort has been directed towards neutron bomb-style capability.
WRT neutron bomb effects, I get the aspect of heat/blast, but from some net searching I don’t see anything on the capability for producing radioactive contamination/fallout. Don’t know if that’s linear with the kiloton effective yield or what.
While some fallout will be concentric with the detonation location, weather effects will play an important role in determining area and severity of impact.
scott s.: but from some net searching I don’t see anything on the capability for producing radioactive contamination/fallout.
That’s because fallout is particulate matter — dust, sand, ash, water, fission products, un-fissioned nuclear material, weapon residues, and whatever else that’s vaporized by a regular thermonuclear blast’s heat and force.
Conversely, a neutron bomb produces a momentary pure neutron and gamma radiation release in tandem with a minimal heat/force blast that produces, correspondingly, minimal particulate matter blasted loose and contaminated. Therefore, minimal fallout.
As far as I understand it, in principle a neutron bomb could even be designed to work like a nuclear EMP device which produces an intense gamma release but zero thermonuclear blast and, therefore, zero fallout. Except in the case of the neutron bomb, it would be a nuclear EMP release that was absolutely lethal to biological material.
Nasrallah mentioned in his speech yesterday the decision to fight in support of Gaza was made together with Amal Movement, Syrian Socialist National Party and Al-Jama’ah Al-Islamiyah. So they kinda have the local Shias, Sunnis, lefties and nationalist burying the hatched for now.
As for Israeli nukes, they are very expensive to build an maintain, so given Israeli defense budget, it’s unlikely they have that many. If any. At this point of the development, when the other side has achieved sort of a parity, or even superiority, in the capability to destroy you, the deterrence based on ambiguity is obviously losing it’s power.
I hope not regret these words, but looking at how Israel it trying to deter the Axis by assassinations and shelling a few villages in southern Lebanon instead of finally ending the ambiguity and telling Iran to back off or be nuked, especially if the Israeli leaders are as insane as Finkelstein states, it’s quite possible the Israeli nukes are more chutzpah than real, deployable devices.
A general point in Israel – there are plenty of explanations for why Israel is doing what its doing, but one thing that I think hasn’t been explored is that there is no ‘Israeli leadership’ anymore. What we may be seeing are competing elements within the military establishment representing the various shades (all far-right) doing their own thing. It is curious that they don’t seem to have ‘claimed’ the Tehran strike. its conceivable as some have speculated that it was carried out by someone else, but its also possible I think that it was carried out by one or more Israeli agencies without consultation. Of course, they may be playing the whole ‘don’t mess with the crazy guy’ game to try to freak out the Iranians, its anyones guess.
We tend to assume that even ‘crazy’ or ‘extremist’ regimes follow a certain internal logic. But if the Israeli establishment is itself splintering, then applying rational analysis to their actions may be futile. Or they make be like mid-19th Century Paraguay, a country seemingly determined to declare war on all its bigger nations without any particular regard to common sense (some might also see parallels to Japans ‘f** it, lets just declare war on everyone’ decision in 1941. Douglas Adams fans might be thinking of the denizens of the Planet Krikket, who decided the rest of the Universe just has to go.
But the one thing that can be said with certainty is that the Israeli security establishment see the coming conflict as one they cannot lose (if ‘losing’ is defined as losing territory – its possible they could ‘lose’ just by having major losses inflicted on them). And in their logic, this means the nuclear option is a rational and necessary one to an existential threat.
Not a lot is known about Israeli nuclear capacity, but it seems certain that they have not just numbers of warheads, but a range of tactical and strategic warheads, ranging from ‘suitcase bombs’ (Seymour Hersh has written that they developed these as far back as the 1970’s) to possible neutron bombs and possibly even earth penetration warheads. So they can escalate in a manner far beyond the capacity of anyone else in the region.
They also have a full nuclear triad. For certain they have ballistic missiles that are very deeply buried in the Nagrev desert that can hit anyone in the wider region. They almost certainly have nuclear warheads on cruise missiles in their small submarine fleet – and they may well have a submarine in the Red Sea (allegedly they’ve used the Suez Canal in the past). They also have a range of aerial bombs and stand-off missiles that can probably be used by their F-35’s and F-15s. They also are claimed to have buried nuclear mines in the Golan Heights as a last resort in case it means they get driven out of those lands, and its also likely that they have artillery tactical nukes.
All this is to say that there is zero chance of a first strike taking out any but a small proportion of their potential nuclear response. They can hit Iran with a massive attack. or go for an escalatory series of tactical strikes. When it comes to nukes, Israel holds all the cards. The only question is the ‘what happens next’ after they let loose the first round of attacks.
I would discount any Pakistan bomb being used. Its not clear if their warheads are particularly light or sophisticated, so delivery would be hard (its not a simple task to just fit one onto an Iranian missile). And Pakistan is within range of the Jericho III missile (a possible 5,000 km range – Lahore is 4000 km from Tel Aviv). So it would know it would be on the receiving end of any retaliatory strike. Plus, there is no evidence that Pakistan has that type of close relationship with either Iran or Hezbollah/Hamas. They have their own disputes (not least over Baluchistan). They would also almost certainly have to ask permission from KSA and the Gulf States, and its hard to see any of them wanting to get dragged into a nuclear dispute on Irans side.
Actually, Israel is probably the easiest nuclear country to neutralize if it was on its own, because it has no strategic depth.
The submarine-launched nuclear cruise missiles are not in huge numbers and should be interceptable. Iran has serious air defense. Maybe a single digit go through.
The deeply buried ICBMs are the really big problem, but Iran has hypersonic missiles that can burrow deep, like the Russian Kinzhals.
So if Iran already has nukes, which is quite likely, they can in principle take those out. Especially if Hezbollah has been given some of those Iranian nukes and can shoot point blank with little to no warning. Even if the missiles are buried 100m deep, it’s enough to explode a nuke 50m above them and all the launch infrastructure that takes them from 100m deep to the surface will be melted and destroyed by the underground blast.
Of course, the same applies to Iran’s missiles, but there Israel is not known to have the delivery means to disable those deep in their mountain tunnels. They have bunker busters and nukes, but no long-range hypersonic missiles, so in theory they should not be able to get planes to fly over there.
And again, fundamentally, Israel has no strategic depth. So if Iran has been able to situate serious AD installations in Syria and Lebanon, they could in principle intercept a lot of the SSBNs in the boost phase, which is the only moment you can realistically stop them. But that’s a big if.
Thus in theory a first strike on Israel is viable. In theory. In practice, we don’t know what the real capabilities are, but based on what has been revealed, the Resistance has the tools to win, even if takes some painful blows.
The really big question is what the US would do if Israel is erased from the map. If the US was an independent rational actor, they don’t do anything. In practice, the US is none of those things, so this is where the actual second strike is likely to come from.
This is what Israel might be betting on as deterrent. Otherwise trying to show beyond any doubt to everyone that you are out to totally annihilate physically them in the long terms is absoluite suicidal madness that no rational actor would engage in.
But then what happens if the US launches nukes on Iran?
A question I have is the feasibility of attacks against Israeli NC2, though I suppose there may be a doctrine of “in case of fire, break glass”.
Coupled with that is that there’s no leadership in US now. No one wants to blow things up, perhaps, but nobody wants to be seen hitting the brake.
From the Imperial planetologist of Dune, Liet Keynes, beaten by the Harkonnens and left in the deep desert with a torn stillsuit and no water: “And as his planet killed him, it occurred to him again that the most persistent principles in the universe are accident and error.” And we got plenty of both, in bumpers.
Kamala Harris and Biden constitute “paralyzed” leadership. Blinken and his Jewish cabals are the ones running the show.
Zionist might be a better choice of word here instead of Jewish…
Israel might also avoid taking responsibility for killing Haniyeh in Teheran to leave open the possibility that the USA/CIA did it. And even Iran doesn’t take that possibility seriously, US media could claim that they do, leaving open a “logical” cover for a false flag attack on US assets in the region. (CVN-71 is now parked near Qatar; is Iranian coastal defense good enough to prevent “someone” from landing there long enough to launch a stolen Russian anti-ship missile?)
When the US dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki it was unnecessary, Japan was at the point of surrendering, the war was already won, and the targets were selected specifically because of their civilian populations, served no military purpose. The point of dropping the bombs was terror and maybe an element of curiosity, trying out a new toy.
