Aug 9, 2006

Israel's Territorial Spoil's Of War On Iran- Oh How We Whine On About It

Israel has argued that the war against Hezbollah's rocket arsenal was a defensive response to the Shi'ite organization's threat to Israeli security, but the evidence points to a much more ambitious objective - the weakening of Iran's deterrent to an attack on its nuclear sites.

Israel has been planning its campaign against Hezbollah's missile arsenal for many months. Matthew Kalman reported from Tel Aviv in the San Francisco Chronicle on July 21, "More than a year ago, a senior Israeli army officer began giving PowerPoint presentations, on an off-the-record basis, to US and other diplomats, journalists and think tanks, setting out the plan for the current operation in revealing detail."


In planning for the destruction of most of Hezbollah's arsenal and prevention of any resupply from Iran, Israel appears to have hoped to eliminate a major reason the US administration had shelved the military option for dealing with Iran's nuclear program - the fear that Israel would suffer massive casualties from Hezbollah's rockets in retaliation for an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities.

One leading expert on Israeli national-defense policy issues believes the aim of the Israeli campaign against Hezbollah was to change the US administration's mind about attacking Iran.

Luttwak, senior adviser to the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, says administration officials have privately dismissed the option of air strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities in the past, citing estimates that a Hezbollah rocket attack in retaliation would kill thousands of people in northern Israel.

But Israeli officials saw a war in Lebanon to destroy Hezbollah's arsenal and prevent further resupply in the future as a way to eliminate that objection to the military option, says Luttwak.

The risk to Israel of launching such an offensive was that it would unleash the very rain of Hezbollah rockets on Israel that it sought to avert. But Luttwak believes the Israelis calculated that they could degrade Hezbollah's rocket forces without too many casualties by striking preemptively.

"They knew that a carefully prepared and coordinated rocket attack by Hezbollah would be much more catastrophic than one carried out under attack by Israel," he said.

Gerald M Steinberg, an Israeli specialist on security affairs at Bar Ilon University who reflects Israeli government thinking, did not allude to the link between destruction of Hezbollah's rocket arsenal and a possible attack on Iran in an interview with Bernard Gwertzman of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York last week. But he did say there is "some expectation" in Israel that after the US congressional elections, President George W Bush "will decide that he has to do what he has to do".

Specialists on Iran and Hezbollah have long believed that the missiles Iran has supplied to Hezbollah were explicitly intended to deter an Israeli attack on Iran. Ephraim Kam, a specialist on Iran at Israel's Jaffe Center for Strategic Studies, wrote in December 2004 that Hezbollah's threat against northern Israel was a key element of Iran's deterrent to a US attack.

Ali Ansari, an associate professor at the University of St Andrews in Scotland and author of a new book on the US confrontation with Iran, was quoted in the Toronto Star on July 30 as saying, "Hezbollah was always Iran's deterrent force against Israel."

Iran has also threatened direct retaliation against Israel with the Shahab-3 missile from Iranian territory. However, Iran may be concerned about the possibility that Israel's Arrow system could intercept most of them, as the Jaffe Center's Kam observed in 2004. That elevates the importance to Iran of Hezbollah's ability to threaten retaliation.

Hezbollah received some Soviet-era Katyusha rockets, with a range of 8 kilometers, and hundreds of longer-range missiles, after Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000. But the Israeli daily Ha'aretz, citing a report by Israeli military intelligence at the time, has reported that the number of missiles and rockets in Hezbollah hands grew to more 12,000 in 2004.

That was when Iranian officials felt that the Bush administration might seriously consider an attack on their nuclear sites, because it knew Iran was poised to begin enrichment of uranium. It was also when Iranian officials began to imply that Hezbollah could retaliate against any attack on Iran, although they have never stated that explicitly.

The first hint of Iranian concern about the possible strategic implications of the Israeli campaign to degrade the Hezbollah missile force in south Lebanon came in a report by Michael Slackman in the New York Times on July 25. Slackman quoted an Iranian official with "close ties to the highest levels of government" as saying, "They want to cut off one of Iran's arms."

The same story quoted Mohsen Rezai, the former head of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, as saying, "Israel and the US knew that as long as Hamas and Hezbollah were there, confronting Iran would be costly" - an obvious reference to the deterrent value of the missiles in Lebanon. "So, to deal with Iran, they first want to eliminate forces close to Iran that are in Lebanon and Palestine."

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's main purpose in meeting with Bush on May 25 was clearly to push the United States to agree to use force, if necessary, to stop Iran's uranium-enrichment program. Four days before the meeting, Olmert told CNN that Iran's "technological threshold" was "very close". In response to a question about US and European diplomacy on the issue, Olmert replied, "I prefer to take the necessary measures to stop it, rather than find out later that my indifference was so dangerous."

