M.A.D. R.I.P.

(If you haven't already done so, please read the Iranian nuke vs. Israeli nuke post, you can consider this post to be a continuation and/or expansion of the points made therein.)

M.A.D. of course stands for Mutual Assured Destruction. It is what passes for sanity these days in international affairs. That said, it is also enjoying over a half-century of success. M.A.D. is the policy that justifies the nuclear arsenals being deployed throughout the world. The Soviet Union had them because the U.S. had them. France and the U.K. had them because the Soviet Union had them. China had them because all of the above had them. India had them because of China, Pakistan because of India. Now we see North Korea has them: they have them because we have them, we're the adversary sitting on the other side of the D.M.Z.

Every nation in possession of nuclear weapons today has them because they're afraid some other nation has them and they're afraid that if they don't similarly arm themselves, their nation may only exist in the future as an entry in a history book.

Every nation but one of course: Israel. Israel has no nuclear-armed adversaries. To be sure, it has adversaries aplenty, arguably of its own making, but it has demonstrated repeatedly now that its military — as provided for by the U.S. taxpayer — is handily capable of defending against any manner of aggression these adversaries are capable of producing.

The other way of saying this is that Israel is the only nuclear nation in the world today that is not employing M.A.D. as the rationale for possessing its nuclear arsenal. Israel is doing something else.

(that's alarming because M.A.D., as policy, works. Israel pursuing some other policy therefore is really terrifying.)

Here is a story by The Sunday Times titled Israel plans nuclear strike on Iran. So if you're wondering why it is I feel compelled to bring this subject up again, there you go. Israeli Prime Minister Ohmert recently acknowledged Israel was in possession of nuclear weapons too, and an entire post could be dedicated to the incredible hypocrisy seen expressed by our media in response, but what is likely a sober and factual report on impending nuclear war takes top billing today.

Israel is set to take the world into nuclear war. And why? We are told time and time again that it is because it can't permit Iran to possess nuclear weapons. The Sunday Times story even trots out the "Israel must be wiped off of the map" quote attributed to Iranian President Ahmadinejad as rationale, even though it's been shown that he never said any such thing. It is being drilled into our heads that a nuclear Iran must mean the end of Israel. That M.A.D., a policy that has kept the world free of nuclear war for over fifty years — and despite the bitterest hostilities between opposing nations — cannot possibly work between Israel and Iran. And so therefore America must attack, or at least, look the other way as Israel attacks in its stead.

Of course, this reasoning is flawed, its conclusion blatantly false. The established precedent is that M.A.D. works. Not only that, the precedent is that nations locked in cold war eventually tire of it and learn to accept the other side. I made this point before: if Iran had gone nuclear back in 1967, the internationally recognized border between Israel and Palestine would undoubtedly be the de facto border today and we'd likely see peace in that part of the world where we now see nothing but war. It is the huge imbalance of power in the region, as made possible by Israel being the sole nuclear power in that part of the world, that makes it possible for racist Jews to continually take land that doesn't belong to them, to do it in the name of God, and then to invoke God's name again as they murder those not of their kind that they find still on the land. It is nothing less than Jewish supremacism, the very mirror-image of the white supremacism so many claim to find abhorrent.

"God says it's our land so we get to kill you." Why is that attitude forgivable over there but not over here? (hint: imagine if more racist whites were running the newsrooms of America)

The alternative to a nuclear Iran was possible several decades ago. The initial impulse of Israel to first build the bomb is understandable I think. This document has been on the web for some time; I am forced to accept it as fact because Israel's policy of strategic ambiguity mandates no alternative narrative be provided (our media is less than worthless in covering such issues of course) and it talks about the Israeli nuclear program beginning in the late 1950's. This is well before the track record of conventional military supremacy for Israel. You're greatly outnumbered so you look for something, anything, to even the odds. Got nukes?

