WarSclerotic

Peres salutes Azerbaijan for foil… JPost – Diplomacy & Politics..

Missile Warfare: A Realistid Assessment – Op-Eds – Israel National News.

Recent discussions around a preemptive strike on Iran have included the possible repercussions of such a move, namely missile attacks on Israel. The threat of ballistic missile warfare is perceived as a paradigm shift capable of radically altering modern warfare.

Those who believe that Middle East battlefields of the future will primarily consist of missile attacks upon Israeli cities therefore argue that Israel must prepare itself for such a situation.

Furthermore, since a missile war relegates ground forces to near irrelevance, they claim, geographical and topographical factors will become of lesser importance.

Yet no war in which missiles were employed – from the Iran-Iraq War to the Second Lebanon War – has ever been won without the additional use of maneuvering ground forces. In other words, the use of missiles has never been a deciding factor in any armed conflict.

This is no coincidence, since missiles have limitations that prevent them from becoming a decisive weapon. Their main limitation is inaccuracy, as most are only capable of landing hundreds of meters off-target. This makes the chance of a precise and direct hit very low.

Another significant limitation regards the physics of the explosion itself. The blast caused by the warhead steeply drops as the distance from the blast center increases. Thus, the actual damage indicates a much more limited threat than what superficially seems to be the case. For example, an air-launched bomb weighing one ton will destroy a building if it hits it directly, while at only 45 meters off-target it will cause medium damage and at 60 meters off-target the damage will most likely be very limited.

There are hundreds of missiles in the Middle East. Syria, for example, has a particularly large array of surface-to-surface missiles with ranges of a few hundred kilometers, most of which are low-accuracy. Considering that longer range missiles cost considerably more, the number of 1,500 km-range missiles (capable of covering the distance between Iran and Israel) is likely to be much smaller than the number of 300 km-range missiles. Furthermore, launch and logistics capacities are complicated by the fact that most ballistic missiles used in the Middle East are liquid fueled, which ultimately decreases the launch rate.

Clearly then, the simultaneous launching of hundreds of ballistic missiles is simply unrealistic.

On a countrywide – or even citywide scale – the expected damages and casualties of such missile attacks are low. A bird’s-eye view of any town will show that due to public areas and numerous spaces between buildings, only a fraction of any area is in fact occupied by buildings. It is therefore likely that an attack by dozens of missiles will only cause a small number of direct hits and result in a relatively small number of casualties.

Nonetheless, the psychological impact of such an attack would be quite significant. And of course, a direct hit to a site or facility containing hazardous materials would drastically challenge this calculus. Such a scenario, in which potential damage is extremely high, warrants a separate discussion.

The largest missile battle that has taken place to date was during World War II, specifically from 1944 to 1945, after Germany completed its development of the V-2 ballistic missile, with a warhead of 980 kg and a range of 320 km. Most missiles were fired on Antwerp (approximately 1,660 missiles) and London (approximately 1,400 missiles). Although this huge number of missiles – 3,060 altogether – caused thousands of deaths, it did not prevent the Allies from reaching Berlin.

Considering the current technological capabilities and limitations of the missiles possessed by Israel’s enemies, it seems likely that the current state of missile warfare will remain unchanged for quite some time. Any efforts to alter this will meet constraints, particularly economic considerations, policies pertaining to the sale of missiles, and organizational and logistical hindrances. For example, Syria’s current stockpile mainly consists of the older, liquid fueled Scud-C and D missiles.

Even if Syria is able to acquire more advanced missiles in the future, it would be incapable of replacing its entire missile arsenal in a short time and would still be limited in firepower to a mix of advanced and old technologies.

Next Generation Ballistic Missiles

The Russian SS-26 is an innovative ballistic missile that represents a dramatic change of capacity for such weapons. It is capable of homing and maneuvering even during the final stage of its flight path. While Russia and the US currently possess this type of missile, no Middle East Arab country has yet been able to obtain such a weapon.

