I read the article in the Atlantic about Israel attacking Iran by Jeffrey Goldberg. It attempted to be a propaganda piece on Israel and their dire predicament in the Middle East. The same Israel that possesses 100 nuclear warheads. They are truly in mortal danger from Iran. By the way, Mr Goldberg, who served in the Israeli Army, wrote an article in 2002 saying that Sadaam Hussein had links to al Qaeda, so we know he never gets his facts mixed up with lies and propaganda. The article actually makes Netenyahu look like a nutjob seeking his 100 year old daddy’s approval. His “reasoning” for going to war with Iran is based on emotional proclamations about the Holocaust. When you don’t have facts to back up your position, fall back on mushroom clouds and the holocaust. That is the Israeli playbook.

Mr. Wright does a fantastic job pointing out that all of the Israeli arguments for attacking Iran are weak, invalid, and based upon false propaganda. The Israelis don’t care. They are on a mission to destroy Iran. They know that Obama is a weak man. They will attack without his approval and force him into conflict with Iran. Obama, being the weak political hack that he is, may actually think an attack will benefit him politically. When your domestic agenda is in tatters, find a foreign bogeyman to distract the masses. The Jewish controlled media in the US supports war with Iran. They blare the propaganda from the loudspeakers 24 hours a day.

 News stories are slanted to make the masses think Iran is actually a threat to the US. Recent polls show 60% approval for attacking Iran. It is beyond delusional that a country that spends $2.5 billion per year on their military is a threat to a country that spends $895 billion per year on their military. Our military spends $2.5 billion on toilet seats.

The part of the story that no one addresses are the unintended consequences of attacking Iran. Neo-cons aren’t big on thinking through the consequences of their actions. It gets too messy for their neat little world domination game of Risk. Before I get to the unintended consequences, let’s address the known consequences:

• The US military is already fighting 2 wars and has stretched our soldiers beyond the breaking point. I wonder if the neo-cons are ready to re-institute the draft for more cannon fodder. It is much easier to set up recruiting stations in poor neighborhoods where youth unemployment is 50%. See, there are benefits to a depression.
• We’ve borrowed $1.067 trillion from the Chinese to fight our two current wars of choice. How many more billions will it cost to destroy Iran. Maybe we should ask Donald Rumsfeld.  Secretary Rumsfeld estimated the costs of the Iraq War to be in the range of $50 to $60 billion, a portion of which they believed would be financed by other countries. Pretty close for a government bureaucrat.
• The combination of further borrowing with a definite spike in oil prices to over $100 a barrel would be the final nail in the coffin for the US Economy. A deep lasting Depression would ensue and unemployment would soar.

There is no doubt that air strikes by Israel and/or the US would set back the Iranian nuclear program for years. The MSM would declare success and the Neo-cons on Fox News would be doing back flips. Then reality would set in. the Iranian leaders have plenty of options to make life really miserable for the US and Israel. Here are possible unintended consequences:

• Iran would immediately launch a torrent of  long range missiles into the Green Zone and other US bases in Iraq where 65,000 troops sit. Thousands of American casualties would result.
• Iranian fighter jets would launch Exocet missiles at every oil tanker within reach in the Strait of Hormuz and possibly block the Strait.
• Iranians would unleash thousands of mines into the Strait of Hormuz, effectively stopping the shipments of oil to the world.
• Iranian fighters would fire their Russian built Sunburn missiles that fly just above the surface of the water and sink a couple of our multi-billion dollar aircraft carriers.
• Insurgents in Iraq would start blowing up everything that moved in Baghdad. Shias and Sunnis would be at war within hours of the attack on Iran.
• Hezbollah would launch thousands of missiles into Israel and the all out war would resume in Lebanon and Gaza.
• Venezuela would declare an oil embargo on the US. Gas prices in the US would go from $2.75 to $5.00 overnight.
• Pro-Iranian factions within Pakistan would topple the American supported President. Nuclear weapons would now be in the hands of Iranian sympathizers. India would immediately mobilize for possible war.
• Pro-Iranian factions within Saudi Arabia and other unstable Middle East countries would unleash their fury on anyone supporting Israel or the US.
• Russia and China would condemn the actions of the US and Israel and offer no support within the United Nations.
• North Korea would use this opportunity to ratchet up tensions with South Korea and possible war.
• If the oil flow from the Middle East is interrupted for longer than a week, the US economy will come to a grinding halt. Gas lines will form. Riots would ensue when food is unable to be transported to grocery stores.
• $200 oil would break the back of the fragile US economic system. Gold prices would soar.
• Muslims in Europe would take to the streets in violent protests.
• Sleeper cells of Muslim terrorists would be activated in the US and bombs would go off on subways and in shopping malls.