As I mentioned elsewhere yesterday, the Likud party was once Irgun. Similarly, the IDF was originally Haganah. Both vicious terrorist groups operating in British Mandate Palestine. It’s not an exaggeration to say they drove the British out of Palestine, nor that they primarily attacked innocent populations.
If you consider the Old and New Testaments to be historical or somewhat historical, this kind of terrorism goes very far back to the Sicarii, but as Kourous rightly pointed out yesterday, also the pointless destruction of the innocent population of the city of Shechem.
Then there’s the genocide of Canaan, the genocide of Amalekites, the attempted genocide of the Midianites, the pointless execution of the 450 prophets of Baal.
All were for no reason other than to terrorize, this is form, the MO, of terrorist groups. Israel is behaving like Irgun, which is no surprise because Likud IS Irgun. The form is imprinted on the fossilized brains of Netanyahu, Ben Gvir and Smotrich.
Expect nuclear terror.
The main reason for dropping the bombs on Japan was as a threat to the USSR and ensure that it would not support Communist anti-Nazi forces in Europe. They likely understood that they only had a few years of technology advantage over the Soviets on this and used it to destroy Communist movements in Italy, France, and Greece.
Americans pioneered nuclear blackmail.
thank you, your observation supplements my mention of one important motive behind hiroshima above.
Charles Mee Jr.’s book Meeting at Postdam is still the valuable reference.
From Gar Alperovitz’ wikipedia page:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gar_Alperovitz
“In 1965 Simon and Schuster published Alperovitz’s Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam, based on his Cambridge doctoral thesis. Drawing on the diaries of Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, the work argued that after Germany’s defeat, U.S. policymakers based their strategy toward the Soviet Union on the judgment that the atomic bomb, once demonstrated, would provide leverage in negotiating the postwar world order. Alperovitz also reported that, at the time, there was substantial but not definitive evidence suggesting that gaining diplomatic leverage against the Soviet Union was a major consideration in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki”
Bombing two Japanese cities, especially within a few days of each other (Aug 6, Aug 9) buttress this in my mind. The Japanese leadership was probably already stunned by Aug 6, and then another city was bombed before the could react to the first one.
Great post. The main question is will Israel use nuclear weapons or not? I suggest that if they do it will have to do so before the next administration takes office. At the moment Washington is being ruled by committee since Biden is clearly not able to take any leadership role (and hasn’t for some time). Will US elites agree to “let” Israel use nuclear weapons? The answer is yes, I’m certain they will agree. Will the US back up Israel with its own assault on Iran? That I don’t know. The US has a history of nor following through in war. I wonder if anyone knows what the Zionist lobby in the US that controls US policy in the region is thinking and pushing–that would be the decisive factor.
This gets into the asymmetrical war thinking that maybe John Misherimer has mentioned.
Let’s say Russia does a formal military alliance with Iran. And then puts nukes there. Or just provides them the parts they need to build one.
If Iran sets off an underground test that changes everything. I think it puts Israel on hold, but maybe they are crazy enough to do a preemptive strike?
I thought things were scary before, wow.
Question for anyone.
Since Netanyahu was just in DC. Do you think he was given the all clear we have your back? Or was he told to back off and he’s taking the position that the US will not stop military support no matter what they say?
And how would this wider war impact the Harris campaign?
I think top Democrats said “Please please negotiate with Hamas to end the war in Gaza, so Trump doesn’t win”, and Bibi’s response was killing Hamas’ chief negotiator.
Now this looks like a situation where russian missile defense systems might be helpful for Iran, no?
It’s truly fascinating watching our species go ballistic (pun intended), even when the full effects of our dismissal of planetary boundaries have not even begun to show.
It’s always darkest before dawn. Until it isn’t.
Armageddon. Darn, Yves Smith, if this article isn’t tightly argued.
Yet I would like to open up some geographic / population issues that may factor into how the war is prosecuted.
–First, Israel is a small place. So is Lebanon. For a long time, this favored the Israelis, who could drop some bombs on Syria or Beirut and be home for dinner.
–This small theater of war means that the use of nuclear weapons is thoroughly dangerous. One is talking about enormous numbers of civilian deaths. One is talking about poisoning land for a long time. The avarice on the faces of people like Smotrich and Netanyahu indicates to me that they don’t want to mess up real-estate deals too much. There’s beach-front property in Gaza! There’s farmland up to the Litani! So: Watch for hesitancy because of lack of room to maneuver.
–Iran cannot be conquered by Israel or the U S of A. The geography precludes invasion. Talk to the ancient Romans about the Parthian wars. Iran’s interest is in making sure that its big urban centers like Tehran, Mashhad, Shiraz, and Esfahan don’t come under attack. The military there undoubtedly knows that Israel would like to bomb the nuclear facilities.
–Syria doesn’t have much to lose. There is a very disturbing article in this month’s Harper’s Magazine by Pauls Toutunghi about the wreckage that is Syria under U.S. sanctions.
–Nor does Iraq have much to lose by getting rid of the remaining U.S. bases.
–Which means that for Hezbollah, Hamas, and even Syria and Iraq, this is a war of liberation.
–You have written that the Iranians and Hezbollah don’t waste weapons by bombing civilians, which would lead to losing their base.
–I am inclined to think that the retaliation from Iran and Hezbollah will be economic (ports, infrastructure) and military (bases, supply depots).
–If I were in the Middle East, I’d advocate that Hezbollah teach the U.S. and the U.K. a lesson by destroying both of the U.K. bases on Cyprus, which have extraterritoriality and are colonialist enterprises. But maybe I’m a tad excitable today.
We have to keep in mind that U.S. politics and U.S. foreign policy are highly melodramatic, and highly unreliable. But there is a reason why the U.S. is cozying up to Poland, Drama Queen of Europe. It’s all drama-queenery all the time.
Now to stop bombs from falling…
I don’t think you understand that neutron bombs do not have the same qualities as a conventional nuke. It’s area of destruction is relatively small and it contamination is short term. Israel will use those bombs in Lebanon if there is a full-scale war and the US will, likely, support them despite all that.
I disagree here.
A neutron bomb kills living things but does not harm infrastructure.
That is the opposite of what Israel would want to do in strikes on both Lebanon and Iran. It would want to destroy tunnels. It wants the high blast force that only conventional nuclear bombs (the most powerful hypersonic missiles can achieve similar, but more targeted, levels of destruction via their kinetic force)
I don’t think Israel, crazy as they seem to be, wants to use conventional nukes–I think Col. McGregor thinks so as well. On the other hand, certainly what you say makes sense from a purely tactical POV.
I think we have a nomenclature issue. A tactical nuke is a conventional nuclear weapon, just a small size. Macgregor specifically discusses use of a tactical nuke in the segment and said they could be as small as 5 kilotons and even discussed the blast range.
I heard him say “neutron”.
You were answering me.
I was disagreeing and saying a neutron bomb would not serve Israel’s aims. Hezbollah like Hamas is underground. A neutron bomb would kill people on the surface and maybe in the near-surface area of tunnels.
Israel needed to and has failed to clear the Hamas tunnels. It would need to clear or destroy Hezbollah’s tunnels to prevail. That takes a conventional nuke, as in the non-neutron kind.
Like Yves, I disagree, but for a different reason.
A Neutron bomb would kill a lot of people quickly in the immediate blast radius, but would kill a *lot* more people outside range – slowly, and grotesquely. Pictures and videos of those slow deaths – distributed globally across a couple decades – would horrify and alienate the entire world, including most Jews and likely even many Zionists.
Israel already has a hard enough time keeping “friends”.
Are you sure about the “slow death” aspect? IIUC the effects are from high energy radiation (neutron/gamma) which would obviously loose density with distance, but I think would kill quickly. I think “slow deaths” are mainly via radioactive contamination from alpha/beta emitters.
I have no expertise in radiation wounds; just extrapolating from basic physics (density declines proportional to square of distance?), a vague understanding of the effects of a high flux of energetic neutrons on human flesh (direct cell damage, DNA damage), and horrific pix I’ve seen from aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. People vaporized near the epicenter were the “lucky” ones…
Smotrich, Ben Gvir and Netanyahu are terrorists at their core, in their mode of thinking, so primarily motivated by intent to create fear, uncertaintly, to terrorize populations as a way of achieving political aims, ideological goals, of effecting change in targeted populations. Racial supremacy is the secondary goal. I think the real estate is tertiary.
If they were motivated by profit there would have been peace long ago.
