Archive for the ‘Nuclear Weapons’ Category
The ‘deterrence’ works mirage
by Speranza ( 91 Comments › )Filed under Ahmadinejad, Cold War, Iran, Israel, Nuclear Weapons at August 31st, 2012 - 11:30 am
Deterrence worked during the Cold War because the U.S.S.R. had no interest in being destroyed in a nuclear exchange even if it meant that the U.S.A. would be destroyed too. Nations such as North Korea and Iran are a whole different story.
by Charles Krauthammer
There are few foreign-policy positions more silly than the assertion without context that “deterrence works.” It is like saying air power works. Well, it worked for Kosovo; it didn’t work over North Vietnam.
It’s like saying city-bombing works. It worked in Japan 1945 (Tokyo through Nagasaki). It didn’t in the London blitz.
The idea that some military technique “works” is meaningless. It depends on the time, the circumstances, the nature of the adversaries. The longbow worked for Henry V. At El Alamein, however, Montgomery chose tanks.
Yet a significant school of American “realists” remains absolutist on deterrence and is increasingly annoyed with those troublesome Israelis who are sowing fear, rattling world markets and risking regional war by threatening a preemptive strike to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Don’t they understand that their fears are grossly exaggerated? After all, didn’t deterrence work during 40 years of Cold War?
Indeed, a few months ago, columnist Fareed Zakaria made that case by citing me writing in defense of deterrence in the early 1980s at the time of the nuclear freeze movement. And yet now, writes Zakaria, Krauthammer (and others on the right) “has decided that deterrence is a lie.”
Nonsense. What I have decided is that deterring Iran is fundamentally different from deterring the Soviet Union. You could rely on the latter but not on the former.
The reasons are obvious and threefold:
(1) The nature of the regime.
Did the Soviet Union in its 70 years ever deploy a suicide bomber? For Iran, as for other jihadists, suicide bombingis routine. Hence the trail of self-immolation, from the 1983 Marine barracks attack in Beirut to the Bulgaria bombing of July 2012.
Iran’s clerical regime rules in the name of a fundamentalist religion for whom the hereafter offers the ultimate rewards. For Soviet communists — thoroughly, militantly atheistic — such thinking was an opiate-laced fairy tale.
For all its global aspirations, the Soviet Union was intensely nationalist. The Islamic Republic sees itself as an instrument of its own brand of Shiite millenarianism — the messianic return of the “hidden Imam.”
[........]
The classic formulation comes from Tehran’s fellow (and rival Sunni) jihadist al-Qaeda: “You love life and we love death.” Try deterring that.
(2) The nature of the grievance.
The Soviet quarrel with America was ideological. Iran’s quarrel with Israel is existential. The Soviets never proclaimed a desire to annihilate the American people. For Iran, the very existence of a Jewish state on Muslim land is a crime, an abomination, a cancer with which no negotiation, no coexistence, no accommodation is possible.
(3) The nature of the target.
America is a nation of 300 million; Israel, 8 million. America is a continental nation; Israel, a speck on the map, at one point eight miles wide. Israel is a “one-bomb country.” Its territory is so tiny, its population so concentrated that, as Iran’s former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani has famously said, “Application of an atomic bomb would not leave anything in Israel but the same thing would just produce damages in the Muslim world.” A tiny nuclear arsenal would do the job.
[........]
This doesn’t mean that the mullahs will necessarily risk terrible carnage to their country in order to destroy Israel irrevocably. But it does mean that the blithe assurance to the contrary — because the Soviets never struck first — is nonsense. The mullahs have a radically different worldview, a radically different grievance and a radically different calculation of the consequences of nuclear war.
The confident belief that they are like the Soviets is a fantasy. That’s why Israel is contemplating a preemptive strike. Israel refuses to trust its very existence to the convenient theories of comfortable analysts living 6,000 miles from its Ground Zero.
Read the rest – The ‘deterrence works’ fantasy
Eric Margolis: Lying Serb-basher and all-around shill for the jihad
by 1389AD ( 23 Comments › )Filed under Al Qaeda, Albania, Balkans, Canada, Iran, Islamic Supremacism, Islamic Terrorism, Kosovo, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Media, Nuclear Weapons, September 11, Serbia at July 19th, 2012 - 12:00 pm
July 16, 2012
The Sun Daily (Malaysia)
Letters to the Editor letters@thesundaily.com:
In your article, One of America’s Finest Hours, it is apparent that Eric Margolis supports the well known phrase by Goebbels, “Tell a lie a hundred time and it becomes the truth.”