Will all of these things happen? No. Will some of them happen? Yes. Are there other possible consequences I haven’t considered? Yes. An attack on Iran would be an extremely stupid thing to do with the world economic situation so fragile and tensions already high. I believe it will happen in the near future. I also believe it will mark the start of the violent portion of the Fourth Turning. Below is a link to a war game conducted by the Brookings Institute earlier this year. Enjoy.  

http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Files/rc/reports/2010/02_iran_israel_strike_pollack/02_iran_israel_strike_pollack.pdf

August 17, 2010, 9:00 pm

Why Not to Bomb Iran

The article wasn’t an argument for bombing, just a report on Israel’s state of mind. So why all the outrage — why, for example, did Glenn Greenwald of Salon title his slashing assessment of the Atlantic article “How Propaganda Works: Exhibit A”?

In part because the author of the article is Jeffrey Goldberg, who has previously been accused of pushing a pro-war agenda via ostensibly reportorial journalism. His 2002 New Yorker piece claiming to have found evidence linking Saddam Hussein to al Qaeda is remembered on the left as a monument to consequential wrongness. And suspicions of Goldberg’s motivations only grow when he writes about Israel. He served in the Israeli army, and he has more than once been accused of channeling Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu.

There is certainly a bit of channeling in Goldberg’s Atlantic piece. For example: “Netanyahu’s belief is that Iran is not Israel’s problem alone; it is the world’s problem, and the world, led by the United States, is duty-bound to grapple with it.” Still, the piece is no simple propaganda exercise. Indeed, what’s striking is that, for all the space given to the views of hawkish Israeli officials, they don’t wind up looking very good, and neither does their case for bombing Iran. The overall impression is that, as Paul Pillar, a former C.I.A. official, put it after reading Goldberg’s piece, Israel’s inclination to attack Iran is “more a matter of the amygdala and emotion than of the cortex and thought.”

For starters, Netanyahu comes off in Goldberg’s article as so psychologically enslaved by his uberhawk father as to be incapable of making autonomous policy decisions. (One Israeli politician told Goldberg that there can be no two-state solution until the 100-year-old father dies.) So the elder Netanyahu’s manifest enthusiasm for military action against Iran may be one of the most powerful forces behind it. This shouldn’t inspire American confidence in such a policy — and one thing the Atlantic article drives home is that Israel very much wants America to support air strikes or, better yet, actually conduct them.

The debate becomes about who should bomb Iran, not about whether Iran should be bombed.

When the subject turns from Netanyahu’s psychology to Israel’s psychology, the inclination to bomb Iran still looks none too cerebral. One of the prime movers behind it is that Israel’s regional nuclear monopoly has “near-sanctity, in the public’s mind” because it has “allowed the Jewish state to recover from the wounds of the Holocaust.” This is an understandable reaction to the trauma of the Shoah, and it helps explain the political pressure to bomb Iran, but it’s not a sound strategic reason to do so.

Memory of the Holocaust also, of course, informs Israel’s Iran policy in another way. “The Jews had no power to stop Hitler from annihilating us,” an anonymous Israeli official tells Goldberg. “Today, 6 million Jews live in Israel, and someone is threatening them with annihilation. But now we have the power to stop them. Bibi knows that this is the choice.”

Actually, my own sources tell me that, though many Israelis take seriously this prospect of Iran trying to annihilate them, Israel’s policy elites by and large don’t. They realize that Iranian leaders aren’t suicidal and so wouldn’t launch a nuclear strike against a country with at least 100 nukes. On close reading, as others have noted, the Atlantic piece suggests that this sober view indeed prevails in Israel’s higher echelons. Though Netanyahu warns us about a “messianic apocalyptic cult” possessing nuclear weapons, he doesn’t seem to be seriously imagining the “cult” launching a first strike. Goldberg writes: “The challenges posed by a nuclear Iran are more subtle than a direct attack, Netanyahu told me.”