Yes ports & oil depots/gas terminals would be the more logical. Even a small success would be devastating to Israel economy and its ability to project war.
If I recall correctly, the prevailing/default winds for most of Israel is from the NE to the SW/from N to S.
tactical nuke Lebanon, and the (currently empty) northern settlements, Tel Aviv, Haifa, all of Israel etc receive the blowback.
Israel, along with South African apartheid loonies, apparently developed “boosted primarily” smallish hydrogen bombs, which are also enhanced-radiation “neutron bombs” designed to kill living things while leaving infrastructure more or less intact. https://thebulletin.org/premium/2022-01/nuclear-notebook-israeli-nuclear-weapons-2022/ These weapons would ostensibly produce less entrained soils and hence less fallout and shorter lasting radiation exclusion areas. Air bursts vs ground bursts maximize EMP effects and human deaths, so the effing Israel ites who do the bombing likely figure a few dead Jews are a fair exchange for a whole lot of dear Arabs, with nots such a long wait to be able to offer waterfront and hillside “estates” for sale.
All us mopes can do is wonder what the hell goes through the minds of these creatures playing mumbledy-peg with our lives…
So far as I know the SA nuclear programme was conceived as a way of defeating the Russian and Cuban hordes who were expected to pour in through Angola for the Final Conflict. They would have been airburst weapons designed to kill troops and destroy equipment. But what McGregor seems to be talking about is precisely ground bursts that would take out tunnels and underground headquarters and supply dumps. I don’t believe that’s feasible but, insofar as it is, it would scatter fallout everywhere and lead to thousands of deaths of Lebanese of all persuasions, not to mention Chinese, French, Italian and Indian troops, among others. And all for little or nothing in terms of military benefit.
And don’t forget, there are ten thousand UN troops from nearly fifty countries there, as well as two Brigades of the Lebanese Army.
If the USS Liberty affair and other incidents involving Israel bombing UNIFIL patrols are any guide, the lives of those UNO troops from fifty countries will give Israel pause for about 5 minutes or so.
At the stage where the Israelis have become insane enough to put atomic bombs into use, they are not going to squirm in pangs of conscience about collateral damage affecting non-Jews, even if they are their patrons. At most they will probably have sent some generic warning well beforehand, noting that Lebanon is now a military operational area and that they cannot vouch for the safety of anybody there — so all those 50 nations please b*gger off before the firing starts.
USS Liberty incident was followed by the admiral commanding the 6th Fleet launching US Navy aircraft to attack the Israelis. They were turned back only because LBJ himself ordered it (well, it was McNamara, but he indicated he was with LBJ and the order came from the president himself, I believe.). I don’t think other countries, least of all, China, necessarily have an LBJ for president.
” …. what the hell goes through the minds of these creatures playing mumbledy-peg with our lives ….”
Aurelien’s latest essay, “No Left Turn,” provided me with some insight into this conundrum. “The Party,” (some in the US refer to the “UniParty,) has no ideology, other than, perhaps, “the organized struggle for power and wealth according to complex rules.” Certainly, the creatures have no adherence to any ideology that promotes the greater good of the community, the nation, the planet.
Power corrupts; the Party Elite really do believe they are invulnerable. The bombs will not hit them or their children. But, my god, the surge of power that comes when you give the order to launch that ‘nuclear warhead:’ I (me, myself) am wiping out an entire city, snuffing thousands of lives. Better than sex.
One might change “according to complex rules” to “setting up complex rules, then cheating them.” If they stuck to even “complex rules” and accepted their applicability to themselves, then things would at least be manageable. But they don’t: they come up with ever-so-clever ways to cheat them themselves, while insisting that they apply to whoever that they don’t like. That does not provide much rationale for others, if they get strong enough, to abide by them.
Reminds me of a segment on I think it was “60 Minues,” back when that involved actual journalism. The setup was a visit to a squadron of Minuteman ICBM troops. The reporter asked some 20-something newly minted Air Force captain who held one set of the keys that unlock the launch panel, “what do you think about being the person who could fir off a missile that would kill maybe millions of humans?” Response: “Well, I could never have this much responsibility at my age in a civilian job.” And now we mopes learn that these people routinely cheat to pass, with even minimal scores, the pretty rudimentary tests the Air Farce gives to check the competence and preparedness of the “responsible” officers. https://apnews.com/united-states-government-b942adacae524dcfa7fbc85ed6292433 And tests of US nuclear missiles show that maybe a lot of them are “damp squibs,” and won’t even get to their designated death zones. https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/america-replacing-its-old-icbms%E2%80%94here-what-know-about-new-missiles-183947
Russia and China must be watching very closely. israel is a profound liability to the US, threatening to get the country stuck in multiple quagmires in West Asia and for what? Literally the stickiest web of Zionist bribery.
Putin has said that Russia would provide weapons to the west’s adversaries and I think this is a long term promise. For China too, they know the long term goal is to attack them (I think India is also coming to this realisation in terms of their own position) so I think this inability to escape this ludicrous apartheid terrorist state is drain and a weakness without limit.
Please go listen to Macgregor. A 5 kiloton nuclear bomb has only a five mile radius. There won’t be much fallout. See also here on the health effects of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts. They seem to have come almost entirely from direct radiation exposure and not fallout: https://k1project.columbia.edu/news/hiroshima-and-nagasaki
MacGregor is an armoured corps officer, and I don’t know what his source for nuclear weapon blast effects is. They do depend, though, on such variables as type of warhead, height of detonation, building construction and even weather conditions. The Hiroshima bomb was airburst, intended to maximise the blast effect, and detonated about 2000 feet above the city. I don’t know whether the fireball even touched the ground, so the amount of fallout would have been small. What MacGregor appears to be talking about here, though, is the use of tactical nuclear weapons to attack below-ground targets belonging to Hezbollah. By its very nature this requires a ground-burst, and therefore lots of fallout, and because the effect will be localised, it requires a number of warheads. Of course an Enhanced Radiation/Reduced Blast weapon (“neutron bomb”) which is optimised for killing people–though its destructive effects are not negligible either–would be of very little use for the kind of attack MacGregor is talking about.
Some experts argue the reverse, that the fallout from a ground burst is lower than from an air burst. The conventional claim is the dirt gets irradiated, sucked up into the mushroom cloud, and then spread around, and so results in more spread of radioactive nasties. This is a counterview:
https://www.reddit.com/r/nuclearweapons/comments/17k0meb/would_the_fallout_from_an_air_burst_be_more_less/?rdt=34214
And fallout is pretty short lived in effect:
https://remm.hhs.gov/nuclearfallout.htm#description
Before getting into all the nuclear arms game theory I’m curious as to why there is no consideration given to Iran simply closing off access to the Persian Gulf as a measure of retaliation. This non-nuclear option would immediately put a severe squeeze on the US and Europe—Israel’s two main supporters.
Perhaps facing an economic recession before an election might help focus the minds of US and European elites into finally putting real pressure on the Israeli lunatics.
Closing the Straits of Hormuz is a ‘suicide bomb’ sort of option. I don’t think it’s on the table because it does exactly what the Israelis want. It brings in the US, and does tremendous harm to Iran itself.
Also, it does tremendous harm to Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf Monarchies in the region. So, it brings back the divisions within the Islamic world that Iran has spent at least a decade trying to overcome.
Iran has been working like a python to slowly improve it’s strategic situation and strangle its opponents. This move does the opposite.
They could “do a houthi” – just close it to Talmudistan, the amerikunts and their British poodle. Everybody else gets free passage.
All the assassinations should show people the options Israel had to take out specific Hamas militants, but they chose wholesale genocide and more land grabs.
There should be much more concern for the security of every country around Isreal. Israel is now showing they are the greatest threat to security.
Like the USA, the country has the mentality of exceptionalism that would rather blow up everything than not get all they want. Exceptionalism is infantile.
I wonder who has been shorting Israeli stocks? Gvir and Gantz? Bibs and his delightful (gag) wife? The Pelosis? The Biden gangsters?
Wondering how the Likudniks plan to do a TeutoNazi decamping, just before the hammer falls, maybe via the submarines the Krupps built for “Israel” with German and US taxpayer money? A “see you, suckers” final explication of that so very typical notion of the “freier?” https://www.haaretz.com/2007-01-28/ty-article/thou-shalt-not-be-a-freier/0000017f-e3ad-d38f-a57f-e7ffa5630000 Flee to comfortable safety, like numerous Nazi high command did to Central and South America and other places with enough fascist admixture in their polities to “absorb” the mini-anschluss?
