Right Wing Nut House

Would Israel attack Iranian nuclear facilities without the cooperation and approval from the United States?

If they have to, you betchya. But a couple of problems inherent in a positive response to that query is the question of what would be meant by “have to” and the notion that the Israeli Air Force has the ways and means of being successful in any such attack in the first place.

War monger George Bush has apparently rebuffed the Israelis when the Jewish state asked for American cooperation in attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities last May. I frankly don’t understand how that’s possible considering that Seymour Hersh and many others on the left assured us that Bloodthirsty Bush was itching for war with Iran in order to bring about the end times and fulfill the prophecies of the Bible.

Over the last 4 years, lefties like Hersh have predicted a US strike on Iran (or our tacit approval of one by the IDF) so many times I’ve lost count. Is there a faction in the Administration that would love to see us level Nantanz and a few other installations? Absolutely. But there has always been opposition to this move by the real politik crowd who, since getting burned by going along with the neocons on invading Iraq, have asserted themselves on Iran and it appears they have convinced Bush that only in the most dire, last resort circumstances should such a shattering attack be approved.

We won’t go into the pros and cons now. I summarized most of them here if you wish to revisit the familiar. Suffice it to say that attacking Iran would be a monumentally bad idea, a disaster for Iraq, a disaster for the region, and a potential disaster for the world. The only possible justification would be if Iran is on the cusp of constructing a bomb and would have perfected a delivery system - something they are at least a year away from the former and several years away from the latter.

The news reports about Iran having enough nuclear material to build a bomb have been incredibly misleading. There is no evidence that Iran has any facilities to enrich their uranium from its current 3-5% to the 85-90% necessary to make it go boom. The problem is that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Even IAEA lickspittle ElBaradei is worried that he and his group of nuclear enablers cannot guarantee Iran doesn’t have some secret installation that can complete the enrichment process and build a bomb. What is known, however, is that they are not doing it at Nantanz where the centrifuges keep whirling merrily away, creating the raw material of Israel’s destruction.

This, of course, is the $64,000 question and is the reason Israel is so nervous. Another unknown is how far along Iran is in perfecting their plutonium manufacturing process at Arak where there is a heavy water facility. The IAEA inspected the plant last year while it was under construction. Once operational, that plant alone could produce enough plutonium to make 5-6 bombs a year - if the Iranians could master the extraordinarily difficult task of fashioning a weapon from the more efficient nuclear material. Most experts say the Iranians are at least 5 years away from getting the Arak facility up and running and another few years from being capable of building a plutonium device.

But the Israelis are looking at the 250 pounds of enriched uranium sitting in storage knowing it would take just a few months to continue the enrichment process and make Iranian dreams of a bomb come true. That’s if the Iranians had a mind to do so and if they had a facility or facilities that they could keep the prying eyes of the world from discovering what they are doing.

As for the former, the only people willing to debate the “no” position are either still in diapers or are liberals. The latter supposition is a lot trickier and depends on both what we know from history and what we can assume from Iranian statements on their nuclear program.

As for history, we can consider ourselves lucky we can prove the Iranians have a nuclear program at all. We only uncovered its scope when we unmasked the nuclear black market being run by A.Q. Kahn, the “Father of the Pakistani Bomb” who not only supplied hardware to states wanting to get their hands on nuclear weapons but also expertise in the form of rogue nuclear scientists who were assisting several states including North Korea, Iran, and Libya.

What makes Khan’s assistance so significant is that he was not helping these countries to build power reactors or submarine power plants or even really cool experimental stuff that might unlock the nature of the universe. He was helping these nations for one reason and one reason only - to build an atomic weapon. Much of the equipment he loaned or sold these nations - not to mention apparently selling the actual design for a bomb - reveals an unmistakable desire on the part of these nations to acquire nuclear weaponry.

As for statements by the current regime in Iran speaking to their intent; while mouthing nonsense about using their knowledge and technology for “peaceful purposes” they have, out of the other side of their mouths, been a little more forthcoming in their desire to “wipe Israel off the map” and make Iran “a great power.”

Put one and one together and you are left with the unmistakable impression that Iran wants to build a nuke. It would be the height of folly and wishful thinking to believe anything else.

That said, whither Israel? If an Obama Administration will not authorize an Israeli strike or go after Iran itself, where does that leave the Jewish state?