But after 1967, and certainly after 1973, it should have become clear that being a nuclear power was no longer tenable. The weapons weren't required for national defense, and their existence would only inspire others in the region to develop same (what kind of racist ideology would suppose that Muslims would be neither capable of or desirous of doing so in the face of such a threat?) But most importantly, the imbalance of power would seriously impede the ability to craft effective foreign policy. The manner is which the modern state of Israel was created, when combined with the ability afforded by nuclear weapons to totally disregard the reaction from the Muslim world, has made possible a scenario where anger and hatred on all sides can only intensify.

Israel today uses its nuclear weapons much as an alcoholic uses the bottle. As an escape. There are urgent, pressing problems that need to be dealt with, but which are too complex for the existing system of government to deal with, so Israel instead chooses to self-medicate. Israel can't solve the problem it's in, but it can take consolation from the fact that the problems the Muslim nations it is surrounded by are worse (or, that Israel can make them worse). So under the cover of overwhelming military superiority, it takes yet more land away from Palestine and kills still more Palestinians. Like partaking of the bottle, it feels good. And makes worse a problem that was already impossible to solve.

Iran acquiring nuclear weapons would mean taking away the bottle from Israel. Continuing the atrocities in Palestine in the face of a nuclear Iran tomorrow would be akin to the U.S. committing atrocities in Cuba during the Soviet era or China committing atrocities in Taiwan today. It would be prelude to nuclear confrontation.

So I think the crisis here has nothing to do with the security of Israel, but rather, the security of power for those who hold it within Israel. As President Ahmadinejad stated, it is the government of Israel that must be changed, and Iran's acquiring nuclear weapons achieves that not through incineration but by introspection. Up until that point, Israel could get away with demanding that everyone else change as a prerequisite for peace. The Iranian nuke puts an end to that. The Iranian nuke means that Israel will have to start looking at how it can change as well.

That would mean the end of the present government — which clearly is utterly incapable of such a feat — and the end of power for all those who currently reside within that government. And of course, in their eyes this is unacceptable.

So I ask you, what is Israeli policy with respect to the use of nuclear weapons today? It isn't Mutually Assured Destruction, because as I think I've demonstrated, M.A.D. would only benefit the state of Israel, and yet it is about to start a nuclear war in order to see that this policy be preempted. If you were to try to discover what this policy is by reading The New York Times, you'd do well to learn of the policy of strategic ambiguity, but really, the term is meant only to describe the policy by which public relations is handled. I'm talking about the policy that governs the use of Israeli nuclear weapons. We see that they are seriously contemplating starting a nuclear war, so this is more than an entirely legitimate question, it is an urgent one, indeed, this may be the question we need to see answered if we have any hope of surviving this upcoming year.

(if you think that's being overly dramatic, take another look at the map: Iran is literally surrounded by nuclear states: the U.S. is in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Persian Gulf, NATO to the northwest in Turkey, Russia is to the north, Pakistan to the east; China and India each one nation away. The list of things that can go wrong is only exceeded by the number of ways the situation becomes worse than it already is.)

In 2002 the Israeli Embassy in Paris caught fire. It was a notable event for me at the time because of the way it was covered. I was living in New York City at the time; a couple of years earlier I was in California. I lived in a house and I had one of those big satellite dishes that would let me tune in not only to the cable news channels but to the so-called "wild feeds" network television would use to transmit stories from journalists in the field to the network offices in New York or Atlanta. I acquired the dish because the Waco incident (ATF-FBI-DOD vs. Branch Davidians) had revolutionized the way I saw news. I watched the event unfold live on CNN and C-SPAN, only to hear nightly news anchors reduce to the day's events to gibberish, often outright lying in the way they covered the story. I still remember then President Bill Clinton nearly having a nervous breakdown as he admonished the press corps he had assembled in the Yellow Room of the White House for questioning his decision to assault the "compound", actually going so far as to dare any of them to dispute the "fact" that David Koresh was a child molester (as if that, even were it true, would justify what happened that day). I remember it most vividly because it was such an extraordinary event that... we never ever got to watch on television again.