Are there any innocents left in the Zionist state that one would shed a tear for, when what seems to be the last act in the tragedy finally opens?
In my early 20’s I was walking around the archaeological site at Megiddo. I kept asking myself, how armageddon could begin here? Then the MacGregor quote from the article “Israel’s population has largely left the northern and southern border areas, making it even more concentrated than usual”. Now I can see it!
To summarize, with a crude analogy…The Axis of Resistance thinks, “if I get you into one of those Jiu-Jitsu-style arm-bars and threaten to break your arm, you’re supposed to ‘tap’, right?”
But, Israel doesn’t see it that way. Israel says, “I’ve got this grenade in my other hand, if you break my arm, I will blow the both of us to bits”.
And, to take it further, Israel says, “I’m going to start punching you in the nuts and you cannot do anything about it, because you know if you break my arm, I’m going to pull the pin on this grenade and kill us both. So, you’re just going to sit there and deal with getting punched in the nuts! Your arm-bar doesn’t impress me much.”
The Axis of Resistance is probably saying, “we can break his arm, why doesn’t he just submit!??!!”. The next question immediately becomes…”Can we get that grenade away from him!?!?!?”
To be clear, “get that grenade away from him” means to wreck Israeli airfields beyond use so that they can’t put planes in the air to launch a nuclear strike.
The Axis of Resistance MIGHT be able to do this…or might not?!?!?!
I’m re-posting this piece of my comment above as a separate response, because I think the analogy works well to describe the situation.
Israel is supposed to be rational and not want it’s arm broken, right?
modern industrial warfare is not rational.
but it has raged around the world for decades now under the illusion of rationality.
that humans are capable of rationalizing the dangers and treating such wars as normal and not crazy does not make such wars rational.
it is a delusional calculus of mass destruction.
we pretend to ourselves that the problem can be reduced to the immediate situation and worked out within that logical realm.
our fascination with that “problem” seduces us, we become seduced by the illusion that the danger can be confined and that our military logic is what’s most essential, because we see that the larger context of the problem is unmanageable.
that is where we are.
I think you’re giving the Resistance far too little credit. Remember that most of the Hamas and Hezbollah leadership actually spent years in Israeli captivity and many speak Hebrew. They know the Zionist Entity better than anyone else because their movement’s survival depends on it. There’s also deep studies of other anti-imperial resistance movements to see what works and what didn’t.
They’ve already tried every iteration of resistance available out there, multiple times. They’ve tried appeals to the UN and international solidarity, they tried peaceful resistance, violent resistance, suicide bombings (often derided in the West as counterproductive, but which did drive the Americans out of Lebanon), and collaboration.
The current iteration has proven to be the most successful in beating Israelis and their Western backers. They’ve fully unmasked the West as liars, genocidaires, rapists, and thieves. There’s far too much exposure and evidence to memoryhole the global South and a substantial portion of the global north. They understand the need to use the process to change the consciousness of the masses before they can move forward.
I think you’re giving the Resistance far too little credit.
Not at all, I think they’ve been incredibly savvy. But, when you’re trying to subdue a rabid animal, things get really dicey and unpredictable.
I think you’re correct that they’ve got superior positioning, strategically and politically and morally.
But, the approaches you describe above are methods of resisting the Zionist project, not defeating it. They’ve never come THIS close to being able to deeply, and permanently, damage or even destroy the Zionist state.
To bring it back to my analogy (I think it works). They’ve never gotten Israel in an arm-bar before, at any time in the past 80 years. Israelis probably (at least some of them) know it and they’re flailing around like maniacs trying to get out of it. Threatening to blow up everyone involved is, well, one way to get out of it….maybe…lol…
I follow Electronic Intifata, The Cradle, and Justin Podur’s line on this matter. I think the Resistance is intentionally playing a slow game and letting Israel and its backers destroy themselves. They’re also waiting for the economic and social fallouts to render Israel unviable, and one can argue that getting the ICJ advisory and getting Israelis to openly riot over the right to rape and torture, ensured that will happen even if everyone in Gaza is murdered or exiled. If something can lead to ending the siege and genocide sooner, they’ll take it, but they’re not counting on it.
It seems that the end-game for the Axis of Resistance is that divisions and dissensions as to how to proceed will lead to infighting, and ultimately to something akin to civil war amongst Israelis:
1) dead-enders vs. people favouring a deal to free hostages;
2) anything goes (those who favour torturing and raping prisoners, and oppose even the fig leaf of judicial procedures) vs. disciplined military respecting hierarchy and formal prerogatives;
3) haredim who refuse enlistment vs. patriotic “everybody at the front” seculars;
4) greater Zion fanatics vs. business-oriented people ruined by a prolonged war;
5) let us get rid of that corrupt Netanyahu bastard vs. Netanyahu is the only one who knows how to handle the Americans and if he leaves, then chaos will ensue;
6) the traditional Ashkenazim vs. Mizrahi vs. Sefardi vs. Falasha animosity;
7) those double-nationals who can go back to the USA, France, Argentina, Russia, etc, and those who are stuck in Israel.
I doubt that Israel will be decisively defeated before Israelis start actually fighting each other.
The ” traditional Ashenazim vs. Misrahi etc.” animosity is too broadly phrased and believed-in. The word ” Ashkinormative” comes from that overbroad concept.
The better word would be ” Sabranormative” . . . meaning normativazition of and by those SecuLabor-Movement-descended Ashkizraelis who dominated the politics and set the cultural standards. They despised those Ashkenazi Jews who were not culture converts to their Sabranormative politics and culture. Including people like Menahem Begin, who was just as Ashkenazi as they were. That shared Ashkenaziness didn’t stop Ben Gurion from ordering the sinking of Irgun’s ship the Altalena and its shipload of weapons when Begin wanted to keep it for his Irgun instead of turning it over to Ben Gurion’s Haganah-descended IDF-in-embryo.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/fire-in-the-hole-blasting-the-altalena/
Mizrahi-Ashkenazi animosity? The Mizrahi voters voted for Begin because they knew that Begin was despised by the same Sabranormative Establishment leaders who despised them. And his victory would be their revenge. And the Mizrahi voters are the core base of Likud-Netanyahu’s support today.
Or am I wrong?
Israel has a small fleet of U-boats given them by Deutschland. These carry cruise missiles which all the betting says “can be” armed with nuclear weapons. At least 1000 mile range, unknown how these would fare against the porous air defenses of all Israel’s neighbors. Israel also has strategic IR/ICBMs able to reach all of EU, most of Russia, north and central Africa, etc. Samson options says “We’re ficking crazy and suicidal enough to burn the planet if we don’t get our way.”
Wrecking the airfields won’t knock out the bulk of the nuclear weapons that Israel “maybe has or doesn’t have.” And Israel would likely do a first strike, just like the effing US war planners have in mind per current OPLAN.
A scenario to ponder:
Nobody likes to see a dependent entity / vassal / client go rogue and threatening everybody, including suzerain / patron.
When push is close to coming to the shove, the USA call a meeting with Russia, China, France, the UK, and Germany. All quickly conclude that Israel must be prevented from running amok, they pool their intelligence / electronic warfare / anti-aircraft / anti-missile / anti-submarine / bunker busters capability, promptly and jointly neutralize the Israeli atomic triad, and send a “stop your nonsense” message to the Israeli government.
Or at least this is what could happen if the top leaders of the USA were not inept, senile, stupid, and mired in internecine struggles.
I think the whole thing is taking place precisely because there is no leadership in US now… Netanyahu just saw the sorry state of things with his own eyes.
And assumes a level of trust and understanding that simply does not exist and takes years to build, and also somehow magically neuters the various imperial clades that see profit (money and/or power) in letting the dogs of war loose, and are too stupid or careless to see what the effects would be. Also assumes some magic that produces interoperability of forces that takes years, and more of that intentionally degraded and vaporized trust stuff, to establish.
Well . . . is American rulership disorganized enough that Russia/France/China/Germany ( with maybe Britain being part of it IF the first four KNEW Britain could be trusted) could secretly do it themselves while America was consumed with its own internal decline and fall processes?
That would be a low-blood outcome.
