WarSclerotic

Will Israel Attack Iran? (And If It Does, Can It Really Stop Tehran’s Nuclear Program?) | Global Spin | TIME.com.

Nir Elias / Reuters

An Israeli air force F-15I fighter flies over an air force pilots’ graduation ceremony at Hatzerim air base in southern Israel Dec. 29, 2011.

In the effort to stir global action against the Iranian nuclear program, Israel has played its hand brilliantly.  Having twice sent fighter-bombers to erase nuclear reactors in hostile states — to Iraq in 1981 and Syria in 2007 — its conspicuous preparations against Iran form a firm flank in the effort to corral world opinion. This week, as the European Union joined the United States in launching exceptionally potent sanctions on Iran’s petroleum industry and central bank, a senior French official explained the urgency as follows:  ”We must do everything possible to avoid an Israeli attack on Iran.”

But could Israel go it alone?

The question is addressed in detail in the latest print edition of TIME. The full article is available to subscribers here. But as quoted by a senior security official, the assessment offered to the cabinet of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last autumn was not altogether encouraging:

“I informed the cabinet we have no ability to hit the Iranian nuclear program in a meaningful way,” the official quoted a senior commander as saying. “If I get the order I will do it, but we don’t have the ability to hit in a meaningful way.”

The key word is”meaningful.” The working assumption behind Israel’s military preparations has been that, to be worth mounting, a strike must be likely to delay Tehran’s nuclear capabilities by at least two years. But given the wide geographic dispersion of Iran’s atomic facilities–combined with the limits of Israel’s air armada–the Jewish State can expect to push back the Iranian program only by a matter of months — a year at most, according to the official, who attributed the estimate to the Atomic Energy Commission that Israel has charged with assessing the likely effect of a strike.

That assessment comes as no surprise to military experts both inside and outside Israel.  ”That’s a perfectly logical calculation, for somebody who actually knows how Israel assesses this,” says Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.  Perhaps the most respected military analyst working stateside, Cordesman went on for a while in our telephone interview about how weary he’d grown of reading back-of-the-envelope estimates of “former Israeli officials.”  The reality, he says, is that the decisive, actual capabilities are known only to the military professionals who have the details in front of them.  Even then, the course of action – in this case, whether Israel will launch the attack it has spent more than a decade equipping and training its military for — will be determined by more than strictly military matters:

Israel is going to act strategically. It’s going to look at the political outcome of what it says and does, not simply measure this in terms of some computer game and what the immediate tactical impact is.

What everyone agrees, however, is that as formidable as the Israeli Air Force is, it simply lacks the capacity to mount the kind of sustained, weeks-long aerial bombardment required to knock down Iran’s nuclear program, with the requisite pauses for damage assessments followed by fresh waves of bombing.  Without forward platforms like air craft carriers, Israel’s air armada must rely on mid-air refueling to reach targets more than 1,000 miles away, and anyone who reads Israel’s order of battle sees it simply doesn’t have but a half dozen or so.  Another drawback noted by analysts is Israel’s inventory of bunker-busting bombs, the sort that penetrate deep into concrete or rock that shield the centrifuge arrays at Natanz and now Fordow, near Qum.  Israel has loads of GBU-28s, which might penetrate Natanz. But only the U.S. Air Force has the 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrator that could take on Fordow, the mountainside redoubt where critics suspect Iran would enrich uranium to military levels.

Still, Israel could launch a surprise strike of a single wave and do significant damage.  And sometime this year it probably will, according to the Israeli author of  ”Will Israel Attack Iran?” the New York Times Magazine story that went online Wednesday.  The piece begins in the high-rise apartment of Defense Minister Ehud Barak and more or less maintains that perspective throughout.  The bottom line is attributed not to an individual or institution but to a state: “Israel believes that these platforms have the capacity to cause enough damage to set the Iranian nuclear project back by three to five years.”

It’s also entirely possible, of course, that Israel’s credible threat to go it alone is both sincere and, at the same time, understood as a wonderfully effective motivator for sanctions and other coercive measures short of war. (Indeed, amid another round of Strait of Hormuz threats by Iranian politicians, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared today that his country was ready to talk about its nuclear program–though he insisted it was not going to give it up.) The world paid a lot more attention than it might have to the Nov. 8 report of the IAEA — the one detailing Iran’s efforts to prepare a nuclear weapon — because in the fortnight before its release, Israel fairly thrummed with debate over whether it should launch an attack.  There’s surely a limit how many times the threat can be made and remain credible. Already, the dynamic between Jerusalem and Washington is being compared to Fred and Grady in  ”Sanford and Son” — “Hold me back!”  But as enriched uranium piles up inside the mountain outside Qum, the calendar may well provide the suspense.