On what planet is Margolis living? For the past seven years, four major humanitarian organizations did research on these Balkan Civil Wars and to use their words: “We are having difficulty coming up with 100,000 victims on all sides.” America’s finest hour has been our State Department’s skill at hoodwinking the rest of the world.
Margolis has no evidence that “160,000 Muslims were slaughtered” or that “10,000 Bosnian girls were gang raped.” He supports the Partisan Press that claimed for 8 years that there were “300,000 Bosnian Muslims killed.” He personally used that figure in numerous articles. President Clinton increased that fictitious death count to “350,000″ during his last inaugural address. Margolis makes clear that his finest hour is specializing in yellow journalism and hate speech.
Lies, manipulation, distortions and race baiting by the media have revealed the depth to which Margolis and his ilk will stoop for a byline and prove that few, if any, do any real research. Has political journalism become so difficult that a writer needs to resort to lies, or worse, fiction?
William Dorich, Los Angeles
The writer is the author of six books on Balkan history, including his 1992 book, Kosovo. His current book is Serbia: Faces & Places.
According to Wikipedia, Margolis’ mother is Albanian and he is heavily involved with Pakistani and other Muslim media outlets.
Eric S. Margolis (born 1942 or 1943)[1] is an American-born journalist and writer. For 27 years, ending in 2010,[2] he was a contributing editor to the Toronto Sun[3] chain of newspapers, writing mainly about the Middle East, South Asia and Islam. He contributes to the Huffington Post and appears frequently on Canadian television broadcasts, as well as on CNN.[4] A multinational, he holds residences in New York, Paris, and Banff, Canada.[5] Margolis is the owner of Canadian vitamin manufacturer Jamieson Laboratories.[6]
This is reason enough to boycott Jamieson Laboratories.
Margolis was born in New York City in 1947 to Henry M. Margolis, and Nexhmie Zaimi, an American-Albanian. His father was a New York businessman, restaurant owner, theatrical producer and investor, while his mother was a journalist and author. Eric Margolis holds degrees from the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, the University of Geneva and New York University. During the Vietnam War he enlisted in the U.S. Army.
Margolis writes a regular column for the Huffington Post and also writes for Dawn,[7] an English language Pakistani newspaper, the Gulf Times[8] in Qatar, the Khaleej Times[9] in Dubai, New York Times[10] and The American Conservative[11][12] . He appears regularly on such television outlets as CNN,[4] Fox, CBC,[4] British Sky Broadcasting News, NPR, and CTV.[13][14] He is a regular guest on the TV Ontario’s The Agenda‘[15]‘.
He is affiliated with several organizations including International Institute of Strategic Studies[16] in London and the Institute of Regional Studies[4] based in Islamabad, Pakistan.
[...]
Margolis has argued that the American government may have been behind the 9/11 attacks. On September 10, 2010, in a column on his website[21] Margolis declares “we still do not know the real story about 9/11.” Margolis’ arguments include, the Osama Bin Laden tapes are fakes, questioning why the Air Force didn’t shoot down the planes, asserting a lack of plane wreckage at the Pentagon, and repeating the theory that 9/11 was “staged by Israel’s Mossad and a cabal of right-wing US Air Force generals” without criticizing the theory. While saying there is no “hard evidence” that Americans were behind 9/11, he adds “What, in the end, can we conclude? … The attacks plunged America into wars against the Muslim world and enriched the US arms industry[,] boosted pro-Israel neo-conservatives [and] destroyed one of Israel’s two main enemies.”[22]
[...]
More here.
It gets more interesting.
Captured records show that al-Qaeda bigwigs correctly identified Eric Margolis as a reliable shill for the ummah:
Toronto Sun: Canadian reporters named in al-Qaida spin plans
By Jessica Murphy, Parliamentary Bureau
First posted: Friday, May 04, 2012 02:26 PM EDT | Updated: Friday, May 04, 2012 06:26 PM EDTOTTAWA – Al-Qaida was a “moribund organization” that was “grasping at straws” with a proposed spin campaign to mark the tenth anniversary of 9/11, says a Canadian journalist named by the terror group in newly declassified documents.
“What kind of media blitz is going to make a blip of difference 10 years after the event?” said Gwynne Dyer in an telephone interview from London, England. “But what else was (Osama bin Laden) going to do on the 10th anniversary? Have a drink?”
Dyer, a columnist and broadcaster, and Eric Margolis [emphasis added], a veteran Middle East correspondent, are the two Canadians among a number of journalists cherry-picked by the terror group for the contemplated “media strategy,” according to documents seized in a raid on bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan last year.
