Rethinking Our Approach to Iran's Search for the Bomb

I hesitate to recommend Rethinking Our Approach to Iran's Search for the Bomb by the Center for Strategic & International Studies' Anthony Cordesman as weekend reading, since its conclusions are just too sobering. On the other hand, the comprehensive report is rather heavy-going, and may be hard to find sufficient time to do it justice during the working-week. It is compulsory reading for anyone with an interest in strategic issues, and does a fantastic job of summing up all the most up-to-date and unclassified information available on Iran's nuclear program, with the added bonus of Cordesman's invaluable insight.
The veteran national-security expert has done much of the work for us by wading through hundreds of pages of the full versions of the last two International Atomic Energy Agency reports on Iran and other relevant documents, rendering them into something approximating laymen's terms. As he notes at the beginning of study, very few of those commentating on these affairs have actually read the entire documents, probably even less have the necessary qualifications to actually understand them. Any serious readers of this blog would do very well to make the time and read Cordesman, unless you have access to classified material, as this is the most important report on Iran you will read until something really big and new comes out. I certainly hope the Western negotiators who are about to meet their Iranian counterparts for the second round of the P5+1 talks in Baghdad, ten days from now, will have read it by the time they land in Iraq. It is probably much better than anything they will get in their briefing papers.

	Satellite image showing the military complex at Parchin, Friday, Aug. 13, 2004.
	Photo by: AP

Here is a short summary of the document. I hope I do it justice:
- Anyone who believes that Iran is not yet actively pursuing a nuclear-weapons program and merely developing the capabilities is committing an act of willful delusion. The intelligence supplied to the IAEA and verified by different "member countries," is clear on that Iran has been working on a wide range of projects for over a decade, all of which are specifically aimed at acquiring the capabilities necessary not only to enrich uranium to weapons-grade, but to assemble a nuclear advice that can be launched by long-range missile. Talk of a fatwa against nuclear weapons is just that: talk.
- Despite sanctions and international monitoring, Iran has received highly specialized instruments and equipment, benefited from the knowledge of foreign nuclear weapons designers and made impressive advance in its own scientific centers, so as to be able to carry out most of the necessary testing for a nuclear device, without actually creating a nuclear detonation. There has also been preparation for an actual nuclear test.
- The P5+1 talks will be useless if they continue to focus only on an Iranian commitment to curtail uranium enrichment for two main reasons. First, Iran is simultaneously advancing on multiple fronts of nuclear development and can continue even if it delays enrichment. Second, advances in centrifuge technology by Iran mean that it could well be capable of building a new network of smaller, easily dispersed enrichment installations unknown and unmonitored by the IAEA.
- A military strike on Iran, whether by the U.S, Israel or anyone else, may take out some of the key installations but the technological advances already achieved by Iran, mean that the damage will be limited and not prevent the continuation of the nuclear program. Only a willingness by whatever country attacks Iran to carry out a series of follow-on attacks can seriously endanger the nuclear weapons project.
- Iran will be extremely reluctant to abandon its nuclear program as it is a key element to the regime's entire regional strategy. In order to offset Iran's inferiority in conventional weapons when compared to other regional powers, it sees the nuclear option as its only way of fully countering that imbalance of force. Any future dealings with Iran or military strikes must take that into consideration.
Another researcher may have reached the conclusion that Iran has already achieved so much so as to render the situation irreversible. But Cordesman does not say that the West has totally failed in preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. According to him, it must entirely rethink both its diplomatic approach and its military strategy in order to do so.

Seated Among the Heroes and Watching the Faces of the Martyrs

By Barry Rubin

As we set out down Ibn Gvirol Street to the Herzliya Gymnasia high school, all the stores were closing. The police cordoned off the street to vehicles and, as on Yom Kippur, hundreds of people strolled down the middle of the pavement. Past the city hall, where a concert was starting up, we walked and then past the small memorial of restless stones that marks the place where Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated.

That night in November 1995, I’d come home from the peace rally that had turned into a mass of mourners when the news spread that Rabin had been murdered a few meters away. I walked, crying, into the small room, then a family room and now our office where I’m writing this. Our daughter sat on my wife’s lap.