The satellite dish often let me see what really happened, and then watch as the news would have us believe it happened. Weather and sports aside, it isn't hyperbole to say that my experience was that lies were presented as news more often than truth. There was a period of time when the technology was new that you had several minutes — or sometimes even as much as an hour — to see and hear the news as it happens before the censors kick in and the network political officers could arrange for the suitable "spin" and the story emerges in a sanitized, safe-for-public-consumption version.

Anyways, when I moved to New York, I lost the dish. The TV was gone. The web was my only source of news, and the only times I ever got to see the media scramble to sanitize a story again was 9/11, and when the Israeli embassy caught fire in Paris.

The Paris fire was at first headline news. A major event. The Times gave it big print at the top of the page. Drudge gave it that stupid flashing beacon. It had the "this just in" quality of a major air disaster or political assassination. And just as it was beginning to gather momentum, the story stopped. The New York Times, Drudge, and CNN and MSNBC — all of them as far as I could tell — they all just dropped it. My recollection is that for a period of a few hours, it was as if the story simply never happened. And then it was back, but with a far more muted treatment. The Times had originally featured an array of stories on the Paris fire; they often do this for big events. My most specific recollection of the day was one of amazement when I saw that stories that The Times commissioned their own writers to write were gone and replaced by a single A.P. story. And now even that story is nowhere to be found (do a search on nytimes.com for "paris israeli embassy fire" and enjoy 50 hits, not one of them a match.)

Returning to The Third Temple's Holy of Holies for a moment, one of the things that always bothered me about this report was the fact that, though the estimate of the number of weapons varies wildly, what is considered to be the most accurate assessment, that made by Mordechai Vanunu, a technician at Dimona (Israel's secret nuclear weapons lab), is also amongst the highest: 200. Equally disturbing is that this estimate was made in 1985.

You see, in 1985, Israel had a very limited capacity to deliver these weapons. They had nothing resembling our strategic bomber fleet, they had no ICBM's, and they had no subs. They had fighter jets that could be converted to deliver these weapons, but they of course had a very limited range. If your only goal is to deter attack by conventional forces, and then by only a handful of nation states, you require at most a few dozen such weapons. And such a number matches their ability to deliver these weapons at that time: converted fighter bombers operating at a limited range.

So why produce so many weapons when they couldn't possibly ever be deployed during time of war?

The only answer that makes sense is that these weapons were deployed during peacetime.

Again, what is Israel's nuclear policy? It stands alone amongst the nuclear nations of the world in that it doesn't have any adversary that is similarly armed, but that isn't the only thing that makes it unique. It is also a relatively tiny nation. We have these monster hydrogen bombs that are so horrible that a single detonation would likely be all that it takes to destroy the state. Today, Israel has submarines that are almost certainly armed with nuclear weapons. Today, Israel could retaliate against so horrible a strike. But in 1985, and the years before, it couldn't possibly. One or two strikes take out all of the airbases, ergo, no fighter-bombers, ergo, no nuclear response. Their nukes served as a deterrent against conventional assaults, but not against nuclear attack. To deter against that, they needed something else.

The only thing that makes sense is that the bulk of these 200 weapons were forward deployed, in peacetime, throughout the world with emphasis on those nation states capable of carrying out a nuclear attack against Israel. Israel would seek to have weapons already in place in each of these countries, and this is key, without requiring authorization from the central military authority within Israel to see the weapons detonated, so that in the event Israel really was wiped off of the map, retaliation would still be possible.

Of course, for this deterrent to be successful, the nations in which these weapons were forward deployed would need to be advised that this was in fact the case. Which likely means that those occupying the very highest levels of propaganda organs like The New York Times knew about this too.

So when the Israeli embassy in Paris catches fire, the real journalists on staff start covering it like a major news story, until somebody up on high in the newspaper and who understands what is probably in that embassy learns what is happening and moves for a blackout. At these highest-levels of the mainstream media, national security isn't always the foremost concern, unless, of course, it's Israel's national security.