And on the take. Don’t forget the money…
A fine analogy and well worth reposting. In the middle of Yves’ superb analysis was a photo of Israelis queued up at the airport (Ben Gurion I assume – are there any others?) “ voting with their feet. What if a few precision missile strikes were to render it unusable? Those citizens might get proactive about deposing the Zionist nutters rather than become collateral damage. Also, at the risk of getting ‘tin foily’ I have read anecdotal reports of neutron weapons having already been used- kind of on a “trial run” basis. No long term contamination, but in my book a nuke is a nuke is a nuke and a heinous WMD. Also, let’s not forget that a most important endgame objective in the complete ethnic cleansing of Gaza is the elimination of Palestinian sovereignty of Gaza and the assumption of oil and gas mineral rights by Israel – it’s all about the (petro) Benjamins, baby! What a world. :^\
Just a quibble, I’m thinking it’s about the real estate this time.
They don’t have the power anymore to depose the Greater Likudistanis from power. They don’t have the power to wage and win the Civil War of Total Internal Conquest against the Greater Likudistanis which ” deposing them from power” would involve.
That garbage barge sailed and sank when the SecuLaborist-type Israelis failed to launch and win a Civil War of annihilation against the supporters and engineers of the Rabin Assassination. That was their last and only chance to have crushed the Likud-and-further-right side of the spectrum and stomped it into the ground.
Too late now.
It is worth mentioning that the hard-core U.S. neocons have always wanted to break the nuclear weapons use taboo. Giving Israel the green light to use “tactical” nukes accomplishes this neatly. With the use of these weapons legitimized, the U.S. can position them in Pacific bases to intimidate China. The U.S. could also supply them to Ukraine, Poland, and even the Baltic states. The world is in grave peril as long as warmongers are in power in nuclear-armed states.
And, in typical neo-con fashion, there’s never any plan or consideration of what happens the day after!
When the Axis of Resistance feels compelled to end Israel’s existence because the nuclear taboo is broken, well, then it’s kind of restored, isn’t it?
Yes, the Axis can end Israel’s existence, but they’d prefer not to have to do that, because, you know, that gets a lot of people killed.
There are only two war-monger regimes in the world–Israel and the USA.
The British state loves a bit of warmongering too
It’s all bluster for the Brits they have no serious war-making capabilities other than SAS. But you make a good point because the City of London is a major part of the Empire’s Deep State that always councils war, if it’s good for business.
We like to do the mongering and let others do the making
It’s more profitable.
From the Analysis.news @ utube
Netanyahu Hell-Bent on a Wider War – Trita Parsi
My own thoughts:
Bibi met with Biden and verified that he is indeed a vegetable, but can still be counted on. He met with Kamelot and decided he could roll her, if it comes to that. Finkelstein has, for some time, called Israel a lunatic regime.
I recall Bibi once saying that if they were backed to the wall they would go crazy (I interpreted that as meaning nukes). They are already crazy.
I think the game theory here is that Israel must get as close to nuclear war as possible without actually getting there. This way they accomplish a bunch two essential asymmetries:
1. US cannot withdraw support at all. The risk of nuclear war > risk of political backlash. Just keep giving them whatever they need.
2. Hezbollah and surrounding Arab states cannot respond in traditional ways to Israel attacks. They have to do this song and dance where they warn Israel in advance and do something proportional to prevent use the nuclear weapons in response.
That is, unconditional support by the world’s superpower + positioning them as only the aggressor in regional conflict.
Of course, the stakes are nuclear war and potentially civilization in the game they’re playing all so a theocracy the size of New Jersey can annex territory the size of Detroit.
THEWILLMAN: ...all so a theocracy the size of New Jersey can annex territory the size of Detroit.
Ain’t humanity grand?
To be fair, this is just one tribe of psychopaths on the Old System. What would the world be like if the Romans, the Mongols, or the Scythians had had nukes?
The revolution in electronics has made it much easier to build EMP devices. I’m not the only one who noticed. These already could be deployed in tunnels inside Israel. Dry rock/sand/gravel/concrete doesn’t provide a lot of shielding.
‘Even the cockroaches won’t survive’: Expert discusses Hezbollah’s new EMP weapon
Rotem Mey-Tal, CEO of Asgard Systems, a company developing military technology for the defense industry discusses Hezbollah’s new tactic and supply of electromagnetic ordnance.
https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/article-812168
Thanks. An interesting article but it raises more questions than it answers, like can an EMP weapon be carried by a drone. I would guess it is possible as they are delivering mortar shells in Ukraine, but how much mass and weight would one have?
Military electronics are hardened against EMP. Anything that is part of nuclear strike capability (either detection or retaliation) has to meet ridiculously tight requirements. This is part of the reason why a lot of military electronics is so ancient. (Larger transistors are more resilient to high voltage transients and radiation induced single event upsets)
An EMP would not stop Israel from being able to retaliate with a nuclear strike.
I don’t think you can assume anything about the rate of fleeing Israelis based on the linked video of the Ben Gurion departure check-in area. I had the misfortune to be required in Israel in June for a business trip in June and departed on a Friday evening, and it was more crowded than that video by the time the check-in staff opened things up (because everything is closed or has significantly reduced staffing on Fridays/Saturdays a large crowd will accumulate in the departure check in area waiting for the staff to begin processing). While it was clear all the departing flights at that time were full, mostly of Israelis, which was clear due to the separation of security checkpoints and passport control at Ben Gurion and Newark by passport nationality – which I commented on here at the time – the video above is just how things look at Ben Gurion when there are more than a few departures booked for the shift.
That being said, I’ve been on several calls with the Israeli colleagues I work with over the past 24 hours and the mood there is quite tense, up to the point of quietly rescheduling technical things that would normally be handled on typical 24×7 support coverage to be done as quickly as possible, because everyone is anticipating the technical resources may be unavailable in the coming days depending on what form the retaliation (and counter response) will take. Even the coworker who gleefully recorded the air defense ‘fireworks’ in the April strike from Iran from his apartment balcony was obviously worried and wondering if he was going to be unable to make it to Israel next month for a religious holiday.
I occasionally compare the availability of one way direct flights to/from nyc to Tel Aviv. Prices are generally higher going west, but all flights seem to be fully available at the moment. Interestingly, united doesn’t seem to be flying the route now, and I think American used to as well. Delta, which usually has the highest prices, still does the route.
Anyway, the fewer flights all seem to be available now whereas when I looked a few weeks ago there were at times more flights available easterly than westerly. Even then it was always possible to get out at (sometimes hugely) lower prices with one stop. If there’s an exodus it’s not straining capacity.
Great article that has sparked a really good set of contributions. I will subscribe (with money next time you pester me).
Thank you so much!
The world is as close to nuclear disaster as it has ever been!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIc4QWtcLhs
Here’s MacGregor and Daniel Davis. Longer and more in depth than the Judge usually gets on the military/strategic front. For those of us who are into that sort of thing.
MacGregor points out, correctly, in my view, that Russia, China, Pakistan and India will very much NOT like our trying to destroy Iran.
I suspect Russia might threaten to intervene directly. They might send Mr. Kinzhal to visit the USS Eisenhower.
This is MacGregor at his best with sharp, cold, strategic analysis, in my view. If you want to cut to the chase, go to the 35th minute mark.
1) He points out the temporary nature of the Israeli control over the US political system. He points out that Netanyahu probably realizes the US won’t stay beside him, or Israel, forever, and the present time is probably his best chance to get and keep US protection if there’s a war.
2) He points out a pair of massive, historically significant, strategic blunders. Russia in WWI and Germany in WWII. Both of them seriously underestimated their opponents. Those are both true, and I was aware of them as examples, but the detail he provides is completely new to me and absolutely fascinating.
I gather his larger point is for a kind of strategic caution and humility. We don’t know what we don’t know, so opt for a peaceful settlement.
He points out the temporary nature of the Israeli control over the US political system
Can we refer to this as the Epstein Window? It will close/age out eventually, if we have the time.
The Ike is back in Norfolk; Russia isn’t stupid enough to hit it there. The Theodore Roosevelt is now in the Persian Gulf, so it’s the logical target, but even then, I expect that Russia would be far more likely to give Iran weapons and let them pull the trigger.
Good resource for knowing where our sailors are:
http://www.gonavy.jp/CVLocation.html
My bad, I forgot the Houthis wore out the Eisenhower and they needed a break. Longest deployment since WWII, or something crazy like that?