Will Obama Take Ahmadinejad’s Bait? « Commentary Magazine.

Optimists may interpret Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s call for new talks with the United States and Europe about his country’s nuclear program as a sign that international sanctions are working. But the notion that Tehran is looking for a way out of the nuclear standoff is exactly what Ahmadinejad and the ayatollahs who actually run Iran want Washington to believe. With pressure mounting on the Obama administration to implement sanctions on Iran’s Central Bank–a measure that would set in motion a limited embargo on the country’s export of oil–the Islamist regime is hoping to give the president an excuse to back away from the confrontation.

Despite his tough rhetoric on the issue, the Iranians know Obama is caught between two competing dynamics that are both linked to his re-election.

On the one hand, the president knows if he fails to ramp up the pressure on Iran to disavow its nuclear ambitions, he will be handing the Republicans a cudgel with which they can beat him during the campaign as well as endangering his hold on the Jewish vote. Yet on the other hand, implementing an oil embargo–something the administration has already signaled it is uncomfortable with–could result in a spike in oil and gas prices and help send an already shaky economy into another tailspin. Since the president has already sent notes to Iran asking them to return to talks, it could be the Iranians are hoping they can parlay a new round of pointless diplomacy into another year of delay they can use to enrich more uranium and get closer to their nuclear goal. They are clearly hoping Obama will seize upon new talks as a way to finesse his way out of his re-election dilemma.

Given the increasingly muscular tone the administration has taken toward Iran lately that would seem to be a vain hope. But the Iranians remember that Obama came into office convinced the power of his personality could transform the issue. It took the president a full year before he realized this “engagement” policy with Iran would get nowhere. What followed was two years of diplomatic efforts to forge an international coalition to pressure Iran. Though the president again took credit in his State of the Union speech for accomplishing this task, Russia, China and Turkey have all refused to play along and remain opposed to further sanctions, a factor the Iranians are counting on to restrain Obama’s actions. The Iranians have always treated negotiations as a tactic with which they hope to run out the diplomatic clock until the day when they can announce a successful nuclear test, an achievement that may render them invulnerable to pressure.

The administration has, in effect, painted itself into a corner on Iran. It can’t back down now without appearing weak and perhaps obligating Israel to undertake a unilateral attack to prevent Iran from building a bomb. Yet, it fears further sanctions and seems at times to be more worried about the use of force against Iran — by Israel or the West — than it is about the Iranian nuclear threat. Thus, it may hope to try to talk its way out of this problem even if it only means putting off a decision until after November.

That scenario is exactly what Ahmadinejad is hoping will prevail in administration counsels. If it does, it will be a signal victory for Iranian diplomacy and their nuclear ambitions.

First Parachuting Drill in 15 Years – YouTube.

Video: Small Drones in Action – Defense/Security – News – Israel National News.

A new video distributed by the IDF shows one of the smallest drones in the world in action.

The drone, called the Skylark I-LE, is small, lightweight, and can be carried by one person and set up to be ready to fly in less than eight minutes.

The Skylark I-LE has three hours of flight-time with a live video-feed, day and night, in any weather-condition. The Skylark is quiet as a mouse with the eyes of a hawk. It is quickly deployed and quickly recovered.

Former IDF chief: Israel must prepare for possible attack on Iran – Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News.

Gabi Ashkenazi says Israel needs to do all it can to operate under the radar against Tehran, but stresses that military option must be on the table.

By Barak Ravid and DPA

Former IDF chief Gabi Ashkenazi said Thursday that Israel must operate under the radar against Iran, but it should also prepare for a possible strike against the Islamic Republic’s nuclear facilities.

During a lecture at the Institute for National Security Studies, Ashkenazi stressed that Israel’s strategy on Iran must be a combination of several approaches.

	Iranian naval vessels near the Strait of Hormuz, Jan. 3, 2012.
	Photo by: Reuters

“Israel must do all it can under the radar and combine that with paralyzing sanctions, but at the same time keep a reliable military option on the table with the willingness to use it if necessary,” Ashkenazi said.