Operational since 2006, the SS-26 maintains an almost pinpoint precision of 5-7 meters at its 280 km range. The export version is not equipped with a homing warhead and therefore has a reduced accuracy of 30-70 meters. The arrival of high-accuracy ballistic missiles to the Middle East theater will change the situation, as such missiles pose a threat to military facilities, such as airfields and army depots, as well as to strategic civilian facilities. High-accuracy tactical ballistic missiles can significantly impact the battlefield on the ground by hitting communications nodes, headquarters, bridges, and so on.

The best response to next-generation ballistic missiles will most likely be a combination of deterrence, active defense and passive protection. Deterrence is central to any missile war. Israel must make it perfectly clear that anyone attacking it with ballistic missiles will be exposing its own vital infrastructure to great peril.

One Israeli F-16 aircraft can carry nine tons of highly-accurate bombs (nine times the payload of a Scud missile). This means that the efficiency of one bombardment mission carried out by a single fighter armed precision guided munitions is several times more destructive than in the past.

The defensive means available are missile-to-missile interceptors, systems designed to jam and disrupt attacking missiles’ homing systems, and improved passive protection of critical facilities and domestic residences.

Conclusion

The threat attributed by the general public to missile warfare is somewhat exaggerated. The menace of ballistic missiles should be presented to the public in a realistic manner.

The belief that territory and type of terrain are unimportant in the age of missiles is a dangerous fallacy. We do not know how future war will look.

While missiles fired at Israel’s cities are just one possible scenario, the use of ballistic missiles has never been a deciding factor in any armed conflict.

BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 161, January 25, 2012
This article is part of a monograph on “The Future Battlefield: Technology’s Impact on Topographical Factors” that will soon be published by the BESA Center.

Brian Stewart: Is there still room for compromise with Iran? – World – CBC News.

Ahmadinejad: Western sanctions c… JPost – Iranian Threat – News.

By REUTERS

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Thursday that his country’s economy would not be damaged by newly imposed Western sanctions, AFP reported. “At one point our trade with Europe was around 90 percent but now it is only approximately 10%, and even this 10% we don’t need… History has shown that the Iranian nation can not be hurt [by Western sanctions],” Ahmadinejad said.

Ahmadinejad’s comment came just one day after he agreed to increase bank interest rates on bank deposits up to 21%, hoping to halt a spiraling currency crisis intensified by the new sanctions.

On Monday, the European Union announced new sanctions on Iran which it hopes will deter Tehran from pursuing its nuclear program. The sanctions, targeting Iran’s vital oil exports and its central bank, will come into full effect by July 1.

The announcement places the EU and the United States on a unified path aimed at damaging the Iranian economy to force Tehran’s compliance with the international community. Sanctions by the two have already hit the Iranian currency; the rial has been steadily losing value against the dollar, prompting extreme intervention measures by Tehran’s central bank.

Turning to the US, Ahmadinejad said that “for the past 30 years the Americans have not been buying oil from us.” He added that Tehran’s central bank has no relations with the US, according to the AFP report.

British daily The Telegraph quoted him as saying that “they have this excuse that Iran is dodging negotiations while it is not the case… Why should we run away from the negotiations?”

Iran’s terror proxy – JPost – Opinion – Editorials.

DEBKAfile, Political Analysis, Espionage, Terrorism, Security.

DEBKAfile Exclusive Report January 25, 2012, 10:27 PM (GMT+02:00)

Saudi Air Force F-15SA fighter-bomber

With its latest acquisitions from Washington and Europe, the Saudi Air Force will have more fighter-bombers of more advanced models that the Israeli Air Force. Deep concern over this was recently relayed by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak to President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Defense Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta.

debkafile‘s Washington and military sources that Israel made its concern known with the utmost discretion so as not to be seen as hampering the expansion of the Saudi Royal Air Force as Riyadh gets set to tackle Tehran should Saudi oil exports be sabotaged by Iranian attacks on its oil production or the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, its primary export outlet.
Last month, the US agreed to sell Saudi Arabia 84 advanced F-15SA fighter-bombers worth $29.4 billion. First deliveries are due in 2015. The package included the upgrading of 70 F-15 planes of the Saudi air fleet. Riyadhis also buying 72 advanced Eurofighter Typhoon fighter bombers. All in all, the oil kingdom will have the largest and most sophisticated fighter-bomber fleet in the Middle East.
Israel leaders reminded the Obama administration of its standing pledge to maintain Israel’s qualitative military edge in the region. The aircraft supplied to the Saudis will place that edge in doubt.
They voiced two additional causes for concern:

1.  One fine day, Saudi Arabia, which has never agreed to peace relations with Israel, may be moved to attack the Jewish state from an air base very close to Israel’s shores. That proximity and the size and quality of its air force will allow dozens of warplanes to penetrate Israel’s air defenses and drop bombs on southern and central Israel.