It doesn't seem to me that Israel really ever had to worry about nuclear attack. There was considerable friction with the Soviet Union once upon a time of course but it is very difficult to imagine NATO sitting by idly in the event the USSR launched against Israel, and besides, playing in this game only ensures you're on that list of targets when the day comes. I think the mindset of Israelis, who, rightly or wrongly, see themselves as having just escaped extermination probably is the factor here. The materiel necessary to produce a bomb is easily smuggled in I think, especially when you have diplomatic immunity and all that. Also helpful no doubt is the very practiced role of uber-victim and the skill at twisting any disagreement into a question of anti-Semitism. Challenging the Israeli Ambassador as to the contents of his luggage is probably seen as career suicide, even if barking neutrino detectors herald his arrival at the airport.

So while I think Israel's nuclear program is at best an over-reaction, I can at least understand it. I have no end of things to say about Israeli nukes laying in wait on American soil of course, it's an unacceptable situation that must be addressed immediately and to America's and the world's full satisfaction (it's a safe bet that it isn't just America or France that's hosting these devices), but it is at least plausibly rational behavior on their part, or at least, as rational behavior can be when the various alternative existential realities the bomb presents us with are first factored in.

What I do not understand however, and what is causing me to become increasingly radicalized with regards to all things Israeli, is the way what was originally conceived as a nuclear deterrent is now becoming something else. At the same time Israel is planning to take the world into nuclear war, all new settlements are being built in the West Bank. The announcement of this was cynically timed right before Saddam's assassination in an effort to conceal the fact from America, even though it should be common knowledge to everyone that it is the building of these settlements in particular and the treatment of the Palestinian people in general that is creating most if not all of the conflict in the Middle East, and specifically, served as the catalyst for 9/11 and is a direct cause for our now having lost 3,000 American military personnel in Iraq.

Israel sees what this conflict is doing to America, and what does Israel do? Make it worse for America.

So, one more time: what is Israel's nuclear policy again? Why does the U.S. government always bend over at Israel's command? Why does Israel get first dibs on our tax dollars? Why is Israel able to get away with staffing our newspapers and our television stations with racist Jews who promote the very same hateful ideology Israel carries out as policy in Palestine and elsewhere day in and day out?

I think the answer is crystal clear. Israel's nuclear policy today can be summed up in one word: terrorism. It is the threat to use deadly force against innocent civilians to achieve a political goal. The government of Israel has reasoned that the only way it can survive is by ensuring that Israel remained mired in conflict with Islam, and it can't do that if Islam can fight back, so Israel is telling the world that it alone gets to use nuclear weapons, or else, in the event of their use against Israel by any nation, Israel will retaliate against all nations.

In M.A.D., if nation A launches a nuclear strike against nation B, nation B launches a retaliatory nuclear strike against nation A. It doesn't involve nations C, D & E. It doesn't need to, because its weapons are targetable.

Under Israel's nuclear policy, Israel has no choice but to retaliate against all nations simply because the weapons are already at their targets. And what is vital to understand here is what the nature of the trigger must be. Undoubtedly, the weapons are set to go off if tampered with (allowing them to be disarmed moots their strategic value), but more than that, Israel can not rely on any individual to set them off in the event of an attack on Israel because any number of things can prevent the person so charged from fulfilling his duties (e.g., conscience, illness, capture). What's best for Israel is to have the weapons on a timer, perpetually counting down to oblivion, only to be reset periodically using codes only available from a central authority in Israel. Lose Israel, and you lose the codes. Lose the codes and you lose Washington. Beijing. London. Moscow. Paris.

This I think is the real definition of strategic ambiguity. The ambiguity isn't about whether they have weapons or not. It's about what they're planning to do with them.

So the analysis here is that all of these nations that are now signing on to sanctions (and worse) against Iran are not doing so because they fear the Iranian bomb.

They're doing it because they fear the Israeli bomb.

It is nothing less than nuclear blackmail.

[2007-01-27: Continued here.]