“When the moment comes I don’t know if we won’t be alone, and for this reason Israel must also rely on itself,” he said.

During his term as IDF chief, Ashkenazi was considered a supporter of a more moderate approach on Iran, in which all diplomatic options must be exhausted before any attack is launched.

Earlier Thursday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said the new round of economic sanctions by the European Union will be “futile,” and added that his country was ready to resume nuclear talks with the six world powers – the U.S., China, Russia, Britain, France and Germany.

Ahmadinejad appeared to downplay the impact of a new round of EU sanctions on Iran, including a ban on oil imports, saying that trade with EU states made up only $23 billion of Iran’s $200 billion annual trade volume.

“Aren’t you ashamed to get together and make such statements. Where do you think you can get with these steps?” Ahmadinejad said.

“They are saying they (EU) do not want to harm the Iranian people, but the steps they take and the language they use are all against the people,” he added.

The EU sanctions, as well as similar measures taken by the United States to force Iran to curb its nuclear activities, are believed to have already had an impact on the Iranian economy, with the national currency, the rial, falling drastically in recent days.

Israeli hacker team brings down Iranian we… JPost – Middle East.

By Screenshot

Israeli hackers brought down Iran’s Press TV website and two websites belonging to the Ministry of Health and Medical Education on Thursday.

The hackers, who call themselves “IDF Team,” said their actions were a response to a series of attacks on Israeli sites the previous day.

Three additional Iranian sites were hacked and their servers altered to display an Israeli flag and anti-Arab text in English.

The website of Press TV, the Iranian regime’s English-language satellite channel, was unavailable for a short period of time following the hackers’ announcement.

“At 16:30 Israel Clock the Iranian Ministry of Health and Medical Education website will be down until further notice. In addition to Iran’s television network, broadcasting in English round-the-clock, based in Tehran that [is] called Press TV will be down until further notice,” the hackers wrote in a message.

“Ahmadinejad what do you have to say about that?” they added.

The attack represents the latest chapter in an Internet feud that began at the start of the month when an Arab hacker published tens of thousands of Israeli credit card numbers.

Earlier, IDF Team told The Jerusalem Post it was preparing a response after the websites of two Israeli hospitals – Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer and the private Assouta hospital network – were taken offline on Wednesday.

IDF Team has played a pivotal part in Israeli counter-strikes on high-profile Arab websites following attacks by Arab hackers. They appear to have employed a combination of attacks to disable the Iranian websites on Thursday, by launching dedicated denial-of-service attacks (DDOS) attacks and breaking into Iranian servers.

On Wednesday, the Haaretz newspaper’s Hebrew-language website was downed by pro-Palestinian hackers. Haaretz said it saw a message claiming responsibility for the attack by hackers calling themselves “Anonymous Palestine.” The website of the financial newspaper The Marker was also unavailable on Wednesday.

Last week, Israeli hackers brought down the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency website and the Abu Dhabi Stock Exchange site, in retaliation for a DDOS attack on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and the El Al websites.

Connecting the Nuclear Dots on Iran | FrontPage Magazine.

(Another serious mention of the EMP option.  There may be more.  I’ll keep searching. – JW)

With the IAEA discussing a dramatic new report from its nuclear inspectors in Iran, are some – such as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – exaggerating the imminence of a nuclear-armed Iran? Or is the U.S. government hopelessly misleading us that the threat is manageable through sanctions and tough talk?

A series of extraordinary leaks in the Israeli press last week revealed an internal debate within Israel’s inner security cabinet over the need to launch a pre-emptive strike on Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons sites.

According to these reports, Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Barak favored the strikes; Vice prime minister and strategic affairs minister Moshe “Bogey” Ya’alon reportedly was opposed. The leaks came on the heels of the third test-launch of a Jericho 3 nuclear-capable strategic missile, and what Israel claimed were long-planned air force exercises over Sardinia to simulate an attack on Iran.

According to former CIA case officer turned novelist Chet Nagle, the Jericho 3 test may have been designed by Israel to send quite a different message than the one being played up in the press.

Any Israeli attack on Iran is sure to make of Israel an international pariah, Nagle argues. Plus, the likelihood of success – that is, in destroying or disabling all of Iran’s nuclear weapons capabilities so they have nothing to launch on the morning after the attack – is low.