2.   Israel also fears that four or five Saudi pilots or hired Islamist fliers may one day form an al Qaeda cell inside the Saudi Air Force and conspire to carry out a suicide attack on Israeli cities on the model of al Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, most of whose participants were Saudis.

Israeli intelligence officials in close touch with American counterparts asked them if Washington had asked for Saudi assurances about the reliability of the air crews who will man the new F-15SA planes. They were told that no such guarantees had been requested.
For now, Israel has brought its concerns to the notice of the Obama administration without making specific requests to hold up delivery. Israel is conscious that the Gulf region is on tenterhooks over its security and the Saudis are deep in military preparations to beat back potentially aggressive Iranian moves in the wake of the oil embargo approved by the US and the European Union against Tehran’s nuclear program.
Jerusalem also takes into consideration the importance to the flagging American economy of the huge warplane transaction with the Saudis which will support 50,000 jobs in the US air industry and 600 American contractors of aircraft parts.
Obama will certainly not be approachable on this issue while running for re-election.
But none of these considerations allays the deep anxiety prevailing in the top echelons of Israel’s high military and air command over the radical upgrade awarded Saudi air power providing it with the capacity to outclass and outgun Israel.

Conrad Black: Time for Obama to Grow Some Cojones on Iran.

Huffington Post

Conrad Black

Historian, publisher, and author

American policy in the Near East is bedeviled by both an enforced ambiguity, the product of decades of runaway oil imports and chronic deficits, and a tactical ambivalence. The deficits have placed huge quantities of U.S. Treasury bonds in not necessarily friendly hands.

U.S. and allied efforts in Afghanistan have been severely hampered by the Haqqani faction of terrorists that has been largely directed by America’s former principal ally in the region, Pakistan, which is also the chief source of ammonium nitrate that is the main ingredient in most of the anti-personnel bombs that account for most allied casualties in Afghanistan.

The War on Terror has undoubtedly been retarded by America’s huge oil imports, from which its ambivalent ally, Saudi Arabia, largely gains. And in accord with the governing pact in that country between the House of Saud and the Wahhabi establishment (of radical Islam), a significant part of the oil proceeds are applied to the financing of more than 90 per cent of the world’s Islamic institutions. While most U.S. imports are from Canada and Mexico, the scale of those imports keeps international prices high and prevents those countries from selling more oil internationally and reducing revenues to terrorism-financing countries.

Despite this, the Obama administration has been very sluggish in expanding domestic oil drilling and natural gas production, and has been distracted by ecological militancy as in the cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to the Gulf Coast. The U.S. has been serendipitously served by fortuitous advances in fractional hydraulic drilling (fracking), but is still fussing with windmills and worrying about unfathomable climate change.

These ambiguities have afflicted policy toward Iran’s nuclear program. President Obama started out saying there was “no time to lose” to begin deterring an Iranian nuclear military capability, but also acted as if his presence as president, a non-white semi-Muslim, would obviate previous problems between non-white and Muslim countries with America. This was the burden of his speeches in Cairo and in Ghana at the outset of his administration. He chose a policy of passivity opposite the brutally fraudulent Iranian election in 2009, and gained no reward for it. He and Secretary of State Clinton have effectively preferred Iran’s closest ally, Bashir Assad of Syria, Iran’s closest ally, over his opponents in the Syrian civil war.

