In my post yesterday, I established to my own satisfaction that Israel (though not the United States) is rational to be concerned about the possibility that Iran, a country whose leaders do want the destruction of Israel, may be close to accomplishing the development of an atomic device, one that might in turn be implanted into a missile capable of reaching Israeli territory.
This is based largely upon an IAEA report about which we can say that even those who argue with that conclusion use the IAEA's authority for their own selective purposes.
Now the question: so what? I submit that Israel, to its credit, has thought more like an enterprise than a sovereign. A profit-making enterprise wants to solve problems in the lowest cost and lowest risk manner available. The "profit" here is the security and prosperity of Israelis. What is the lowest cost, lowest risk, way of protecting that profit against the threat caused by an Iranian nuke program?
Stuxnet, the computer worm, comes to mind.
That may have set back any Iranian program by about a month.
And yes, something more violent comes to mind too, but it has been a very targeted violence, not aimed at whoever happens to be in the way of a bomb, but aimed squarely at the would-be Oppenheimers or Fermis of Iran, those working to create the threat to millions of Israelis. And, logically, should they be invulnerable?
I wrote about this here. The money quote:
Imagine if, in 1944, the government of Japan had learned what Fermi and Oppenheimer and other scientists working in the US were up to: the creation of a new bomb that could wipe out an entire city in a single puff of radioactive smoke.
Would it have been wrong, would it have been a war crime, for Japanese agents to seek to kill some of the key scientists?
Probably, in your estimation as in mine: not. It would have been a good deal more humane than the way sovereigns in fact do engage in war, that one and others.
For that matter, targeting those who are making the device that may kills millions of your citizens if you don't stop them is remarkably efficient in means-ends terms.
Here as with Stuxnet the only thing to be regretted is that such a measure may do no more than buy some little time.
A longer-term solution, still quite cost efficient, would be for Israel to team up with the Saudis. It could assist them with a nuclear program. After all, the Saudis (who are Sunni) can hardly be expected to sit quietly while the one great Shiite power develops a nuclear stockpile unique to the Persian Gulf region. If persuaded of the necessity, the Saudis, who certainly have the money to do so, could develop a deterremce-capable force next door to Iran. For reasons I discussed yesterday, I would expect them to do so, if at all, quite openly. Deterrence is open, not secretive.
Yes, a Saudi/Israeli alliance sounds unlikely, but so do lots of alliances:
Like the one that stopped Jersey.
So Israel does have options to protect itself short of massive strikes -- with the possibility of a 3d world war -- now under so much ardent discussion.
Again, think about businesses versus sovereigns. Some businesses find themselves in a situation where waste makes sense, if that waste is subsidized by someone else. Suppose hypothetically I'm running a road construction company. The actual traffic needs would be well served by a two-lane road, and I am confident my company can do that inexpensively. But the government that is paying me, for whatever reason, wants a four-lane highway there. Perhaps local interests believe their area will derive prestige from a large highway. So the local interests demand a four lane design, the politicians go along with that, and I am told that my firm can have the extra revenues needed for all four lanes at a larger profit margin than I had expected from two.
Israel is in the position of my hypothetical road construction company. Rationally, if left to their own devices, they would pick the wise and short-of-war route for preserving their own safety. But if a superpower underwrites them, and its chief executive says "I've got your back," Israel may end up in in a position where risking war comes to seem rational.
The United States should stop putting them in that position. Events will be better for Iranians, for Americans, for every nation in the Middle East, and for Israel itself, if the U.S. is less insistent than it has been that we have Israel's "back." We are the ones engaged in the absurd prestige-based subsidy for the four-lane highway. And the unnecessary third and fourth lanes could do an awful lot more harm in this situation than my too-tame analogy has suggested.
In my recent book, Gambling with Borrowed Chips, I devoted one chapter to the role that fuel prices may have (but probably did not) pay in the financial crisis of 2007-08.
I began that chapter with these words: "I don't plan yet another thumb-sucking discussion of 'energy policy.' Those who care about my personal views know that I believe the U.S. policy of reliance upon foreign sources of crude is a disaster, and depends upon the use of our superb armed forces as security forces for distant unreliable pipeline and shipping lanes. We can move toward a better way of doing business that won't involve fighting hree wars at a time and, I am confident, in time we will."
In the meantime, since we are committed to keeping open all those readily closed shipping lanes and protecting all those pipelines, we are also commited to cultivating Israel as an ally -- beyond our own best interests, and beyond theirs.