Now our daughter is 17 years old, playing a leading role in her school’s Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day commemoration program. In the school’s courtyard, plastic chairs have been set down tightly, arm to arm, for about 1000 people.  All of them are full. The front two rows are reserved for the school’s graduates who now are in the army and the parents of those former students who have fallen.

At precisely 8:00 PM, with an un-Israeli sense of discipline, everyone rose at the same moment as the sirens went off. Those are the same sirens as the ones I heard signaling incoming Iraqi missiles almost a quarter-century earlier. A flag is slowly lowered to half-mast. The father of one slain soldier-graduate says the Kaddish; a cantor chants the El Maleh Rahamim prayer, modified for the occasion but rooted in the prayer for those martyred a thousand years ago in Europe by the pogroms accompanying the Crusades.

These are the parts of the program repeated every year. It is possible that such things would grow stale and routine. But they don’t. They are simply—literally—too close to home; too fresh in the mind and raw in the emotions. For all of those students will have to serve, too. And every citizen—not just every soldier—is a potential target.

Yet it is what comes next that is most harrowing. Four students, including our daughter, recite—as photos and details flash on two large screens—the names of each of those martyrs and heroes. One by one they march before us. And the list goes and photos go on and on, for longer than I had expected.

The first of the dead is from 1915; the overwhelming majority, it seems, are from the War of Independence, when about one percent of the Jewish population died.  A number of them died on October 6, 1973 and in the following couple of days, in the Sinai at the start of the Yom Kippur war.

Some were civilians; others soldiers.  Most male; a few female. Only one is well known, the writer Yosef Hayim Brenner who taught at the school, murdered by an Arab mob in 1921.

At the very end are the names of five people who were killed in the 1948 war, given a special emphasis as they had each been the last survivor of a family wiped out in the Holocaust.

They are frozen with the haircuts and clothes of their time, mostly smiling, happy students or young soldiers. Loved by their family and friends, they were regular people, never intending to be martyrs and certainly not heroes. They were deprived of life but we were deprived of their presence and their achievements.

And suddenly I remembered something I hadn’t thought about for years.  A dignified professor told me long ago about a conversation he had once had, probably in the 1960s, with a cabinet minister who had been one of the pillars of the governments of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father.

The powerful politician began talking about the Holocaust and how, deep down, he could not really believe that all of those people had died. For many years, he believed, they were somewhere out there and one day there would magically appear off the coast a vast fleet of ships. They would land amidst rejoicing at the reunions that would take place.

He had to believe that, he continued, for without such an expectation, without all of those people and their talents how could anyone believe that the Israel could be founded and survive and prosper at all?  How would it be possible that a people so wounded, so bereft, could survive and be fruitful at all?

And as he originally told this story, the political leader had become deeply emotional and moved. And as the professor recounted the story to me, he had become deeply emotional and moved. And as I heard the story I, too, had become deeply emotional and moved.

“Then He said unto me: 'Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel; behold, they say: Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are clean cut off.”

Now, I watched as these many more people did briefly seem to walk before me.

“So I prophesied as He commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet….”

And I had only to look around me to know that they had not—a cliché but here a truth—died in vain.

“Behold, I will take the children of Israel from among the nations, whither they are gone, and will gather them on every side, and bring them into their own land; and I will make them one nation in the land.”

But I have not invited you to read these words this day just to say this. There is something equally or even more remarkable to tell. 

In all of this and throughout the nation on this day, there was not a word of hatred, of reviling any enemy. No smugness of triumph, no desire for conquest; no thirst for revenge or punishment. Thus behaves the world’s most slandered nation.

Chag Sameach Pesach!

"A happy and Kosher Passover to all the People of Israel, From the Navy Under Water Tasks Unit".