Obama has tried to square the circle between his purposeful promises to take preventive action against a nuclear Iran and his determination to stick to soft options. Mrs. Clinton spoke darkly of “crippling sanctions” nearly two years ago and the administration has turned the other cheek again and again following Iranian promotion of terrorist organizations in Iraq and Afghanistan, its support for extreme Hezbollah and Hamas conduct in Lebanon and on the frontiers of Israel, and even an alleged attempt to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States.

In a long-unprecedented display of congressional solidarity, the Senate voted 100-0 for heavy sanctions on Iranian oil and against the Iranian Central Bank. Even more astonishing, though in keeping with its more robust policy toward Colonel Gaddafi, Europe took the lead on sanctions on Iran, though it buys 22 per cent of Iran’s oil exports. After all the president’s huffing and puffing, he intervened heavily to dilute sanctions.

Once again, as if to fulfill the prophecy of banners endlessly waved about on Iranian ships and small craft harassing American vessels in the Straits of Hormuz that crow: “The US Can’t Do a Damn Thing,” the Obama administration is trying to suck and blow at the same time. It has dithered so long it is in a tough election year, and desperately wants to avoid an oil price spike that would affect domestic oil and gas prices, and undercut the extremely tentative economic recovery.

The president wants to discourage the Iranian nuclear option program, but avoid the military option and avoid an increase in oil prices. Libyan oil is coming back into the market, Iraqi production is rising, and the Saudis, ignoring Iranian threats more vigorously than have the Americans, have undertaken to make good any shortfall that arises from sanctions on Iran — and at current prices. The U.S. has warned Israel not to take action against Iran, when the wise tactical course would be to allow a fair degree of sabre-rattling, however reluctant Obama might be to follow up on it.

If America had been more sensible about oil production and imports, it would not be overly concerned about the oil price. If Obama had conceived and started to execute an Iranian nuclear policy in his first days in office, the issue would have been resolved long ago. If the country had not been so profligate, especially in the last three years, the U.S. Treasury would not be quaking in its boots about central banks holding large quantities of U.S. debt agitating the dollar and America’s current account. Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner wrote to Senate armed forces committee chairman Carl Levin that tight sanctions on the Central Bank of Iran would be damaging to the administration’s “carefully phased” approach and might yield a “net economic benefit to the Iranian regime.” This isn’t carefully phased; it is pusillanimous humbug.

Starting three years ago, the administration should have moved to reduce oil imports, impose draconian sanctions, avoid the open artery deficits it has done nothing to contain, assist the Iranian democratic opposition, and become both credible and explicit about a military option. In a speech on December 2, Defense secretary Leon Panetta, faithfully reading from his predecessor, Robert Gates’ song sheet, warned of “unintended consequences,” specifically oil price increases, in the event of a military attack on Iran.

It is inconceivable that the U.S. strategic leadership has not considered what Iranian nuclear military capacity would do to the oil price, to the delicate political balance in the Middle east, to what is left of American alliances in the area, and to the political condition of Israel.

Apart from Europe’s 22 per cent, 27 per cent of Iran’s oil exports are to China, 18 per cent are to India, 16 per cent are to Japan, and 12 per cent are to South Korea. All of these except perhaps China could probably be induced to cooperate with a squeeze on Iran. Under the sanctions adopted, financial access to the U.S. is to be denied to any financial institution and its host country, that buys oil through the Central Bank of Iran, or conducts any business with that bank other than in food, medicine, or medical devices. The president retained the leeway to waive or vary the sanctions where there is an inadequate supply of oil in the market, the country in question is cooperating with the United States, or he judges that to proceed would not be in the national interest of the United States.

The president has moved a second carrier group to the Persian Gulf and a third is nearby, and has pre-positioned to the area the military hardware and personnel necessary for a use of force. Israel has relocated much of its main nuclear facility at Dimona, an indication of a possible war footing (to preserve its nuclear strike capacity from sudden attack), and Premier Netanyahu has said that Iran appears to be “wobbling.” As the Iranian rial has abruptly lost more than 40 per cent of its value, the Iranians have proposed another round in the old charade of having in the U.N. nuclear inspectors. This was Saddam Hussein’s old wheeze.