Showing posts with label Israel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Israel. Show all posts
18 March 2012
22 January 2012
Thinking
Okay, there's a problem with the Romney steamroller. The Republican race has taken a very strange turn, and further increases my perplexity about this political year in general. But let's ignore that for today, because something else occurs to me that may be of more interest.
Imagine if, in 1944, the government of Japan had learned what Fermi and Oppenheimer and other scientists working in the US were up to: the creation of a new bomb that could wipe out an entire city in a single puff of radioactive smoke.
Would it have been wrong, would it have been a war crime, for Japanese agents to seek to kill some of the key scientists?
Frankly, I don't think so. Abstracting for a moment from the fact that the Japanese were the aggressors in the war in thr Asia-Pacific region (and I'm not thinking specifically of December 7, 1941 -- they had been engaged in rapacious behavior for years before that) ... abstracting from that, as "laws of war" do, the use of a hit squad to target key figures in the Manhattan Project would not have been shocking or criminal at all. It would simply have been ... war.
Fast forward. It may well be that Israel's Mossad has agents killing Iranian nuclear scientists. It may well be, also, that the US CIA is providing assistance. I don't know. (If I knew, those two respective secret agencies would be far less competent than their reputations suggest.) My suspicion is that Mossad could and probably did pull this off without extraneous assistance.
Is that different in any principled way from the case imagined above? The head of state in Iran speaks not just of prevailing against Israel, not just of forcing an "unconditional surrender" (a term the Roosevelt administration was using vis-a-vis Germany and Japan in 1944) but of wiping Israel off the map. There is every reason to believe that the nuclear program is designed exactly for that purpose.
So: where is the shock value here? Just wonderin'
Imagine if, in 1944, the government of Japan had learned what Fermi and Oppenheimer and other scientists working in the US were up to: the creation of a new bomb that could wipe out an entire city in a single puff of radioactive smoke.
Would it have been wrong, would it have been a war crime, for Japanese agents to seek to kill some of the key scientists?
Frankly, I don't think so. Abstracting for a moment from the fact that the Japanese were the aggressors in the war in thr Asia-Pacific region (and I'm not thinking specifically of December 7, 1941 -- they had been engaged in rapacious behavior for years before that) ... abstracting from that, as "laws of war" do, the use of a hit squad to target key figures in the Manhattan Project would not have been shocking or criminal at all. It would simply have been ... war.
Fast forward. It may well be that Israel's Mossad has agents killing Iranian nuclear scientists. It may well be, also, that the US CIA is providing assistance. I don't know. (If I knew, those two respective secret agencies would be far less competent than their reputations suggest.) My suspicion is that Mossad could and probably did pull this off without extraneous assistance.
Is that different in any principled way from the case imagined above? The head of state in Iran speaks not just of prevailing against Israel, not just of forcing an "unconditional surrender" (a term the Roosevelt administration was using vis-a-vis Germany and Japan in 1944) but of wiping Israel off the map. There is every reason to believe that the nuclear program is designed exactly for that purpose.
So: where is the shock value here? Just wonderin'
23 January 2011
The One Before Eichmann
Adolf Eichmann is in the news again. Der Spiegel says that newly available records give a new story of his life in hiding, and tell of an Israeli effort to capture him when Israel itself was a brand spankin' new nation, in 1949.
http://www.jpost.com/JewishWorld/JewishNews/Article.aspx?id=203881
(My apologies -- I've had trouble getting that URL to work as a link -- just copy and paste it into your browser if you like!)
Some related surfing tells me that before the Eichmann case, Israel had only tried one WW II war criminal. That was Rezso Kasztner, a Hungarian Jew who, Israel alleged, had collaborated with Eichmann in the destruction of the Jews of that country.
According to Neal Bascomb, author of "Hunting Eichmann" (2009), Israel didn't even have a law on the subject of prosecutinbg Nazis and their collaborators until 1950, so they wouldn't have had one in place at the time of that first effort to capture Eichmann.
As to Kasztner, Bascomb writes: "The supreme court ... eventually ruled that Kasztner had saved Jewish lives rather than aided in their destruction -- but not until after he had been assassinated in March 1957."
Tough timing on that vindication, Kasztner ol' buddy.
http://www.jpost.com/JewishWorld/JewishNews/Article.aspx?id=203881
(My apologies -- I've had trouble getting that URL to work as a link -- just copy and paste it into your browser if you like!)