Also named were New Yorker contributor Seymour Hersh, Beirut-based Robert Fisk and senior ABC correspondent Brian Ross.
According to the proposed plan, 30 to 50 reporters would have been given a website address and password to access the materials in the run-up to Sept. 11, 2011.
[...]
More here.
What the above Toronto Sun article does not mention is that Sun Media, the parent company of Toronto Sun, had already fired Eric Margolis in July, 2010.
Could the Toronto Sun be ashamed that this foaming-at-the-mouth anti-Semite used to write for them? Or have the current news staffers simply forgotten that he was ever there? How the mighty have fallen!
Eric Margolis, Toronto Sun: Appeaser, Jew-hater or moron?
by Klaus Rohrich
Monday, May 8, 2006Last Sunday’s Toronto Sun featured and article in its comment section by Eric Margolis, the Sun’s foreign correspondent. The gist of the article was that a nuclear Iran posed absolutely no threat to the rest of the world, as the Iranians were A) cognizant of the fact that if they did start a nuclear incident they would be totally annihilated by the Americans and B) Iran did not possess the technological capability to deliver a nuclear weapon to a selected target and C) the Americans and Israelis with their nuclear capability were the real threat to world peace.
In the article Margolis made a number of claims that were highly dubious, if not outright lies and I questioned the competence of the Sun’s fact checkers printing his piece without the usual due diligence. For instance, Margolis claims that he was opposed to the invasion of Iraq in 2002 because he knew that Iraq couldn’t possibly be a threat, even if they were in possession of WMDs, as they did not have the capability to deliver them. Margolis claims that Saddam’s most advance missile could only fly a distance of some 130 kms.
A quick check of the Federation of American Scientists’ (FAS) web site would have revealed that not only did the Iraqis have missiles that went a lot further than what Margolis claims they were capable of, they were actually used against Israel and Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War in 1991. According to the FAS, the Iraqis’ Al Husayn and Al Hijarah scud-type missiles had a range of well over 600 kms, sufficient to reach most of Israel. Short memory or loose ethics?
Margolis also posited that the Mullahs in Iran were from 5-10 years away from perfecting nuclear weapons, so there was no need for the world to get its knickers in a knot. Wasn’t that the same attitude that the Clinton administration had toward North Korea when it attempted to “negotiate” them out of completing a WMD program? Today North Korea is capable of delivering a nuclear warhead to many parts of the United States.
Most galling of all was Margolis’s cavalier rationale why Iran would never nuke Israel. He conceded that the Iranians were capable of hitting Israel as well as some American bases in the Gulf, but claimed they would not do so as any nuclear strike in that region “would blow back on Iran”.
Maybe Margolis was sleeping last week when the chief Iranian nutter, Ahmed Ahmadinejad said they don’t care if there is a nuclear exchange with Israel, as there are only six million Jews (an interesting number) in Israel versus nearly a billion Muslims in the world. Israel could conceivably be eradicated with two or three nukes, as the area that Israel covers is slightly less than that of New Jersey. At its narrowest point Israel is only about 8 miles wide.
Margolis rationalizes that if Iran is really developing nuclear weapons it is for reasons of “national prestige and self-defense”, because Israel and the evil Jews have an estimated 200 nuclear weapons ready to go.
He also dismissed the idea that Iran might give nukes to terrorists, claiming that Iran was at odds with both the Sunnis of Iraq, Al Qaeda, as well as the Taliban. He also explained that nuclear weapons are easy to trace because of each nuke’s unique signature. So if Trenton, New Jersey disappears into a smoking mound of radioactive rubble the Americans will be able to track down the source and obliterate it. My question is if a country loves death as much as many fundamentalist Islamic nations do, what do they care, so long as they inflict grievous harm on the Great Satan, America.
I think Margolis’s anti-Bush, anti-neocon (read that as Jews) and anti-Semitic sentiments have gone to his head and have affected his sense of reason. That’s a shame. But a greater shame is that such drivel finds its way into what was once a fine newspaper.
Klaus Rohrich is senior columnist for Canada Free Press. Klaus also writes topical articles for numerous magazines. He has a regular column on retirementhomes.com and is currently working on his first book dealing with the toxicity of liberalism. His work has been featured on the Drudge Report, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News and Lucianne, among others. He lives and works in a small town outside of Toronto and is an avid student of history. Klaus can be reached at: letters@canadafreepress.com.