“If you’re going to go to all that trouble and be a pariah, why not take one of those Jericho missiles, and detonate it 300 miles above the surface and deliver an EMP strike on Iran?” Nagel says. “That would stop their clock – if it’s electric – as well as all those centrifuges and everything else. Then the Greens can take over the country and we can go back in and rebuild the grid.”

Nagel was speaking with me and other analysts last week at a briefing organized by EMPact America for Congressional staff. His comments, while purely suggestive in nature, hint at a much larger strategic truth: if Israel is going to attack Iran, they have to make sure they totally disable Iran’s ability to launch a nuclear weapon.

How better to achieve that goal than a nuclear electro-magnetic pulse strike that would take down Iran’s power grid – and with it, even secret nuclear weapons plants Israel might fail to hit otherwise?

EMP or not, Israel was certainly making a show of force in an effort to convince Iran to back off its nuclear plans. On that score, from what we see in public at least, Israel had little success.

According to Iranian press reports cited on Sunday by the Debkafile, top Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) commanders in Iran were shaking their fists.

In one unsigned editorial from the IRGC’s Fars news agency, the Guards threatened to utterly destroy Israel with just four missiles if Israel dared to launch any kind of attack on Iran.

Which brings us to the question, what if Iran already had the bomb?

Former IRGC officer and undercover CIA spy, Reza Kahlili, believes Iran acquired nuclear warheads from a former Soviet republic at the end of the Cold War, and has designed its own nuclear warhead with the help of Ukrainian scientists.

As I reported in my 2005 book, Countdown to Crisis: the Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran, IRGC commander Gen. Mohsen Rezai traveled to North Korea in January 1993, seeking assistance in arming those warheads. My informant, a top advisor to Gen. Rezai who later defected (and who spoke with me), said the North Koreans agreed to provide that help.

From that day forward, Iran believed it had a nuclear deterrent – not a strike force, but at least a deterrent – and its behavior changed. The IRGC believed they could carry out aggressive acts against the United States, including a terror alliance with Osama Bin Laden and al Qaeda, and the U.S. would never strike back with any consequence, and certainly would not strike the Iranian homeland.

This week’s IAEA report is only the latest in a series of revelations from the UN nuclear watchdog in Vienna that has documented Iran’s long march toward nuclear weapons.

Despite these reports, nuclear skeptics continue to claim that Iran is hopelessly disorganized, incompetent, incapable, and lacking the will to defy the international community and deploy nuclear weapons.

Just three weeks ago, the same nuclear analyst quoted this week by the Washington Post to sound the alarm about the latest IAEA report on Iran’s nuclear weapons progress, David Albright, was telling folks how the Stuxnet virus had crippled Iran’s ability to enrich uranium.

As they say, what a difference a week makes.

We’ve had Indicators and Warnings of Iran’s nuclear weapons intentions going back twenty-five years.

In late 1986, the Iranian Atomic Energy Agency publicly announced it was signing a “consulting” agreement with a Pakistani metallurgist named AQ Khan. I wrote about this agreement at the time – and continued writing about these Indicators and Warnings as they became known.

In 1992, the Simon Wiesenthal Center asked me to compile this information into a monograph called Weapons of Mass Destruction: the cases Iran, Syria, and Libya. At that time, I was looking at patterns emerging from Iran’s procurement of certain dual-use technologies that were needed for a centrifuge enrichment program.

It was clear to me then, as it was to many others, that Iran had a uranium enrichment program. But the U.S. intelligence community failed to connect the dots. Even in 2005 when I wrote a narrative version of Iran’s nuclear weapons development program in Countdown to Crisis, noteworthy scholars dismissed my information as “sensational” and based on “faulty sources.”

This week’s IAEA report shows beyond a doubt that Iran has cold-tested all the components of a workable nuclear weapon design, as I reported in June. It also shows Iran had significant assistance from a Russian nuclear weapons scientists, who for five years helped Iran to design a nuclear weapons trigger.

Rather than a haphazard effort, Iran’s nuclear weapons research was “managed through a program structure, assisted by advisory bodies, and that, owing to the importance of these efforts, senior Iranian figures featured within this command structure,” the IAEA report found.

The program was run out of a “Scientific Committee” under the auspices of the Defense Ministry’s Education Research Institute, the IAEA found.