                    Thinking of you all on Pesach

                         Chag Sameach Pesach

State Dept. Denies Visa to Knesset Memeber

March 14, 2012, - 7:25 pm

OUTRAGE! State Department Denies Visa to Israel Parliament Member; Israeli Legislative Trip to US Canceled

By Debbie Schlussel
Michael Ben-Ari is an elected Member of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament.  But the Obama adminstration is denying him a visa to the United States.  Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and their minions are calling this man a “terrorist,” even though he’s never been a member of a terrorist group and never participated in a terrorist attack.  Instead, he’s a respected elected official in Israel, who commands the respect of members of all parties along the ideological divide.  And, yet, this is the second time (2009 was the first) that Dr. Ben-Ari has been denied entry here.

Yet, admitted Jew-killers and terrorists like Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas a/k/a “Abu Mazen,” who was the paymaster of the Munich Olympic terrorists, are welcome guests not only in the U.S. but at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  Unlike Ben-Ari, Abbas has not faced a democratic election in some time, and if he were to face one today, he’d lose to HAMAS.
So, what is Ben-Ari’s “crime”?  What has he done that is so offensive and noxious to the Obama border police who will let all of the scum of the earth into the U.S. but not this man who grew up in liberal Tel Aviv, has a Ph.D., and served in the Israeli Army with honor?
Well, nothing, actually.  Ben-Ari, however, is a follower of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, the American citizen who was the first American victim of Al-Qaeda.  Kahane believed that Jews and Arabs could not live together in peace, so the Muslims should be deported, just like Muslims deported a million Jews from their countries.  While he felt that Muslims should not live in Gaza and the so-called West Bank–based on their track record of terror, the Obama Administration only welcomes those who believe that Jews should not live in Gaza and the so-called West Bank, based on their track record of repeatedly trying to live in peace.   And now Rabbi Kahane’s ideas have been adopted by even the far-left of Israel, with the fence they had to construct to keep the Muslims and their death wishes out of Israel.  His ideas were adopted (in the reverse) by the same far-left in Israel that also realized Jews and perpetually angry Muslims could not live together in peace and forced Jews out of their homes in Gaza to abandon it to the HAMAS jungle it has now become. The Palestinians themselves–including PLO Ambassador to the U.S. Maen Areikat, who is allowed to travel here and all around the U.S. freely–say that the “Palestinian State” will be Judenrein a/k/a “No Jews Allowed.”
So, Michael Ben-Ari and the whole Israeli legislative delegation have been forced to cancel their upcoming trip because they are the victims of the Arabist thought police in America.  The double standard thought police–the same thought police at the Hillary Clinton State Department who will allow Tariq Ramadan, grandson of the Muslim Brotherhood founder and defender of homicide bombings of Israeli kids, a visa into the U.S. to teach American college students indefinitely.  The same thought police who didn’t give a second thought to giving a visa to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to study at an Islamic conference in Texas, after his father had already warned the U.S. government that he was dangerous and going to perpetrate a terrorist attack.  The same thought police who then gave him a second visa to travel to the U.S. when he tried to blow up a plane with his underwear.
Yet despite allowing entry to these terrorists, the State Department denied Ben-Ari “based on the State Department’s prerogative to ban terrorists from entering the country.” That language should tell you everything. A prerogative means, “We’ll welcome Islamic terrorists in. But Israeli elected officials who’ve never harmed a fly–well, they are the real terrorists. No entry for them.”
Reuven Rivlin, Speaker of the Israeli Knesset, said the Obama move is “an assault on the Knesset as a whole. The United States’ allegation that an MK is a terrorist is unacceptable.”
No, it isn’t acceptable. Sadly, plenty of Jews will continue to support Obama’s clearly anti-Semitic, double-standard laden visa policies. They will donate to his campaign and vote for him. And so he has no reason to reverse course and correct outrageous decisions like this.
Hey, there were Jews who supported the Nazi party, too. But they were sent to the ovens along with all the other Jews.
Oh, and by the way, I know of a certain American elected official who is an acolyte of convicted terrorist Bill Ayres. Maybe he should be deemed a “terrorist,” too, and denied visas to places like Israel, where they don’t allow people who believe in blowing up Capitol Buildings and Pentagons and shouldn’t allow their followers in, either.