At his meeting with Bush, according to Yitzhak Benhorin of Israel's ynetnews, Olmert pressed Bush on Israel's intelligence assessment that Iran would gain the technology necessary to build a bomb within a year and expressed fears that diplomatic efforts were not going to work.

It seems likely that Olmert discussed Israel's plans for degrading Hezbollah's missile capabilities as a way of dramatically reducing the risks involved in an air campaign against Iran's nuclear sites, and that Bush gave his approval. That would account for Olmert's comment to Israeli reporters after the meeting, reported by ynetnews but not by US news media: "I am very, very, very satisfied."

Bush's refusal to do anything to curb Israel's freedom to cause havoc on Lebanon further suggests that he encouraged the Israelis to take advantage of any pretext to launch the offensive. The Israeli plan may have given US Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld new ammunition for advocating a strike on Iran's nuclear sites.

Rumsfeld was the voice of administration policy toward Iran from 2002 to 2004, and he often appeared to be laying the political groundwork for an eventual military attack on Iran. But he has been silenced on the subject of Iran since Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice took over Iran policy in January 2005.

-Excerpt Of An Article By Gareth Porter,Inter Press Service

G. Porter is a historian and national-security policy analyst. His latest book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published in June 2005.

2 comments:

David Wilson said...

man i do so dig it! rant plus boobage? a winning combo to be sure, now if you could just talk some sense you would be a big hit, i mean really big

but all of these conspiracy theories ... oh my, silly eh? really just silly, are you one of those who thinks that Israel really got 10 warnings from the UN and then bombed the observation post on purpose? give your head a shake, Israel is arrogant alright but not that arrogant, no

the real stuff is right there and waiting to be thought about, did i already pass on the message from Esther Lefler in the Toronto Globe: "If Hezbollah laid down its arms, there would be no war. If Israel laid down its arms, there would be no Israel." (?) no harm if i did - it bears repeating

great style man, i love your blogityness and will certainly be back

be well

M1 said...

Hey there David

I just rant about shit where I'm willing to put my easily made money to work. I got millions to lose so I can afford to be wrong. But at the rate I'm going at I'm gonna have to start being a wrong a bit more than never so as to put a speck of a dent in my growing fortunes.

Pertaining to the UN posting that came under attack and of which I posted about here - or somewhere; as in many other thesis forwarded by the meatballians of SMC,I happened to have people directly in the loop d'action. People who were in the direct line of Izzy fire but lived to murmur about it with friends and colleagues. No doubt indeed, the UN posting was on the blunt end of a clear and concise message sent by Israel - and an intentional message it was, devoid of any subtext but for cretins.

You dear Sir, can place your money whenever you find it and where ever you find fit. Perhaps the contrail industry has some intersting IPOs on the tables. Do you get many invitations to partake in IPOs? I'm quite sure you do.

As for If Hezbollah laid down its arms, there would be no war. If Israel laid down its arms, there would be no Israel.
Well, if you wanna spend your hard earned Maritime bucks subscribing to People magazine or high schoolian snippets of cleverity born of narratives derivative of truncated timelines so convenient to, and manufactured by, the clever fellas actually cashing in on them...well, then that too is your prerogative. But I shall remain bewildered by such portfolio-eroding behavior. Hey, maybe some people just like to punish themselves by chronically betting on dud horses and self-hating spouses to avoid the pain of being called both hippy and tin-foily by suburban bloggers working out of shag carpeted basement command centers wired by Dell.

Just because I sometimes pretense to tell it like it mundanely is in my grammarily challenged prose, that doesn't mean I'm necessarily against what belies the propaganda I try to peel back. But often enough that is the fallacious assumption a lot of the LazyBoy sucklings of sales pitchery make, assuming as they do that any discerning attention to the reality underlying propaganda is evidence of an anti-establishment stance...depite the fact that I've been to more backyard BBQs with presidential family members than the genus of Bos.

I buy a lot of consumer goods though I know the advertizing for them is full of bogus representaions of reality. Does awareness of such discrepancies make lil' ol' meatball moi me a conspiracy theorist or does it make the staunch defender of the claims of an Abdominizer commercial a somewhat reactionary character? You seem to suggest you know the answer to that one.

But anyways, I shall spin my tales and pornify them to one of my girlfriend's liking - and the chips will fall where they might fall. But to be fair, I was proven desperately wrong in one particular posting when I claimed Rove was most likely up for indictment. I should have avoided falling into the temptation of posting about something I had no own sources on. But it was nice to be wrong for once.

I could really learn to be comfortable in that zone of fallacy cuz it's populated by so many otherwise entertaining people.

Now don't be a stranger, ya' hear?