Echoes of May 1967
by Speranza ( 165 Comments › )Filed under Ahmadinejad, Cold War, Egypt, History, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Middle East, Nuclear Weapons, Palestinians, United Nations at May 11th, 2012 - 11:30 am
There are eery echoes of May 1967 in the Middle East. Back in 1967 the imperialist fascist dictator of Egypt Gamal Abdel Nasser (wanting to be the head of the Arab world) provoked a conflict with Israel over the Straits of Tiran. Nasser was an Arab Nationalist/Imperialist – but not an Islamist, he was also a Soviet stooge. Gathering in Syria, Iraq, and Jordan – huge Arab armies massed on Israel’s borders threatening genocide. Israel not waiting to be invaded, launched a pre-emptive air strike and in a brilliant military victory (June 5 – 10) was triumphant in the Six Day War. That was is proof positive that the aggressor is not always he who fires the first shot but he who makes war inevitable. One should take note that on June 4, 1967 there were no “occupied territories”. Fast forward 45 years later and replace Nasser with Ahmadinejad (and factor in Hamas, Syria, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah) and we see a similar scenario of genocide enfolding. I still doubt that Israel will launch an attack via the air on Iran (there is no element of surprise) but something is in the works and Obama’s fecklessness is not helping the situation.
by Charles Krauthammer
In May 1967, in brazen violation of previous truce agreements, Egypt ordered U.N. peacekeepers out of the Sinai, marched 120,000 troops to the Israeli border, blockaded Eilat (Israel’s southern outlet to the world’s oceans), abruptly signed a military pact with Jordan and, together with Syria, pledged war for the final destruction of Israel.
May ’67 was Israel’s most fearful, desperate month. The country was surrounded and alone. Previous great-power guarantees proved worthless. A plan to test the blockade with a Western flotilla failed for lack of participants. Time was running out. Forced to protect against invasion by mass mobilization — and with a military consisting overwhelmingly of civilian reservists — life ground to a halt. The country was dying.
On June 5, Israel launched a pre-emptive strike on the Egyptian air force, then proceeded to lightning victories on three fronts. The Six-Day War is legend, but less remembered is that on June 1, the nationalist opposition (Menachem Begin’s Likud precursor) was for the first time ever brought into the government, creating an emergency national-unity coalition.
Everyone understood why. You do not undertake a supremely risky pre-emptive war without the full participation of a broad coalition representing a national consensus.
Forty-five years later, in the middle of the night of May 7-8, 2012, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shocked his country by bringing the main opposition party, Kadima, into a national unity government. Shocking because just hours earlier, the Knesset was expediting a bill to call early elections in September.
[......]
Because for Israelis today, it is May ’67. The dread is not quite as acute: The mood is not despair, just foreboding. Time is running out, but not quite as fast. War is not four days away, but it looms.
Israelis today face the greatest threat to their existence — apocalyptic mullahs publicly pledged to Israel’s annihilation acquiring nuclear weapons — since May ’67. The world is again telling Israelis to do nothing as it looks for a way out. But if such a way is not found — as in ’67 — Israelis know they will once again have to defend themselves, by themselves.
Military Is Ready
Such a fateful decision demands a national consensus. By creating the largest coalition in nearly three decades, Netanyahu is establishing the political premise for a pre-emptive strike, should it come to that. The new government commands an astonishing 94 Knesset seats out of 120, described by one Israeli columnist as a “hundred tons of solid concrete.”
So much for the recent media hype about some great domestic resistance to Netanyahu’s hard line on Iran. Two notable retired intelligence figures were widely covered here for coming out against him. Little noted was that one had been passed over by Netanyahu to be the head of Mossad, while the other had been fired by Netanyahu as Mossad chief (hence the job opening).
For centrist Kadima (it pulled Israel out of Gaza) to join a Likud-led coalition whose defense minister is a former Labor prime minister (who once offered half of Jerusalem to Yasser Arafat) is the very definition of national unity — and refutes the popular “Israel is divided” meme. “Everyone is saying the same thing,” explained one Knesset member, “though there may be a difference of tone.”
To be sure, Netanyahu and Kadima’s Shaul Mofaz offered more prosaic reasons for their merger: national service laws, a new election law and negotiations with the Palestinians. But Netanyahu, the first Likud prime minister to recognize Palestinian statehood, did not need Kadima for him to enter peace talks. For two years he’s been waiting for Mahmoud Abbas to show up at the table. Abbas hasn’t. And won’t. Nothing will change on that front.