Some related surfing tells me that before the Eichmann case, Israel had only tried one WW II war criminal. That was Rezso Kasztner, a Hungarian Jew who, Israel alleged, had collaborated with Eichmann in the destruction of the Jews of that country.
According to Neal Bascomb, author of "Hunting Eichmann" (2009), Israel didn't even have a law on the subject of prosecutinbg Nazis and their collaborators until 1950, so they wouldn't have had one in place at the time of that first effort to capture Eichmann.
As to Kasztner, Bascomb writes: "The supreme court ... eventually ruled that Kasztner had saved Jewish lives rather than aided in their destruction -- but not until after he had been assassinated in March 1957."
Tough timing on that vindication, Kasztner ol' buddy.
02 May 2010
Expensive and Useless Machines
That is the word from an Israeli expert about the body scanners that the US government wants to deploy at hundreds of airports.
The program was created as a knee-jerk response to the Christmas-Day incident on a Detroit-bound plane. The Department of Homeland Security wants to deploy 500 advanced imaging technology units this ear, another 500 next year, according to testimony before its House of Representatives oversight committee.
But do these machines make anyone more secure? The Israelis have some experience in this record. Ben Gurion International Airport is widely regarded as a security success. These machines are not employed there.
A former security chief of the Israel Airport Authority explained why recently to a Canadian newspaper.
Expensive and useless machines. Good concise explanation, that.
The program was created as a knee-jerk response to the Christmas-Day incident on a Detroit-bound plane. The Department of Homeland Security wants to deploy 500 advanced imaging technology units this ear, another 500 next year, according to testimony before its House of Representatives oversight committee.
But do these machines make anyone more secure? The Israelis have some experience in this record. Ben Gurion International Airport is widely regarded as a security success. These machines are not employed there.
A former security chief of the Israel Airport Authority explained why recently to a Canadian newspaper.
Expensive and useless machines. Good concise explanation, that.
23 May 2009
Ben-Gurion announcement
On this day, May 23, in 1960, the then prime minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, announced to the Knesset that Adolf Eichmann had been captured and was in Israel. Perhaps I should have waited to make this the subject of an entry one year from now -- the 50th anniversary of the event.
But I'm doing so now because I happen to be reading a newly published book on the subject, HUNTING EICHMANN, by Neal Bascomb.
One intriguing fact emphasized in this book involves the mechanics of flying Eichmann out of the country. The national airline, El Al, had no regular flights to and from Argentina at that time. (It didn't even have its own maps of South America yet.) And the Mossad could hardly grab Eichmann off the street and hustle him onto, say, some airliner belonging to a US based company. There was consideration of telling the Argentine authorities that El Al would like to make a "test run" of one of its planes into and out of Buenos Aires. But that seemed like a very thin cover for a highly secret operation.
Fortunately, the calender came to the aid of the Mossad. May 1960 was the 150th anniversary of Argentina's independence from Spain. The country had invited many other countries around the world to send official delegations to attend the festivities. It seemed unremarkable, them, that Israel asked for permission to bring its delegation into Buenos Aires on May 19th on a special El Al flight. (Eichmann had already been captured days before that plane left Israel -- he had been held in a safe house since May 11.)
Even the members of the official anniversary-celebrating delegation, officials of Israel's foreign ministry, were unaware of the fact that another purpose was to be served by that airplane. They were told, though, that El Al needed the plane back quickly to keep up its regularly scheduled flights, so they would have to fly home later in the month through other commercial airlines.
As a result, on the trip back to Israel on May 21, that plane carried only Eichmann, the operatives who had captured him, and the flight crew.
Even through meticulously planned operations, though, it is very difficult to keep a secret. The flight crew knew something was going on, and since Argentina's significance as a refuge for leaders of the 3d Reich was hardly a secret, some of them had a pretty good idea what it was. Bascomb has interviewed members of that flight crew and tells the story of that flight from the inside.
When the plane cleared Argentine airspace, there was a spontaneous outburst of delight. The leader of the Mossad operation decided that further efforts at in-cabin secrecy were pointless and gave the El Al security chief, Adi Peleg, the honor of making the announcement. "You've been accorded a great privilege," Peleg told the El Al crew, "You are taking part in an operation of supreme importance to the Jewish people. The man with us on the plane is Adolf Eichmann."