And I saw something today which says that the Abraham Lincoln is now headed from the Pacific to the Middle East to replace the TR (which makes no sense, because the TR just got there a couple of weeks ago). Article also said that the TR had moved out of the Persian Gulf (yay!) to the Gulf of Oman (well, OK…). I’d bet that the TR will remain in the area for a while, which might be a Good Thing (mutual protection, from real or false flag attacks?). Iran would probably view it (2 flattops) as a threatening move, but I think they have the sense not to attack the US directly.
Given that the Zionists have proven to be outright nazis and Ben-Gvir ( “the only problem with the Nazis is that I was on the losing side.”)
has also confirmed this, one could maybe ask the question “what would a Nazi do?”
WW2 and Ukraine have shown that volkssturm is what they do and the zionists/nazis are just shooting the people that try to flee from the war (their own and civilians) and then they go to US, Canada or some puppet state in Latin America.
Is a Volkssturm in the cards before the nuclear weapons?
https://x.com/haaretzcom/status/1637416375378493444
What per cent of the Zionists are outright nazis? What percent of the Zionists voted for Ben-Gvir? Does such fine-grained analysis matter?
Just a few questions:
How many nuclear weapons does Israel have? Eighty? Two hundred and eighty?
How many targets are there for such weapons? Including, say, Egypt’s Aswan High Dam?
How many nuclear weapons can Iran assemble – tomorrow? Three? Five?
How many nuclear detonations could Iran absorb without total civilizational collapse? Five? Ten? Where would the attack refugees go? France?
How many nuclear detonations could Israel absorb without total collapse? Three? Two? Who would stick around to watch? Where would any fleeing population go? Brooklyn?
If Israel collapses and disintegrates as the result of being hit by a couple or three nukes, would the “Israeli government in exile” get to take their remaining nukes with them? To Brooklyn?
Might Israel decide it is in a “Use it or Lose it” situation regarding any remaining nuclear weapons after hitting all primary targets? Would it then just “bounce the rubble” in, say, Cairo?
If Israel itself has been hit a time or two with nukes, will it care at all about drifting fallout washing over what’s left?
If Israel strikes Iran and hits Iranian nuclear facilities and population centers, will Pakistan respond or will that depend on which way the wind is blowing?
Curious minds and all that …
I am concerned that all “dissident” thought leadership is coming from 1) Mearsheimer 2) Macgregor 3) Ritter and 4) Sachs, and primarily though Napolitano’s youtube channel.
Mearsheimer is almost certainly affiliated with the intelligence agencies. Only someone ‘touched’ by the CIA or similar could withstand the blowback from The Israel Lobby with a career intact. Sachs and Macgregor are establishment to their core.
I don’t trust Ritter due to his obvious issues with emotional regulation.
Those of us who have been swimming in dissident internet content for many years have noted that the regime directly targets any dissenting source of information for removal/banning/etc. I am not comfortable with this information situation whatsoever. I wonder who the intended audience of this content is. The American people do not matter whatsoever. I am concerned that these 4 (or at least 3, with Ritter being himself) are effectively an elaborate disinformation operation and the intended audience is within the governments of Iran, China, Russia, etc.
For that matter, you might be in Langley right now trying to discredit alternative viewpoints. I have no evidence, but who needs that?
Your speculation assumes that Russia and China have no independent intelligence services and have to rely on YT content for information. Also you assume that NC and the commentariat are just gullible dupes who cannot place information into significant context, not independently verify information, and evaluate it in an intelligent way.
While healthy skepticism is desirable, you might want to rephrase your post so as not to insult the folks here, unless that is your intention.
I didn’t take what those 4 say on anything very seriously – sometimes there’s some nugget of insight or for understanding the thought alignments within a class of individuals within the US, but their analysis tend to be quite poor and highly influenced by their priors (Macgregor is a right wing nut job on basically all non-Ukraine topics, Mearsheimer doesn’t have the sympathetic imagination to contemplate other countries behaving differently from how the US historically behaved).
Of those in the Napolitano stable, Larry Wilkerson and Alastair Crooke have the most interesting and directly applicable things to say. They were directly engaging at the highest levels, and they tend to be the least tainted by their priors.
Larry Johnson and Ray McGovern also have interesting insights but they’ve been out of the system for a very long time. Sachs is in a different milieu centered around the UN and with economic development, so he has limited direct knowledge about the situation.
I recommend checking out The Cradle and EU, recent talks by Ilan Pappe, Shir Hever, Alon Mizrahi, and Miko Peled. They still have their blind spots and priors, but their analysis is a lot closer to the ground than a bunch of old American men who love to hear themselves talk.
Those are all good sources as well, but it aint either or: it is both and. Survey the sources, evaluate the information and come to your own conclusion, as I stated above. Like it or not, the US and vassals are dominated by a bunch of old white dudes but, they also have some expertise. Or we can “throw the baby out with the bathwater” but that’s not helpful
I’m not, I listen to plenty of their talks and do find interesting insights. But their priors are also very obvious and it can definitely handicap their ability to provide a full analysis of the situation.
But 10 months in, it’s clear to me that the resolution of this issue is mostly going to be on the ground conditions in West Asia. DC opinion havers will simply not matter very much or be expected to deviate outside of the brutally monitored Overton window on Palestine.
So then we largely agree after all: I would also say that being informed about the history is of the utmost importance as well. The history of the late Ottoman Empire, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, then WWI, Sykes-Picot, Mandate Palestine, Balfour, etc. is crucial in understanding the situation as well. Many people are not up to speed on this.
I would highly recommend reading (you probably already have) the late Edward Said, Marwan Barghouti, the folks at Electronic Intifada, and listening to the reports of Palestinian journalist Rami Almeghari for examples. Rami is likely one of the bravest journalists in the world today: he is still alive and I hope he stays safe. According to some accounts over 1,500 journalists have been murdered by Israel in Gaza since Oct. ’23. Israeli journalist Amira Haas has great insights as well.
Yes, I follow most of them and will check out Rami(might be following him under a slightly different name). For history, also check out Justin Podur and East is a Podcast back catalogs.
I have huge respect for Rami Almeghari: he has witnessed some horrific things, had family members murdered by the Israelis and he risks his life every day – and that’s not exaggeration, it’s an understatement. And he still keeps working…
https://www.al-monitor.com/authors/rami-almeghari.html
https://electronicintifada.net/content/crossing-line-interviews-gaza-based-journalist-rami-almeghari/9705
I think you need to get out more. There are a lot more commentators who are skeptical of the status of the US effort to preserve its unipolar project well beyond its sell by date. They appear on many venues: Nima, Garland Nixon, Danny Haiphong, Anya, the Duran, and a ton of less regular broadcasters I can’t recall quickly. They include Larry Wilkerson, Chas Freeman, Ray McGovern, Jacques Baud, Mark Sleboda (more on Urkraine and tends to be limited to Russian outlets), Larry Johnson, Andrei Martyanov, Michael Bremmer. Brian Berletic has his own channel, relies only on Western sources, and documents them below his videos.
Macgregor, Ritter, and Martyanov all write and their written pieces are excellent.
The big problem I have is that so much of the commentary is on video. Being interviewed can too often lead to imprecision and the interviewer taking the subject from topics where the interviewee is very expert to ones where he is on less firm ground. A lot are not willing to be explicit about the limits of their knowledge. I also in particularly see Judge Nap taking interviewee statements that are wrong and propagating them across videos.
On another note: despite the risks of escalation, increased tensions and likelihood of nuclear war – the Anglosphere MassMedia is busy focussing on evil Putin and the prisoner swap, and pushing the drama of Elections Inc. KH and the DT every day ad nauseam. China/Russia evil autocracies, US/UK shining beacons of freedom and democracy. The standards of journalism are impressive eh. Even Edward Bernays would be blown away if he were alive now.
One thing to keep in mind is that Israel using nukes may give NK confidence to do the same. Which puts a huge number of US troops at direct risk. And for US to retaliate in kind would mean direct nuclear confrontation with China as a default. Spiralling madness.
Even more superlative than usual. Thank you! Another ‘July Crisis’, and policymakers as feckless and as prone to discount the risk of a cascade of escalations (and annihilation) as those of 1914.
However, where is the peace movement? We are now as close or closer to midnight as the early 1960s or early 1980s, and yet it has practically vanished. A large section of the so-called Left appear to have become bellicose wingnuts, and ‘intensely relaxed’ about the potential for uncontrollable escalation, especially with a deeply degraded and inept Administration in ‘power’ in Washington. I can just about get my head around that wish respect to Ukraine, but not the Middle East. Many of the comments BTL in today’s article by Mohamad Bazzi indicate that if we do head towards mutual destruction a large section of the erstwhile soft Left will be just as much to blame as anyone else.
