Foreign News and Analysis Since April 2005China Confidential
Friday, September 10, 2010
9 Years Later ...
Japan Defense Ministry White Paper Finds China's Modernizing Military Worrisome, US Reassuring
Why Israel Has Not Attacked Iran
Iran, which is closer than ever to becoming a nuclear weapons state, clearly intends to destroy Israel.After 3 Decades of Atrocities and Terror, Clinton Can Speak Sympathetically About Iran's Islamic Republic
Click here. Read the piece carefully. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton claims Iran has morphed into a military dictatorship with a theocratic cover that is not in line with the Islamic Republic's real ideals.Thursday, September 09, 2010
Castro Concedes Cuban System Doesn't Work
Saturday, 11 September 2010
China's opaque military buildup has U.S. ally Japan worried, as reported here.
Why, then, hasn't Israel preemptively attacked Iran's nuclear facilities?
There are two main reasons.
1. While Israel has the conventional firepower to eliminate Iran's most important nuclear sites (of which there are no more than nine), even a stunningly successful attack would leave intact Iran's retaliatory military capabilities--meaning, that Iran, together with its Islamist Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, could level Tel Aviv and other Israeli population centers with barrages of missiles. Iran's secular (but steadily Islamizing) ally, Syria, is bristling with both missiles and chemical warheads; should it make good on repeated vows to aid Hezbollah, Israeli civilian casualties could reach truly catastrophic proportions. Not for nothing has Iran vowed to "burn Tel Aviv."
Israel's logical alternative to a conventional preemptive assault on Iran is a preemptive nuclear strike--an attack, drawing on Israel's presumed arsenal of nuclear missiles, which, in addition to obliterating the known nuclear installations, would wipe out Iran's military infrastructure and end the Islamist regime for once and all. No normal government, not even one, such as Israel, whose existence is being threatened by an implacable enemy, can consider the nuclear option without intense, internal discussion, debate, and analysis. Moreover, the potential repercussions of an Israeli nuclear attack on Iran are frightening, to say the least. Use of nuclear weapons against a Muslim state by Israel--even if used defensively, in response to the devastation of Israeli cities and towns and in order to prevent the country's eradication--could cause Pakistan's nuclear missiles to fall into Islamist hands, leading to nuclear attacks on Israel and the United States and other Western nations.
2. Not only has the Obama administration warned Israel against attacking Iran; the administration has threatened to punish Israel if it attacks Iran without Washington's approval.
In short, Israel is caught between a rock and a hard place. That the situation has come to this, that the Islamist Iranian menace has been allowed to develop to this extent, is inexcusable.
Clinton has made this kind of comment before--as if the monstrous mullahocracy was more "moderate" before the alleged military takeover.
Her repetition of the assertion belies (a) a crude attempt to drive a wedge between the mad mullahs and Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, and/or (b) a commitment to continued U.S. appeasement of radical Islam (except for Al Qaeda and certain Taliban and IRGC elements).
Disclosure: More than three decades ago, on the eve of Iran's Islamic Revolution, when Jimmy Carter's UN envoy, Andrew Young (a Democrat much admired by Clinton) was confidently assuring concerned Americans that they would eventually come to see the cleric who was leading the revolt, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, as a "saint," this reporter warned (on the front page of what was then the most influential U.S. Jewish community newspaper) that an Islamic overthrow of America's ally and Iran's modernizing monarch, Shah Mohammmed Reza Pahlavi, would result in the installation of a viciously anti-American, antidemocratic, and anti-Israel regime.
Better late than never.
Cuban Communist leader Fidel Castro conceded to an American journalist that his country's Soviet-style system is no longer working. Click here for the story.
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