The United States should assert the naval strength necessary to enforce its sanctions; it could prevent any significant reduction in the flow of oil from other Persian Gulf sources, and the alternate suppliers to Iran should be invoked. Any Iranian recourse to force should be overwhelmingly responded to, as it was by President Reagan in 1988. And if Iranian nuclear development continues, an international air interdiction force should stop it, revisiting Iranian air space with whatever force and frequency are required.

The alternatives are either leaving it to Israel to do the world’s dirty work for it again while the U.S. and Europe abdicate; or doing nothing and allowing this demented theocracy in Tehran to reduce the entire region to chaos while the world wonders what became of its only Super Power. It is time to lead, and never more so than during an election campaign. That is what American presidents do for a living.

Why Iran will not ‘come to its senses’ – Mail Online – Melanie Phillips’s blog.

War with Iran is a truly fearsome prospect.

Its likely consequences would include attacks on US air bases from thousands of Iranian missiles, the unleashing of terrorist attacks within the US and Europe, the rocketing of Israeli towns from the tens of thousands of missiles trained on Israel from Lebanon,  the closing of the Straits of Hormuz thus paralysing western oil supplies, and doubtless other horrors.

But however fearsome this prospect, that of a nuclear-armed Iran is worse. The consequences are simply insupportable.

A regime which has seen itself at war with the west ever since it came to power in 1979, and which has been involved in arguably every major terrorist atrocity against it, will be equipped with nuclear weapons to bring the west to its knees. Working as it does through puppet rogue regimes and terror organisations, it could perpetrate acts of nuclear terrorism – or threaten to do so.

It could mount its long-threatened attempt to wipe Israel off the map, thus provoking a nuclear response to prevent a second genocide of the Jews. Last but by no means least, it will spark a nuclear arms race throughout the region, thus ensuring that nuclear weapons come under the control of some of the most unstable and belligerent regimes on earth. To all these threats and more, the west will be paralysed by Iran’s nuclear capacity, just as it is currently paralysed over North Korea.

This is a nightmare to which the west seems to have woken up only very recently, with the hands on Iran’s nuclear clock fast approaching midnight. Now it has sprung into action. The EU has imposed tough sanctions, including a freeze on the assets of the Iranian central bank within the EU, hitting Iranian oil exports for the first time. With the rial falling on the stock market, Iran threatened to close the straits of Hormuz. The US responded by sailing two aircraft carriers through the Straits. Iran did not close them. The US said Iran had blinked first. Iran said the same of the US.

Now what? The war drums are beating – but is this all just bluff and bluster by the west?

Some think its belated show of strength is just sabre-rattling in a US presidential year. This is unlikely. What’s much more likely is that the west is putting on a show of strength to show Iran that the west ‘really, really means it’ in order to get Iran to ‘come to its senses’.

To which there are three points to make. First, this is all far, far too late. Tough sanctions that would really hurt Iran were being urged years ago, when some of us started warning that Iran’s nuclear programme simply had to be stopped before the situation became dangerously out of control – and were derided as ‘neo-con war-mongers’ for our efforts.

Nothing was done; the UK and EU vaguely wrung their hands and shook the occasional fist; while for his part, Obama advertised US weakness by extending his hand in friendship to the Iranian regime which at the time was busy blowing up American and coalition soldiers in Iraq. Obama’s catastrophic strategy gave the Iranian regime the one thing it needed above all else – time to bring its infernal nuclear programme to fruition. And now we read – surprise, surprise – that the regime has built at Fordow a secret nuclear plant inside a mountain where it is presumed to be impervious to bombing raids.

Second, even these tougher sanctions are likely to be ineffective as they will be circumnavigated by Russia, China and others. And in any event, what exactly is the outcome the west hopes that sanctions will bring about? That Iran shuts down its centrifuges, locks the doors on its nuclear plants and promises it won’t open them ever again and that the IAEA inspectors can set up monitoring stations at Fordow, Natanz and all the other secret nuclear locations which it will now make available for international inspection? Does anyone seriously believe that’s a realistic proposition? And if not that, then what, precisely?