The IAEA report also shoots down – yet again – the National Intelligence Council’s fatally flawed 2007 National Intelligence on Iran, which stated at the outset that Iran had stopped nuclear weapons research in 2003. The IAEA found that the research continued, underground and unreported.

And yet, in a recent talk to intelligence community retirees and other guests, the Director of National Intelligence, Lt. Gen. James Clapper, said his fingerprints were “all over” the 2007 NIE and that he stood by it one hundred percent.

How much more information do we need to understand that Iran is hell-bent on acquiring nuclear weapons and threatening to use them against Israel and the United States? How many more dots do we need before our intelligence community and our political leaders connect them to read the words IMMINENT THREAT spelled out just like that, in capital letters?

Iran’s leaders believe the “end of days” is come, and that by annhiliating Israel with a nuclear weapon they can “hasten the return” of the 12^th imam, the Imam Mahdi of Shiite Muslim eschatology.

But in response to Iran’s latest efforts, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the State Department would open a “virtual embassy” to Iran, and gave an interview to the BBC Persian service where she claimed the Obama Administration failed to respond to the June 2009 protests in Iran because their Iran advisors counseled them against it.

Here’s a novel thought: if our intelligence analysts, including those right at the top, fail to connect the dots, why don’t we just fire them?

Israeli ICBM Test Raises Possible EMP Attack on Nuclear Iran > New English Review.

(Finally, SOMEBODY besides myself has acknowledged this option. – JW)

Nuclear weapons and Israel – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

• EMP strike capabilities: Israel allegedly possesses several 1 megaton bombs,^[148][149] which give it a very large EMP attack abilities.^[150] For example, if a megaton class weapon were to be detonated 400 kilometers above Omaha, Nebraska, USA, nearly the entire continental United States would be affected with potentially damaging EMP experience from Boston to Los Angeles and from Chicago to New Orleans.^[151] Similarly, a high altitude airburst could cause serious damage to electrical systems in most of Iran.^[152]

Israeli leaders fear US Iran sanctions ‘not enough’ | The Jewish Chronicle.

“Sanctions insufficient” – Ehud Barak

The round of sanctions against Iran decided upon by the United States and the European Union over the past couple of weeks is unprecedented, but Israeli leaders are still not convinced that they will be enough to force the Iranian regime to forsake its nuclear ambitions.

A day after EU leaders voted to approve a package of sanctions forbidding the purchase of Iranian oil and petrochemical products by the end of June and cutting off all transactions with the main Iranian banks, Defence Minister Ehud Barak insisted in an interview that it would not be enough. “We are not there yet” he said, echoing remarks by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who said last week during a visit to Holland that the European sanctions should take effect immediately.

While the Israeli government is satisfied with the fact that the EU has finally got around to boycotting Iranian oil, the latest assessments of Tehran’s intentions, as articulated in a report by the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, is that the nuclear programme is a key part of Iran’s bid for regional supremacy and will not be abandoned.

Speaking at a cabinet meeting on Sunday, Mr Netanyahu referred to the international Holocaust Remembrance Day taking place this week. He did not mention Iran by name but his intentions were clear when he said: “The difference between 1942 and 2012 is not the absence of enemies – there is still the will to exterminate the Jewish people and its state. That will has not changed, what has changed is our ability to defend ourselves, and the determination to do so.”

Israeli analysts see the next few months as a critical interval in which Iran is planning to move vital components of its uranium-enrichment process into a new underground facility. This will make a strike much more difficult and give the Iranians the option to “break-out” to military nuclear capability in a matter of weeks. This scenario has caused fears in Washington of an imminent Israeli attack.

Last week, General Martin Dempsey, the new chairman of the American Joint Chiefs of Staff, visited Israel for a round of meetings with political leaders and security chiefs, in a bid to restrain Israel from attacking without prior co-ordination with the Obama administration.

General Dempsey was politely rebuffed and told that Israel reserved the right to attack at will, and would give the Americans notice of only 12 hours.

Meanwhile, tension has grown this week over the Strait of Hormuz. After Iran threatened to close the strategic waterway through which 20 per cent of the world’s oil is transported, on Monday a US aircraft carrier, along with British and French ships, sailed through the Strait. This has given Israelis a ray of hope that the US would take the initiative and attack Iran itself. “The Americans think we will attack and we are now thinking that there is a good chance they will do it,” said one defence source.