It was soon after touchdown on the morning of Sunday May 22, Israel time, that Ben Gurion learned of the success of the operation and of Eichmann's presence in the country. He asked his Mossad chief how many people knew. Isser Harel replied that already more than fifty knew. Thus, Ben-Gurion decided that an announcement was necessary -- news like this has to be framed by a head of state in a manner other than nodding "yes" when a reporter eventually hears about it and asks a question.
This is where we came in, the statement in the Knesset, May 23: "Adolf Eichmann is already under arrest in Israel and will shortly be placed on trial in Israel under the terms of the law for the trial of Nazis and their helpers."
But I'm doing so now because I happen to be reading a newly published book on the subject, HUNTING EICHMANN, by Neal Bascomb.
One intriguing fact emphasized in this book involves the mechanics of flying Eichmann out of the country. The national airline, El Al, had no regular flights to and from Argentina at that time. (It didn't even have its own maps of South America yet.) And the Mossad could hardly grab Eichmann off the street and hustle him onto, say, some airliner belonging to a US based company. There was consideration of telling the Argentine authorities that El Al would like to make a "test run" of one of its planes into and out of Buenos Aires. But that seemed like a very thin cover for a highly secret operation.
Fortunately, the calender came to the aid of the Mossad. May 1960 was the 150th anniversary of Argentina's independence from Spain. The country had invited many other countries around the world to send official delegations to attend the festivities. It seemed unremarkable, them, that Israel asked for permission to bring its delegation into Buenos Aires on May 19th on a special El Al flight. (Eichmann had already been captured days before that plane left Israel -- he had been held in a safe house since May 11.)
Even the members of the official anniversary-celebrating delegation, officials of Israel's foreign ministry, were unaware of the fact that another purpose was to be served by that airplane. They were told, though, that El Al needed the plane back quickly to keep up its regularly scheduled flights, so they would have to fly home later in the month through other commercial airlines.
As a result, on the trip back to Israel on May 21, that plane carried only Eichmann, the operatives who had captured him, and the flight crew.
Even through meticulously planned operations, though, it is very difficult to keep a secret. The flight crew knew something was going on, and since Argentina's significance as a refuge for leaders of the 3d Reich was hardly a secret, some of them had a pretty good idea what it was. Bascomb has interviewed members of that flight crew and tells the story of that flight from the inside.
When the plane cleared Argentine airspace, there was a spontaneous outburst of delight. The leader of the Mossad operation decided that further efforts at in-cabin secrecy were pointless and gave the El Al security chief, Adi Peleg, the honor of making the announcement. "You've been accorded a great privilege," Peleg told the El Al crew, "You are taking part in an operation of supreme importance to the Jewish people. The man with us on the plane is Adolf Eichmann."
It was soon after touchdown on the morning of Sunday May 22, Israel time, that Ben Gurion learned of the success of the operation and of Eichmann's presence in the country. He asked his Mossad chief how many people knew. Isser Harel replied that already more than fifty knew. Thus, Ben-Gurion decided that an announcement was necessary -- news like this has to be framed by a head of state in a manner other than nodding "yes" when a reporter eventually hears about it and asks a question.
This is where we came in, the statement in the Knesset, May 23: "Adolf Eichmann is already under arrest in Israel and will shortly be placed on trial in Israel under the terms of the law for the trial of Nazis and their helpers."
15 August 2008
Four months ago ... a death
The photo is of Fadel Shana, a photographer working for Reuters who died four months ago in the Gaza strip.
Israeli authorities have decided that the tank crew that killed him was acting properly, because they couldn't tell whether what he was holding was a camera or a weapon.
I'm not bringing this up in order to complain about that decision or criticize the tank crew. They did as they deemed they had to do, and war is a nasty business. I doubt Mr. Shana was unaware of that.
Still, I regret his passing, and hope that there will always be others like him, willing to risk the fate he met, in order to bring the rest of us the news about such places as the Gaza Strip.
Peace, Fadel.
07 June 2008
Yesterday's crude oil excitement
Crude oil prices rose yesterday by more than $10 a barrel. As you can see from the attached chart, from the New York Mercantile Exchange, prices were trending down Tuesday and Wednesday. They were flat through Thursday morning in the neighborhood of $122 a barrel. Then, Thursday afternoon, came the start of the spike that continued until Friday afternoon.
So ... what happened? Trading at the New York Mercantile Exchange may have been driven (I say "may" because I'm guessing) by a combination of news items that together suggest further violence in the Middle East and, accordingly, more supply disruptions.