But third, the deeper problem is the west’s assumption that the Iranian regime is capable of ‘coming to its senses’ – its assumption that these are rational actors who ultimately will act in their own interest. Few in the west understand that, on the contrary, the Iranian regime is impervious to reason. Educated, intelligent and cunning they may be – but they are religious fanatics driven by an entirely different set of considerations. That’s what makes this situation so terrifying.

As I have written over and over again, from the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamanei downwards the Iranian regime is dominated by people (adherents of a sect called the ‘Twelvers’) who believe that the Shia messiah, the Mahdi, will return to earth either as result of or to bring about the apocalyptic end of days. It is that apocalypse that they are intent upon facilitating. That is why the argument that ‘they wouldn’t dare launch a nuclear attack because they know half of Iran would be obliterated as a result’ is so fatuous. They would be happy if that were to occur.

Reza Kahlili (a pseudonym) is reportedly a former CIA spy within the Revolutionary Guards. As he has written:

‘Khamenei has been heard to say that the coming of the last Islamic Messiah, the Shiites’ 12th Imam Mahdi, is near and that specific actions need to be taken to protect the Islamic regime for upcoming events. Mahdi, according to Shiite belief, will reappear at the time of Armageddon… Many in the Guards and Basij have been told that the 12th Imam is on earth, facilitated the victory of Hezbollah over Israel in the 2006 war and soon will announce publicly his presence after the needed environment is created.

‘… Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, an influential cleric and a radical Twelver, previously had stated that Khamenei ascends to the sky every year to take direction from Imam Mahdi, and sources close to the cleric have disclosed that Khamenei has been ordered by Imam Mahdi to continue with the nuclear program despite worldwide objection as it will facilitate his coming.’

Last December, Kahlili warned that the previous May Khamenei had ordered the Revolutionary Guards to speed up the nuclear-bomb program and arm Iran’s missiles with nuclear warheads. Now, he wrote, Khamenei had ordered the guards to prepare for war:

‘Though the Islamic regime never should have been allowed to continue with its suppression of its people, its terrorist activities worldwide and its continuation of its missile and nuclear programs despite U.N. sanctions, one cannot imagine a world with nuclear arms in the hands of the jihadists in Iran.

‘With officials from both Israel and the U.S. calling a nuclear-armed Iran a red line, leaving the possibility of a military option on the table, we must realize that the only possible solution to this dilemma is a regime change in Iran, which a majority of Iranians support. The price we pay today to save world peace and security will be minuscule to what the world will pay in the not-so-distant future.’

What really threatens to bring the west to its knees is its own cultural hubris. Refracting everything in the world through the prism of its unshakeable faith in universal reason, it is incapable of recognising or understanding religious fanaticism – and insists instead upon treating the fanatic as a rational actor.  Ironically, it is this belief in reason which has led the west to behave so irrationally in refusing to acknowledge the evidence of the mortal threat to itself posed by Iran — and that there is no alternative to force if it is to be stopped. And now, alas, we’re about to discover the consequences.

A Europe-Iran War – NYTimes.com.

By MARK A. HELLER

TEL AVIV — This week, the European Union went to war against Iran. There was no formal declaration, of course, nor even any undeclared use of military force. But the E.U. decision to place an embargo on Iranian oil imports, ban new contracts, and freeze Iranian Central Bank assets is effectively an act of war and may very well result in the military hostilities that sanctions are meant to forestall.

Oil exports account for over 50 percent of Iranian government revenue and about 80 percent of its hard currency earnings. And the E.U., as a bloc, is Iran’s second-largest customer, taking about a quarter of Iranian exports. Consequently, unless other customers neutralize E.U. actions by stepping up their own purchases from Iran — and indications from China, Japan and South Korea suggest that this is unlikely to be the case — the E.U. decision, coupled with existing American measures, will come close to imposing the “crippling sanctions” that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton threatened but could not deliver without European cooperation.

If that turns out to be the case, then the Iranian regime, already coping with high inflation and a rapidly depreciating currency, will feel constrained to react. One possibility is that it will capitulate and essentially dismantle its nuclear weapons program. That is obviously the outcome that Europeans and others hope sanctions (or even the credible threat of sanctions) will bring about.

