China Confidential
Tuesday, September 02, 2008
On Nuclear-Arming Iran and the Islamist Threat
Foreign Confidential....
Regarding the coming conflict with nuclear-arming, Islamist Iran (scroll down for the most recent article) the left-leaning mainstream media have missed three big stories.
1. The balance of forces in the Middle East has changed. Israel has the region's strongest air force and only nuclear arsenal (and it is formidable). But Israel's enemies, led by the Hitlerian Iranian mullahocracy, have enough missiles and chemical and biological weapons to threaten Israel's existence. They actually don't need nuclear weapons to destroy Israel. Israel's nuclear weapons have thus far served as a deterrent to its destruction; but the deterrent will be neutralized if Iran acquires atomic arms because little Israel, unlike Iran, is a "one-bomb" country, as former Israeli prime minister Bibi Netanyahu has put it.
So, while Israel cannot abide a nuclear-armed Iran, Israel must also plan for wiping out its enemies' missiles, which are certain to be launched against Israeli cities and towns once the shooting starts. Iran, which has repeatedly vowed to annihilate Israel, does not intend to absorb an attack; it will fight back viciously. And Hezbollah, Iran's Lebanese proxy, knows it cannot survive if the Iranian regime falls. In fact, unless Israel is willing to sacrifice the lives of thousands of its civilians, it is more important to first destroy the enemy missiles--and chemical and biological weapons sites--before eliminating the known and suspected Iranian nuclear sites.
A rough comparison can be made with the situation leading up to the 1967 Six-Day War. Egypt and Israel's other Arab enemies had threatened to destroy Israel and "drive the Jews into the sea." With that in mind, Israel had to knock out the Egyptian air force in the first hours of fighting to prevail on the ground on all fronts. In the next war, there is not likely to be much ground fighting, with the exception of crushing Palestinian terrorists and a possible insurrection by radicalized (i.e. Islamized) Israeli Arabs in the Galilee.
2. The Arab-Israeli conflict has been Islamized. Non-Arab, Islamist Iran--Israel's former friend and tacit ally until the Islamist overthrow of the pro-US Iranian Shah--leads an Iranian-Arab Axis that includes Shiite Islamist Hezbollah, the Sunni Islamist Palestinian groups, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and still secular and Alawite-controlled, but rapidly Islamizing, and mainy Sunni Syria. They are all bristling with missiles--Hezbollah has over 40,000 rockets and can reach deep into Israel-and Syria has stockpiles of chemical warheads to match its ballistic missiles.
The rise of radical Islam--an enemy the West has underestimated and has at times actually assisted--has transformed the Middle East. Considering the legions of suicidal, religious zealots, one almost feels nostalgia for the pan-Arab, pseudo-socialist despots of the Cold War era.
3. There are no Muslim moderates--not in any meaningful sense of the term. Muslim moderates simply don't exist, or they are too weak or too scared to ever moderate. There are moderate Muslims, of course, but they are either strictly secular people or outright apostates. Contrary to the claims of both US President Bush and the US Democratic Party, Islam is inherently intolerant and violent; and organized Islam and its clerical fascist mutation, Islamism, are virtually indistinguishable because the latter has enveloped the former. Persistent attempts to accommodate supposed moderate Islamists--a policy still pursued by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the US State Department under cover of its idiotic, counterproductive, democracy-promotion crusade--are bound to fail. These attempts amount to appeasement; and it is impossible to appease an implacable foe bent on regional and global dominance, as shown by the failures of the European powers to appease Nazi Germany in the years leading up to World War II. Diplomatic delays and dillydallying make matters worse; instead of preserving the peace, the appeasers make war inevitable--on the enemy's terms.
In short, Iran is the new Nazi Germany. Like the Nazis, the Iranian Islamists and their proxies and allies must be ... obliterated. There is no alternative to total victory; and any and all necessary weapons must be used to achieve that objective.
POSTSCRIPT: A compelling case can be made that in accord with international law and the centuries-old concept of anticipatory self-defense--which actually predates the modern nation state--Israel, faced with an imminent threat to its existence and the obligation to protect its citizens, has the right to use any and all necessary weapons to preemptively attack its enemies. Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad have declared their intentions--to destroy Israel--and already possess the means to make good on the threat. More specifically, Israel would be justified in using tactical nuclear weapons to eliminate Iranian missiles, which the Iranian regime has threatened to unleash on Israel in order to "burn Tel Aviv" and "exterminate" the "Zionist germ."
Tuesday, 2 September 2008
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