What does “left” mean anymore? What does “right” mean? Before WWII, much of the “left” wanted a worker’s revolution to overthrow the bourgeois capitalist state and abolish private property and all that. Political terms have been turned on their head: now “the left” are anti-labor, pro-oligarchy, authoritarian warmongers, just like their “right wing” buddies. The only difference between them are emotional religious/cultural issues like the proverbial Guns, God and Gays. The left is clearly now defined as right-wing, warmongering, corrupt authoritarians with a rainbow bumper sticker and a BLM lawn sign.
“Left” and “Right” are merely proxy terms for political parties, usually used to disparage, but sometimes used to show allegiance.
John and Yoko’s mantra still stands strong – “War is over – IF you want it.” Peace has a chance!
Recall that the anti-Vietnam War movement took a few years to get off the ground because the left had been stunned senseless by hegemonic anti-communism. Even now you run across people who believe the antiwar movement was run by foreign communists. The smears about Putin agents of influence are the present day-version.
Back then, it took a while for people to see clearly: the most powerful nation on the planet was blasting poor farmers to bits, because it felt threatened by villagers living in bamboo huts. It was absurd.
Teach-ins were one of the most powerful tactics of the movement, and public education is still the first step now.
We can also appreciate how effective the Democrats and adjacent groups today have been at shoring up support for war on their left wing by flanking the left with “Our Democracy,” identity politics, and TDS. They were excellent tactics to head off the formation of any left-wing popular movement.
I’ll just note my impression of Bibi from the subdued moment he stated “We are at war” to his latest speaking fiasco in Congress – he seems like a man resigned in full recognition of his fate, or Israel’s fate. I don’t think either of them is insane, rather I think they are sacrificing Israel with their eyes wide open. Everything is stacked against them. There is probably some serious dealing going on using the threat of nukes because Israel has nothing left to lose. A deal could be achieved that prevents nuclear war if Israel disbands and sails off to the four corners leaving the land to Palestine and in exchange maybe Venezuela will, by being so close to the US, be the concession of the BRICS block. I can’t imagine that this sort of a negotiation is not going on. It’s the division of the world at this point. The price for peace. Or it’s my own wishful thinking.
Sounds far too rational for any us leader with influence today, certainly not anybody addicted to aipac income.
I miss Frank Zappa
Dumb All Over
Whoever we are, wherever we’re from
We shoulda noticed by now, our behavior is dumb
And if our chances expect to improve
It’s gonna take a lot more, than trying to remove the other race
Or the other whatever, from the face
Of the planet altogether
They call it THE EARTH, which is a dumb kinda name
But they named it right, cause we behave the same…
We are dumb all over
Dumb all over, yes we are
Dumb all over, near an’ far
Dumb all over, black an’ white
People, we is not wrapped tight
Nerds on the left, nerds on the right
Religious fanatics on the air every night
Saying the Bible tells the story
Makes the details sound real gory
About what to do if the geeks over there
Don’t believe in the book we got over here
You can’t run a race without no feet
An’ pretty soon there won’t be no street
For dummies to jog on or doggies to dog on
Religious fanatics can make it be all gone
I mean it won’t blow up an’ disappear
It’ll just look ugly for a thousand years…
You can’t run a country by a book of religion
Not by a heap or a lump or a smidgen
Of foolish rules of ancient date
Designed to make you all feel great
While you fold, spindle and mutilate
Those unbelievers from a neighboring state
TO ARMS! TO ARMS! Hooray! That’s great
Two legs ain’t bad unless there’s a crate
They ship the parts to mama in
For souvenirs: two ears – Get Down!
Not his, not hers, but what the hey?
The Good Book says: “It’s gotta be that way!”
But their book says: “REVENGE THE CRUSADES!!!!…”
With whips an’ chains an’ hand grenades…”
TWO ARMS? TWO ARMS? Have another and another
Our God says: “There ain’t no other!”
Our God says: “It’s all okay!”
Our God says: “This is the way!”
It says in the book: “Burn and destroy…..”
An’ repent, an’ redeem, an’ revenge, an’ deploy
An’ rumble thee forth to the land of the unbelieving scum on the other side
Cause they don’t go for what’s in the Book
An’ that makes ’em BAD
So verily we must choppeth them up
And stompeth them down
Or rent a nice French bomb
To poof them out of existence
While leaving their real estate just where we need it
To use again for temples in which to praise OUR GOD
“Cause He can really take care of business!”
And when His humble TV servant
With humble white hair and humble glasses and a nice brown suit
And maybe a blond wife who takes phone calls
Tells us Our God says it’s okay to do this stuff, then we gotta do it
Cause if we don’t do it, we ain’t gwine up to hebbin!
(Depending on which book you’re using at the time…)
Can’t use theirs, it don’t work, it’s all lies…… Gotta use mine… Ain’t that right?
That’s what they say – Every night… Every day…
Hey, we can’t really be dumb, if we’re just following God’s Orders
Let’s get serious, God knows what He’s doing
He wrote this book here an’ in the Book He says:
“He made us all to be just like Him,”
So… If we’re dumb… Then God is dumb…
An’ maybe even a little bit ugly on the side
DUMB ALL OVER – a little ugly on the side…..
Frank sums it up. Hard hitting. We humans, so smart and at the same time so dumb. Also at this time good to read George Saunders’ short story Adams. Also, deeply, sums it up. Thanks for this.
If you want stability, the best thing that can happen is if Russia sends a flew plane-loads of S-500/S-400 missile batteries to Iran.
The only thing keeping Bibi in check is the IDF chain of command respecting civilian rule. Make a war with Iran a clear suicide mission, the IDF (hopefully) would not follow Bibi into the abyss
The question remains as to what shape the Resistance response will take? If I were a betting man, I might put my money on “more of the same” — a repeat of the April attack on Israel, with some variations. That attack appears to be paying current dividends in the form of anxiety within Israel, and moral exhaustion is almost certainly a goal of the Resistance. So this time around:
1) Take it up a half order of magnitude. Last time something to the effect of 300 weapons were employed; this time make it 1500, which will hardly make a dent in the arsenal.
2) Prolong the attack, but perhaps not proportionately to the increase in the number of weapons — a bit higher intensity frequency but still over a longer duration.
3) Once again reveal the disposition of their defenses and exhaust them to the extent possible. Make them feel increasingly vulnerable — and make it expensive for them.
4) Save the best stuff for last, for the most part — but perhaps surprise them with a few early deliveries of the fineries.
5) A false start or two might prove a fine mind game. Keep them guessing.
6) In terms of coordination, Hezbollah could keep on doing what it is doing, Ansarullah (or your preferred spelling) might keep the US occupied (reducing their defense support capacity), and the wildcard would then be Hamas — what can they bring to bear at this point in the game?
The main point of the attack would be less to degrade Israel’s war-making capacity (though we may see a more pointed element of that this time) than to continue to diminish the morale and resolve of the Israeli populace, and preferably within the armed forces. You have seen what we were capable of the first time; we have shown we can go beyond that; the next time, it will seem endless.
The “leadership” of Israel are another story. It seems as though nothing short of elimination will deter them.
Of course, Teheran’s calculus (and that of the Resistance) may be entirely different. I am a rank amateur in such matters, I freely admit.
What other options might Iran/the Resistance have? Tit-for-tat assassinations? Taking out one or more high-value military targets?
It is interesting how Americans think. How they fail to perceive vulnerability. Russia has de-electrified Ukraine. Can Israel survive without electricity ?
That oil refinery in Haifa could burn. Does Israel need fossil fuels ?
Jordan could be overthrown and integrated into West Bank. Will US troops fight in Jordan ?
That is without the Straits of Hormuz being closed or UAE being eradicated
What can US do if Turkey invaded Southern Cyprus to protect itself from Hezbollah strikes on Akrotiri ? Invoke Art 5 ?
Or if Russian weapons eradicate Israeli aerodromes in Hezbollah hands ?
Americans are linear and very limited. They do not comprehend the Asian mindset at all
So very true. I would have my eyes on how to convince Azerbaidjan to stop pumping oil to Israel, or Turkyie to stop the flow of oil or blow up that pipeline. Kurds can always be blamed for it… Not that credible, but just saying…
With the Red Sea closed, there will be pressures on Israel – of course, it can escalate, but Israel is more isolated that it appears. Is a bit like Taiwan…
Great post!