So what are those challenges? For one thing, “Iran’s militant proxies would be able to fire rockets and engage in other terror activities while enjoying a nuclear umbrella.” Whether heading off this prospect would justify bombing Iran is an interesting question, but we don’t need to ask it, because the prospect isn’t real. There’s no way Iran’s having a nuclear weapon would keep Israel from taking out Hezbollah missile sites in Lebanon as missiles from them rained down on Tel Aviv. If the Holocaust has left Israelis with an exaggerated fear of Iran’s intentions, it has also left them with an absolute refusal to be cowed.

One “existential” threat that Israel’s policy elites do seem to take seriously is that a nuclear Iran might render Israel such a scary place to live as to induce a brain drain. “The real threat to Zionism is the dilution of quality,” defense minister Ehud Barak tells Goldberg. Here again, I think the threat is overstated. After a year or two, Iran’s possession of nukes would become background noise for the average Israeli, less salient than periodic flurries of missiles from Lebanon or Gaza — flurries that so far have failed to noticeably drain Israel of intellectual capital.

The “brain drain” issue illustrates what weak “propaganda” much of Goldberg’s piece is: America is supposed to support — or even conduct — a military attack designed to keep talented people from immigrating to America? If I were Israel, I’d hire a new propagandist.

So, if this piece, read closely, makes for such an ineffectual pro-bombing pamphlet, why is Goldberg being pilloried as a propagandist?

For starters, there’s the claim that, though he spends a fair number of bullet points on the blowback from an attack on Iran, he still understates it. No mention, for example, of how an American-backed attack (and America would surely stand by Israel in the end) would feed the war-on-Islam narrative that is already starting to fuel home-grown terrorism in America.

But the main charges against Goldberg aren’t about loading the cost-benefit analysis. They’re about framing the future debate. His piece leaves you thinking that Israel will attack Iran very soon unless America does the honors. So the debate becomes about who should bomb Iran, not about whether Iran should be bombed.

And this is the way Israel’s hawks want the debate framed. That way either they get their wish and America does the bombing, or, worst case, they inure Americans to the prospect of a bombing and thus mute the outrage that might otherwise ensue after a surprise Israeli attack draws America into war. No wonder dozens of Israeli officials were willing to share their assessments with Goldberg, and no wonder “a consensus emerged that there is a better than 50 percent chance that Israel will launch a strike by next July.”

Yossi Alpher, an Israeli peace activist and a 12-year veteran of the Mossad, has opined that Goldberg was “naïve” in not realizing that these officials were using him as part of a public relations campaign. As accusations against Goldberg go, “naïve” is pretty flattering, and I do think it may be more apt than “cynical.” I’ve long felt that most ulterior motives are subconscious, and Goldberg seems to be a case in point. Back in 2002, when he was vociferously arguing for an invasion of Iraq, he just wanted to believe that his Kurdish sources were giving him solid evidence of Saddam Hussein’s links to Al Qaeda — notwithstanding the fact that they, as fellow invasion advocates, had an interest in fabricating evidence. Now Goldberg again seems eager to accept the testimony of people whose testimony is obviously suspect.

In any event, his article shouldn’t distract Americans from the real question: Given that the United States would almost certainly be drawn into war with Iran in the wake of an Israeli strike, and given that America would be blamed for the strike whether or not it had green-lighted it, and given the many ways this would be bad for national security, how can American leaders keep it from happening?

Here, at least, Goldberg has performed a service. His article, read closely, suggests that even from Israel’s point of view, there’s no sound rationale for bombing Iran, especially when you consider the long-term downside: an attack would radically dim what prospects there are for lasting peace in the Middle East; Israel’s downward spiral — in which regional hostility toward it leads to conflicts that only deepen the hostility — would be sustained big time. If appealing to America’s interests isn’t enough to keep Israel from attacking Iran, maybe appealing to Israel’s interests will help.

Postscript: If you want to read a more ringing defense of Goldberg’s journalistic integrity than I am able to mount, here is The Atlantic’s James Fallows on the subject, and here is Time’s Joe Klein.

Attack Iran? Don’t even consider it