Read the rest – Echoes of 1967: Israel unites in 2012
the history f art
by Bunk X ( 137 Comments › )Filed under Academia, Art, Asia, History, Humor, Japan, Nuclear Weapons, OOT, Open thread, Weapons, World at March 24th, 2012 - 9:00 pm
Approximately 200-400 years ago during Japan’s Edo period, an unknown artist created what is easily the most profound demonstration of human aesthetics ever committed to parchment. I am referring to He-Gassen a.k.a. 屁合戦 a.k.a. “the fart war.” In this centuries-old scroll, women and men blow each other off the page with typhoon-like flatulence. Toss this in the face of any philistine who claims that art history is boring.
Ancient Japanese art is a gas – but my hoax-alert antennae are twitching with the reference to “He-Gassen” even though I found another source here. [Found here, h/t Princess Natasha.]
And like a fart in the wind, we’re cranking out an early Saturday edition of
The Overnight Open Thread.
More proof that Obama hates our country: Regime to give military secrets to Russians
by Bob in Breckenridge ( 3 Comments › )Filed under Cold War, Cult of Obama, Military, Nuclear Weapons, Weapons at March 21st, 2012 - 11:00 am
I hate this traitorous POS and his regime more every day, and you should too.
Obama To Give Military Secrets To Russia
Published on TheHill.com on March 20, 2012
President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are increasingly moving to strip America of vital defense capabilities through a web of international treaties and agreements. Already, Clinton is negotiating a code of conduct in outer space that would effectively ban our capacity to destroy satellites and put interceptor missiles in space.
Last week, the president announced that he was going to provide the Russians with detailed technical information about the anti-missile systems he plans to base in Eastern Europe, in the hopes of lessening Russian opposition to their deployment. He is exacting no reciprocal sharing of intelligence, nor can he be sure that Vladimir Putin will not just turn around and forward the gift package to North Korea or Iran.
Reuters noted that “the Obama administration is leaving open the possibility of giving Moscow certain secret data on U.S. interceptor missiles due to help protect Europe from any Iranian missile strike. A deal is being sought by Washington that could include classified data exchange because it is in the U.S. interest to enlist Russia and its radar stations in the missile-defense effort, a Pentagon spokeswoman said Tuesday.”
Defense advocates are especially fearful that these negotiations could lead to a side agreement to limit the velocity of our missile interceptors or place other limits on our anti-missile capability. In the 1990s, the Clinton administration agreed to limit velocity to 3 kilometers per second.
Hank Cooper, who was President Reagan’s ambassador in charge of defending the Strategic Defense Initiative in the Geneva Defense and Space Talks with the Soviet Union and later served as director of the SDI program, said he is worried that “these negotiations might turn into some ‘executive’ agreement that limits the velocity of future improvements to the SM-3 — or other missile defense interceptors.”
He said this would be a “very bad idea — as was demonstrated by the Clinton administration’s side agreement on the margins of the U.N. that limited the velocity of our theater missile defense interceptors. … We got rid of this [agreement] as a byproduct of withdrawing from the ABM Treaty in 2002 — it would be a very bad idea to bring it back in any form.”
Cooper and others argue that Russia already knows our missile velocity from having observed our tests, and that Moscow is seeking these negotiations to tie our hands by prohibiting improvements in our anti-missile technology.
Cooper said “the Russians are not likely to be interested in such an empty concession as sharing our current [velocity at burnout of our anti-missile]. On the other hand, there are other things they would be very interested in and I am not impressed that our current negotiating team can be trusted to keep them secret — or not to trade them away.”
He worries, in particular, that in its zest to “reset” relations with Russia, our negotiators will give away or agree to limit the ability of our interceptors to “track, discriminate and maneuver toward [their] targeted attacking weapon and associated decoys and other countermeasures. I would be very concerned about preserving the confidentiality of our capabilities in that area, and worry about possible ill-advised executive agreements on the associated so-called ‘transparency’ front — especially if they limit potential technological improvements in our defensive systems.”
It is these interceptors that the Obama administration has selected to cope with potential nuclear-armed missiles that might be launched by Iran in the near future to attack the United States or our overseas troops, friends and allies. The close nexus between the Kremlin and Tehran and Pyongyang raises the serious possibility that Russia could compromise our ability to stop their missiles.
Coming on the heels of his New START Treaty that cut our strategic forces while permitting Russia to deploy additional ones, and on top of his proposal to cut our nuclear arsenal by 80 percent with no reciprocity from any of our adversaries, Obama seems intent on disarming our nation.
Sometimes I wonder if Obama knows he is going to be defeated and is embarking on a “scorched-earth” policy to weaken our nation and to hogtie us through international agreements before he leaves office, thus fulfilling the fondest desires of his friends like former terrorist Bill Ayers.