Item: On Thursday, the Turks and Iranians announced that they had launched co-ordinated attacks against Kurdish rebels in the north of Iraq. Condi Rice met with Turkish officials on the subject and released a statement that didn't mention the Iranian role at all, but did say that the Turks and the US are "on the same page" as against the rebels.
Item: a deputy prime minister of Israel said: "If Iran continues its nuclear weapons program, we will attack it."
Item: There's been a new outbreak of violence in Sri Lanka in recent days, including two bus bombings in the capital city Friday. The guerillas, a/k/a/ the Tamil Tigers, demand a separate homeland in the north of the island nation.
Consequence? The rise in the price of a barrel Friday (forget the start of the run-up Thursday) was the equal of the WHOLE price of a barrel in 1998.
If the sense of imminent doom passes over this weekend and things calm down a bit, contracts will lose some of this value in trading again next week.
But I'm still just guessing.
04 July 2007
Johnston is free.
This is one piece of good news that rational people, lovers of liberty all over the world, ought to greet with ... well, maybe fireworks displays?
After four months as a hostage, Alan Johnston is free. His captors, the "Army of Islam," released him from their Gaza Strip HQ today, in the early hours of Wednesday morning (Gaza Strip time).
Johnston didn't have much to say, except that he told an AP reporter, "I'm OK. Really, I'm OK." And, under the circumstances, I can understand that he needs some R&R time before he is any more forthcoming about his experience than that.
Under pressure from Hamas, the Army of Islam apparently dropped its earlier demand that the UK release a radical Islamic cleric with ties to al-Qaeda as the price of Johnston's release.
Hamas, you might remember, forcibly took control of Gaza from Fatah only two weeks ago in bitter intra-Palestinian fighting. Fatah continues to control the West Bank, which is of course the larger part of the Palestinian not-quite-a-state entity thing.
Johnston's release, then, might be seen as a move in the continued Fatah/Hamas struggle. On June 19, in the midst of the fighting between the two factions, Khalil al-Haya, one of the Hamas lawmakers, said that he was "shocked and surprised by the [Fatah] voices forbidding discussions with us, while they enter discussions with Israel." http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1181813070301&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
Perhaps Hamas is now worried about the extent of their own international isolation, and concerned that Fatah has come to seem like a reasonable operation by virtue of its wilingness to talk to Israel. Perhaps (and I'm doing nothing but spinning out a line of speculations without any credibility at all here -- this, after all, is a blog) ... Hamas is trying to one-up Fatah in reasonableness by showing that it is not only willing, but capable of, releasing a western hostage.
Johnston's release and safety are good news items anyway. If they are a harbinger of a new sort of competition among Palestinian factions, a competition in the direction of reason, then it is terrific news.
Light those sparklers.
After four months as a hostage, Alan Johnston is free. His captors, the "Army of Islam," released him from their Gaza Strip HQ today, in the early hours of Wednesday morning (Gaza Strip time).
Johnston didn't have much to say, except that he told an AP reporter, "I'm OK. Really, I'm OK." And, under the circumstances, I can understand that he needs some R&R time before he is any more forthcoming about his experience than that.
Under pressure from Hamas, the Army of Islam apparently dropped its earlier demand that the UK release a radical Islamic cleric with ties to al-Qaeda as the price of Johnston's release.
Hamas, you might remember, forcibly took control of Gaza from Fatah only two weeks ago in bitter intra-Palestinian fighting. Fatah continues to control the West Bank, which is of course the larger part of the Palestinian not-quite-a-state entity thing.
Johnston's release, then, might be seen as a move in the continued Fatah/Hamas struggle. On June 19, in the midst of the fighting between the two factions, Khalil al-Haya, one of the Hamas lawmakers, said that he was "shocked and surprised by the [Fatah] voices forbidding discussions with us, while they enter discussions with Israel." http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1181813070301&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
Perhaps Hamas is now worried about the extent of their own international isolation, and concerned that Fatah has come to seem like a reasonable operation by virtue of its wilingness to talk to Israel. Perhaps (and I'm doing nothing but spinning out a line of speculations without any credibility at all here -- this, after all, is a blog) ... Hamas is trying to one-up Fatah in reasonableness by showing that it is not only willing, but capable of, releasing a western hostage.
Johnston's release and safety are good news items anyway. If they are a harbinger of a new sort of competition among Palestinian factions, a competition in the direction of reason, then it is terrific news.
Light those sparklers.
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