I honestly don’t doubt that Israel using a nuke is a real fear – it was a fear in the US military for a long time during the Cold War. But the scenario was always that they would use nukes in desperation if their country was overrun, not as a weapon of choice striking a neighboring country like is currently being war gamed. (Without a doubt if Israel had hypersonic weapons, they would be using them.)
But one wonders what the world reaction would be the very next day if Israel nuked another country. They would become a nuclear pariah. They would be condemned by the whole world. Would that finally force US and EU support to waiver? Or would the US/EU/Israel accept the crown as the new Axis of Evil?
For the US ‘Axis of Evil’ is only an ad campaign, only words. What counts for the US is dominance, and dominance through fear is just fine. After dominance is secured a new ad campaign can be developed incorporating an updated, refined definition of genocide.
“Norman Finkelstein for some time has, with supporting detail, depicting Israel as having gone crazy.” – just to reiterate that point: the BBC interview is from 12 years ago. It is disturbing how relevant it still is. Down to the countries being named as potential victims.
Just a note:
“Israel has five nuclear subs”
Nuclear sub is typically understood to mean submarine with nuclear propulsion, which these Dolphin subs are not. They are diesel electric with AIP fuel cells (though I don’t see that the AIP aspect is needed for Israeli purposes, unless the need is to avoid US/NATO surveillance).
Thank you, Scott.
Do we know that Israel has 5 subs equipped to launch missiles that carry nuclear warheads?
Israel has 5 Dolphin class subs (with one more fitting out, I think–my info could be out of date.) that are widely believed to be capable of launching nuclear cruise missiles. But nothing is known for certainty, as far as I know. The last boat, which may or may not have entered service, is supposed to be quite different from others and believed to have vertical launch capability.
All these were supplied completely free, gratis, courtesy of the German taxpayer – at a billion euros a pop.
On a related note CNN published this tidbit today:
Russia pulled back weapons shipment to Houthis amid US and Saudi pressure
and:
What could the Saudis have said to/threatened with/offered the Russians to discourage them from pursuing this course, provided it is true? The Russian refusal to comment does seem to lend credence to the story.
Erdoğan maybe waiting for Israel to cross the nuke red line so that Türkiye will have grounds to enact a plan which will be disastrous for the West -> taking the rest of Cyprus.
The US stock market sell off today was blamed on fears of a global recession. But why fear a global recession specifically today? Maybe because there real fear of a big war with nukes in an area with strategic energy and shipping concerns.
Could a big stock market conniption fit perhaps wake up the US president?
The markets worldwide started to dive on Wednesday, though. SPY, NASDAQ, NYSE, TSE, Nikkei, etc., have been red since. But yes, captured media would have us believe it’s because the US posted a sharp decline in jobs, higher unemployment, but I think fear of armageddon is more likely.
Can someone with a knowledge of Hebrew clarify this for me: my understanding of the Knesset debate is that any Jewish member of the IDF, police, or a settler colony in the Occupied territories or, at a pinch, any Jew, has the right, or the absolute right, to rape, torture and/or summarily execute any non-Jew in the current state of exception, or even as a matter of course regardless of the prevailing military/political climate?
Would I also be correct in assuming that a white US Christian Zionist of, say, Anglo Saxon origin can, for these purposes, be regarded as a non-Jew and treated accordingly?
Might this category also cover those of Jewish origin who are secular, favour a bi-national or a separate Palestinian state, and/or reject their right to an Israeli Jewish passport on religious grounds or simply on the basis that they are citizens of the US, France, the UK, or wherever?
You might want to take a look at the Talmud, B.
“Only Jews have souls …… all gentile women, without exception, are whores and filth …… even the best of the gentiles should be killed …… killing a goy, any goy, is a mitzvah, a praiseworthy act ……eating with a gentile is like eating with a dog ……gentiles were put on the earth like donkeys, to serve the chosen people ……”
It goes on in a similar vein ad nauseam. Killing, stealing, swindling, lying are wrong, but only so far as other Jews are concerned. Goyim are all fair game and none of this applies.
Then this is the point to be repeated ad nauseum until all the world can sing, “Bye, bye, miss Christian Zi…”
Wellie another fine case of ex ante ideology meets geopolitical reality … and anyone not with a fire brand in their hand pays for it too …
What would the rest of the world think/do if nuclear weapons were used?
I have a great fear that the instant the genie is out of the bottle, then it will open the door to use in other regions, principally thinking of Ukraine. But, India and Pakistan could both take a strike at one another. Not only that, the chaos following any nuclear exchange could open the floodgates for all manner of conventional weapons being used for genocidal/ethnic purging by countries around the world by countries awash in second hand military hardware.
The generation that built and used the first bomb are gone. Most of them were rightfully afraid of it. The generation that lived in the perpetual fear stemming from the Cold War are almost gone. Is our hope to rest in the post baby-boom generation? I’m not encouraged by what I see. (These, after all, are the Reagan generation of “Money for Nothing – I want my MTV”.)
As a working class American, I am very concerned that our government doesn’t care for anything other than profit for the MIC and elite banking systems. There is no relief from the political hyperbole and blatant lies. In one sense, it would be a release/relief if the lines of right and wrong were clearly drawn. A nuke attack MIGHT shake some of the idiots back into reality and clearly redraw the lines, or, it could truly hasten the “end”.
Even a brief study of history tells me that human greed, avarice and, envy will prevail..
BTW, I am a fan of Dire Straits. Money for Nothing is a great song. (And, I still love listening to Sultans of Swing.)
An interesting and disquieting article, followed by many insightful comments. What I missed was any consideration of the Palestinians. Due to Israel’s compactness (its vulnerability of course) and its cheek by jowl relationship to Gaza and the West Bank (not to mentions the 2 million Arab Israelis) a generalised regional war, possibly extending to weapons of mass destruction, would necessarily involve considerable losses to the latter even if the Israeli population itself was eviscerated. Ironic given the ostensible commitment of the Axis of Resistance to liberation of the said Palestinians. And then there is Jerusalem. I think there is a hostage aspect in the mix here.
Intensive precision bombing of non-Palestinian areas, including the use of vacuum bombs protecting property to be occupied by returning Palestinians, followed by lots of boots on the ground provided by international forces composed of the willing may well provide the only appropriate remedy to this running sore which outrages the vast majority of the international community and makes a mockery of international law.
Yves’s analysis is quite convincing, so far as it goes. But Yves does not draw the obvious conclusion – Iran needs its own nuclear deterrent, either home made, or acquired from a third party like Pakistan or DPRK.
Israel probably thinks it could get away with using nuclear weapons – it is currently getting away with brazenly and openly committing genocide, and virtually all US politicians, with very few exceptions, are bought and paid for/ blackmailed whores in Nuttyyahoo’s pocket. The US will just be dragged into a disastrous war on Israel’s coat tails against its own interests.
Further, what are the implications of the first use of nuclear weapons since 1945? We won’t know until it happens, but it would be like throwing a mountain size rock into a pond. Probably every country in the world would want its own nuclear weapons, for starters. Even small countries would be churning out nuclear weapons, dirty bombs, maybe bioweapons as a temporary stop gap. Forget the NPT. And even a relatively small and poor country like DPRK can acquire an impressive nuclear deterrent. This would be the only guarantee of safety in a Hobbesian world.
Even that might prove a side issue, set against the economic/ political/ diplomatic collapse of the US empire. If the US survived such a scenario, it would be greatly diminished. It is unlikely that Russia and China would sit on their hands and watch events play out. The effect on the world economy would be devastating.
Seemingly intractable conflicts like South Africa and Northern Ireland were in fact resolved after a fashion, even if the settlements arrived at were far from perfect. But other colonial disasters like Palestine and Kashmir have just been allowed to fester for decades with no real attempts to resolve them. One possible outcome of the current crisis is that powerful countries may conspire to impose a settlement of them, not on moral or ethical grounds, but because they have simply become too dangerous to be allowed to continue. The 1945 cease fire lines in Europe were frozen in place in a heavy handed fashion for nearly half a century until the collapse of the Soviet Union. Maybe something similar will occur in the Middle East.
But then again, maybe not. Maybe we will all just get a 180,000 degree sun tan instead.