But it is at least as likely that Iran, feeling trapped, will lash out in a desperate attempt to frighten the Europeans into backing down or at least introduce so much hysteria into the oil market that price spikes will allow it to earn the same revenue from a reduced volume of exports.

One form this might take would be an attempt to close the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has already threatened to do. But that is probably beyond Iran’s capacity for very long and would in any case also shut down Iran’s own ability to export to whatever markets it manages to retain.

Far less complicated would be sabotage or rocket attacks on refineries, pipelines and other facilities in places like Abqaiq and Ras Tanura in Saudi Arabia. These might be carried out as “false flag” operations by local Shiite insurgents concentrated in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, but nobody would be fooled and the risks of escalation to large-scale conflict with Iran would be significant.

In this scenario, the military confrontation that many Europeans have sought to avoid will become unavoidable, even if Iranian decision makers do not delude themselves into thinking that they would ultimately prevail.

Before such courses of action are discounted as unrealistic scare-mongering or dismissed on grounds that they would be self-defeating, it might be worth recalling that Imperial Japan did not attack the United States because it was physically attacked by the United States but rather because it was being economically squeezed (as Iran may well be squeezed now) to the point where it felt that war was preferable to slow-motion strangulation. And it made no difference that many Japanese military leaders, including Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, chief planner of the attack on Pearl Harbor, believed that Japan’s ultimate defeat was foreordained.

It is difficult to imagine that the E.U. members who adopted the decision on sanctions are unaware of this possible dynamic. Indeed, the very fact that British and French warships accompanied the U.S. aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln on its passage through the Straits and back into the Gulf — in brazen defiance of Iranian warnings — imply the opposite: that E.U. governments, especially the two with the greatest force projection capabilities, are perfectly cognizant of the possible consequences and are prepared to deal with them.

And that suggests that the European Union, notwithstanding its economic travails, is experiencing its own “spring” in foreign and defense policy and that those who tended in the past to dismiss it as a flaccid talking shop capable of little more than vacuous posturing now need to carry out a fundamental reassessment.

Mark A. Heller is principal research associate at the Institute for National Security Studies, Tel Aviv University.

Israel Releases Arrow 3 Photos – Defense/Security – News – Israel National News.

Arrow 3

IDF Photo

The Ministry of Defense on Tuesday released photographs of recent tests of Israel’s “Arrow 3” anti-ballistic missile system.

During the tests, a model of the interceptor missile was launched in order to check the propulsion system, as well as other tracking sensors.

The Arrow 3 system is an upgrade of the Arrow 2 defense system that has been in development with the United States since the 1980s, designed to intercept long-range missiles. The improved Arrow 3 system is cheaper than its Arrow 2 counterpart.

Israel’s concept of a multi-layered missile defense system includes the interception of missiles fired from a long-range, as well as those fired from close or medium-range. If the long-range interceptors are unsuccessful, the lower layers of the defense system will be able to intercept as well.

The Arrow 3 system is said to have similar capabilities as those interception systems present on U.S. Aegis destroyers, being able to intercept missiles at great altitudes and distances.

The timing of the release of the photographs has been taken by analysts to be a message for Iran as international pressure mounts on the Islamic Republic to abandon its drive for nuclear weapons, which Israel says is aimed at the Jewish state’s destruction. Iran has called Israel a “one bomb state.”

“Tehran doesn’t have a nuclear program – it has a program for the destruction of Israel,” Minister of Public Diplomacy Yuli Edelstein told the World Jewish Congress on Tuesday.

“The Iranian regime openly calls for Israel’s destruction, is planning the destruction of Israel, and is working daily to destroy Israel. The lesson says should spur the world to action,” Netanyahu said during a speech for International Holocaust Remembrance day in the plenum on Tuesday.

IDF Chief of Staff Benny Gantz, speaking at a memorial service for the crew of the Dakar Submarine, lost at sea on its way from England to Israel on 9 January 1986, was confident Israel could face down all of its foes.

“I suggest that no one tests our determination,” Gantz said.

Development of the Arrow 3 system, intended to intercept long-range missiles launched at Israel, including those equipped with non-conventional warheads, will continue until the system is declared operational 2014.