From today’s J-Post:

The IDF is drawing up options for a strike on Iranian nuclear facilities that do not include coordination with the United States, The Jerusalem Post has learned.

While its preference is to coordinate with the US, defense officials have said Israel is preparing a wide range of options for such an operation.

“It is always better to coordinate,” one top Defense Ministry official explained last week. “But we are also preparing options that do not include coordination.”

Israeli officials have said it would be difficult, but not impossible, to launch a strike against Iran without receiving codes from the US Air Force, which controls Iraqi airspace. Israel also asked for the codes in 1991 during the First Gulf War, but the US refused.

Several news reports have claimed recently that US President George W. Bush has refused to give Israel a green light for an attack on Iranian facilities. One such report, published in September in Britain’s Guardian newspaper, claimed that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert requested a green light to attack Iran in May but was refused by Bush.

Just looking at a map will show the difficulties for Israel in attacking Iran without permission to traverse Iraqi airspace. The IAF would have to fly over the entire length of Syria and part of Turkey in order to reach Iranian territory. From there, it is another long leg to hit the main Iranian nuke facilities in central and southwestern Iran. The Israeli air force has the capability but the mission would be incredibly dangerous - virtually a one way trip considering everything. That is - unless the US gave the IDF permission to overfly Iraq.

(Note: An emailer points me to Ed Morrissey’s piece this morning positing another route for the IAF to Iran - down the Red Sea through the Gulf of Aden around the Arabian Sea and finally flying into the Persian Gulf - that’s around the entire Arabian penninsula just to get to the Gulf where there are two good targets; Bushehr and Shiraz - the latter is a missile testing site while the former is the site of a Russian built light water reactor.

But this would really be stretching Israeli refueling capability not to mention that it is a 5500 mile round trip. That much flying time is almost guaranteed to alert Iran to the sortie. As for any other route - overflying Jordan and Saudi Arabia for instance - both nations possess sophisticated air defenses courtesy of Uncle Sam. Without US approval, it is doubtful the Saudis would appreciate so many Israeli planes flying over their territory.)   

Would Obama consent? During the campaign he made the right noises about not taking the military option “off the table” on Iran but realistically, I don’t think an American attack or a green light to Israel are in the cards when he takes office. The downside to an attack is so bad that perhaps the prospect of Iran with nukes wouldn’t look as bad - at least that will probably be the advice he will be getting from everyone but Hillary.

So the question of whether Israel feels it will “have to” bomb Iran will be extraordinarily difficult for the Livni government to puzzle out. Given all that we know about the difficulties facing Israel in carrying out such an attack, the prospects for limited success, the blowback in the form of Hamas and Hezballah increased terrorism, and the certainty that it would further isolate the Jewish state and perhaps even drive a wedge between them and their #1 ally - all of this would lead one to believe that Israel has no intention of attacking Iran and that these leaks are, for all intents and purposes, just for show.

At least that’s the impression one gets from this piece in ToL:

However defence officials played down the reports today, telling The Times that an attack by Israeli forces alone would probably fail to take out all of Iran’s nuclear facilities, which experts say are scattered across several sites, some deep underground.

“That would leave us open to a nuclear attack from Iran’s remaining weapons stock. Israel would likely need the support, the backing, of forces from a Western ally to successfully carry out the operation,” he said.

Except the existential threat to Israel may be so great that they may feel compelled to attack anyway - alone if absolutely necessary.

They and the rest of the world have time, but not much. Postulating that Iran has someplace they could enrich the uranium they already have to bomb making levels, it would still take many months at their current level of technology to accomplish the task. Unanswered questions are whether they have a workable bomb design and more importantly, have been able to configure the bomb to fit atop one of their Shahab missiles. But I doubt whether Israel is going to wait to discover the answers. More likely, once the Iranian nuclear program has passed a certain point of no return, they will consider acting.

Right now, Israeli intelligence pegs that point as the end of 2009.

Yes, campaign promises are a dime a dozen and few people believe most of them.

But even for someone who promised the moon to so many, Barack Obama’s campaign promises are being quietly shelved or thrown under the bus at an unusual rate.

His tax policies are in ruins. And many of his prized ideas are now going to have to be financed through tax increases on every working American or their cost added to the ever ballooning deficit - the result of George Bush’s massive bailouts.

Then there’s his personnel choices which hardly give substance to his call for “change.” The establishmentarians he has hired on to run his national security and economcs shops fall laughably short of any promise for a “fresh breeze” to blow through Washington - more like a fetid wind of revolving door government.

Does this make Obama a failure? Not hardly. In a sense, it might have done more good than we realize at this time. Disabusing the new president of some of his more problematic notions of governance could very well moderate some of his policies and cause him to scale back some of his more grandiose plans on education ($4,000 tax credit in exchange for “community service”), the environment (1 million hybrids on the road by 2015), and most of all, the “middle class tax cut” which could add another half trillion to the deficit.

You could certainly blame some of Obama’s problems on the Bush deficits but not all. Much of Obama’s problem lies with his dishonest accounting of how he was going to pay for his programs to begin with. That, and a shortsightedness about the vagaries of the oil market will now doom almost all of his domestic initiatives to the ash heap.

With oil trading at below $50 bbl and OPEC apparently unwilling to cut production very much, the Obama team is quietly shelving one of the cornerstones of their economic program - a “windfall profits tax” on the oil companies.

Obama’s promise to give every American family a $1,000 “energy rebate” seems to have come a cropper of - what else - reality.

Obama and Biden will enact a windfall profits tax on excessive oil company profits to give American families an immediate $1,000 emergency energy rebate to help families pay rising bills. This relief would be a down payment on the Obama-Biden long-term plan to provide middle-class families with at least $1,000 per year in permanent tax relief.

How about his other tax raising proposal - the one he was going to foist upon the rich? That, too, has gone the way of the dinosaurs as his broken promise will now raise taxes on everybody because he plans to roll back the Bush tax cuts when they expire at the end of 2010.

To argue, as Obama defenders try to do, that this is not a tax increase is laughable. When you pay X amount in taxes one year and the following year you pay Y amount, with Y being a larger sum of money than X, most kindergartners - and maybe even some liberal economists - would call that a tax increase. And those tax cuts affected people in all income brackets - not just Obama’s idea of who is or who isn’t “rich.”

How about those 5,000,000 “green jobs” that were going to be funded by the oil tax revenue that was going to be invested in new technologies? Gone, along with the silly notion that taxing oil companies will create more oil or even bring down the price of the commodity. The market proved more efficient than anything or anyone in the US government in deciding how much people will pay for energy.

Do the math. Obama was expecting hundreds of billions of dollars from this tax to fund his social welfare schemes. He was expecting tens of billions more by increasing taxes on “the rich.” He either must shelve almost all of his program or raise taxes on everybody - substantially.

From Reuters:

President-elect Barack Obama is not planning to implement a windfall profit tax on oil companies because prices have dropped below $80 a barrel, an aide said on Tuesday.

“President-elect Obama announced the policy during the campaign because oil prices were above $80 per barrel,” an aide on Obama’s transition team said. “They are currently below that now and expected to stay below that.”

Oil prices have fallen from a record $147 a barrel in July to under $50 this week.

Obama, who signaled early in his campaign for the White House that he would take an active approach to oil markets as president, had planned to use the revenue from a windfall profits tax to fund a tax rebate for low- and middle-income families struggling with high energy prices.

But the aide said Obama’s presidential campaign had already taken the price drop into account six weeks ago. When Obama laid out his economic plan for the middle class in mid-October, revenue from a windfall profit tax was not included because of the price change, he said.

Oil companies steadfastly opposed a tax, saying it would stifle exploration and innovation.

Obama is whistling past the graveyard if he thinks he can fund the massive giveaway that polls show was the major reason for his electoral win. With trillion dollar deficits staring him in the face it would be fiscal madness to advance the kind of broad based rebate and handout that he so proudly pushed when running for president.

The dash of reality about revenue that this pullback represents calls into question some of  the primary goals of his Administration. Unless he is willing to push marginal tax rates much higher than he said during the campaign, it appears he will have to renege on that promised giveaway  of hundreds of billions of dollars.

There are few human beings on planet earth more annoying than Deepak Chopra, the touchy-feely, New Age Guru whose fetid, gooey, and completely banal nostrums regarding health and healing have reached a new low in the history of civilized thought.

He is, in short, a first class idiot.

To prove my point, Dorothy Rabinowitz writing in the Wall Street Journal caught this fakir blaming America for the attacks in Mumbai:

Soon enough, there was Deepak Chopra, healer, New Age philosopher and digestion guru, advocate of aromatherapy and regular enemas, holding forth on CNN on the meaning of the attacks.

How the ebullient Dr. Chopra had come to be chosen as an authority on terror remains something of a mystery, though the answer may have something to do with his emergence in the recent presidential campaign as a thinker of advanced political views. Also commending him, perhaps, is his well known capacity to cut through all sorts of complexities to make matters simple. No one can fail to grasp the wisdom of a man who has informed us that “If you have happy thoughts, then you make happy molecules.”

In his CNN interview, he was no less clear. What happened in Mumbai, he told the interviewer, was a product of the U.S. war on terrorism, that “our policies, our foreign policies” had alienated the Muslim population, that we had “gone after the wrong people” and inflamed moderates. And “that inflammation then gets organized and appears as this disaster in Bombay.”

All this was a bit too much, evidently, for CNN interviewer Jonathan Mann, who interrupted to note that there were other things going on — matters like the ongoing bitter Pakistan-India struggle over Kashmir — which had caused so much terror and so much violence. “That’s not Washington’s fault,” he pointed out.

Blogger Betsy Newmark has it about right:

It takes a seriously twisted world view to pivot immediately to finding a way to blame America for terrorists storming hotels and other soft targets to gun down people innocently going about their business. Rabinowitz ties this view to the handwringing over a report that the majority of people in the Middle East think that 9/11 was a put-up job done by the United States and Israel.

Reading Chopra’s writings at Huffington Post is a mind altering experiences; you are forced to alter your perception of how anyone could be so remarkably oblivious to their own idiocy.  It is impossible to reconcile in your mind the idea that anyone could take such a lightweight seriously.

For instance:

On November 7, 2008, at 9:45am , I, Deepak Chopra, took a vow of
non-violence in my thoughts, in my speech and in my actions. I, then,
also had an opportunity to ask the almost 500 people attending the plenary session for the Alliance for a New Humanityin Barcelona if they would join me in this commitment.

I first asked them to close their eyes, put their awareness in their hearts and ask themselves honestly and seriously if they were willing to take a vow.

I told them that a vow is a sacred commitment from which there is no going back. It is like a child that is born, who cannot return to the womb.

I told them if they were ready to take this vow, they should stand up.

People stood up, one by one at first, then in groups of twos and threes, and finally in tidal waves, until more than 450 people had stood up and taken the vow.

Following this, everybody agreed to have at least two people in their lives take the vow. The two in turn, would have two others join them in taking the vow. Our immediate goal now is to get 100 Million people across the world to take this vow. In the meantime, we will be setting up ways to measure and support the dramatic effects this tidal wave of shift in consciousness is going to create.

Ahem…their “immediate goal was to get 100 million people across the world to take this vow?” The “dramatic effects of this tidal wave?”This kind of simple minded, feel good sophistry is what Chopra excels in foisting on his legions of worshippers who mistake his syrupy treacle for serious thought.The idea that such a task is even possible would never cross the mind of anyone except a simple minded dolt.

Here’s what passes for political analysis from Chopra commenting on Obama’s election:

The most sober comment came from Obama himself, when he pointed out that his win wasn’t the change the country is seeking but only the chance for change. Happily, he’s wrong in several regards. We will see immediate change globally. The rest of the world breathed a sigh of relief at the end of the neocons’ attempt to create an American military empire.

In the end, the most moving comment came from Sen. John McCain in his concession speech. Like all the candidates who have stood for the Republican cause since the Reagan revolution, McCain couldn’t resist the temptation to employ “junk politics and immorality” in his campaign. But he went out honorably by saying that America “isn’t a country that hides from history.” That hasn’t been true for the past eight years. Let’s hope it’s gloriously true from now on.

So we’ve been “hiding from history” the last 8 years? What planet has this guy been visiting during the Bush Administration? More likely, he hasn’t a clue what history is and therefore believes that sticking ones head in the sand about terrorism and all the evil in the world passes for facing history square in the face.

Chopra delights in trivializing the momentus and obscuring the obvious. One need only read his “political” writings at Huffington Post to become lost in a sea of the most mind boggling shibboleths, inane platitudes, and nauseating screeds against Republicans you can find anywhere on the internet. No one bothers critiquing his thinking anymore because frankly, there is so little in the way of intellectual meat in his scribblings that any such effort isn’t worth the pixels that would be expended in trying to explain the depth of his stupidity.

Read the rest of Rabinowitz’s piece to get a good laugh.