Obama's reversals Portrayed as Brilliant Intellect!

Obama has his view of how to bring about peace but I prefer Rodney Carrington's version: http://www.tagtele.com/videos/voir/11924/2

Another index, the S&P, turned into Bear Territory a few days ago. More shoes are expected to fall among the financial sector. Second quarter earnings have just begun. I continue to see the market lower with intermittent sudden rallies coming out of nowhere or because traders believe the market is temporarily oversold.

Most investors cannot be overly enthused about either candidate either so this has to be an additional burden weighing on the economy and consumer attitudes.

Iran continues flexing its muscle as it tests missiles as much for home consumption, as a warning to its supposed enemies, of its military strength. Meanwhile Sec. Rice reminds Iran we will defend our allies. If I were Israel, I would not be overly comforted because America's repeated defense of Israel would only come after Israel has been attacked and sustained significant casualties and property damage. Will the U.S. go after Hezballah, Iran's proxy in Lebanon? Will the U.S. attack Hamas should it also attack Israel or will the U.S. and Europe allow Israel to respond in a meaningful way and/or will Israel immediately hear the word "excessive."

Is Iran trying to impact our elections? If so,is Obama or McCain more likely to benefit? Obviously, logic would suggest Iran's leaders would prefer Obama, on the assumption they could manipulate him and the Democrat controlled Congress more than they could McCain even with Pelosi and Reid in charge of Congress.

Menawhile Israel's Defense Minister states Israel is not afraid to take action against Iran. Maybe so, but coming from Barak that is enough to scare me. (See 1 below.)

Have Greens overplayed their hand? Extremists generally do, so I suspect, in time, Greens will lose public support for their opposition to nuclear and other energy pursuits. A series of isolated accidents fueled the Green's movement. This is a look back article that deserves reading because it highlights how stupidity turned our energy structure into one resembling a Rube Goldberg drawing. (See 2 below.)

David Horovitz points out the obvious - Israel will not attack Iran as it did Iraq if it does at all. (See 3 below.)

Jesse Jackson and Phil Gramm fall on their swords. Jackson because he is probably jealous of Obama who has replaced him among the black community and Gramm because he is a lousy politician because he speaks the truth but in a manner that put McCain in a box. Gramm's choice of words proved offensive. Having said that, McCain continues to flop on his own with his own un-co-ordinated campaign.

By the time Obama moves to the center he might meet himself but the Economist says Obama must move further because he is perceived as so far left. As I have written previously the media and press have begun portraying Obama's flip flops as reasoned intellect.(See 4 and 4a below.)

Dick



1) Defense Minister Barak: Israel isn't afraid to take action against Iran
By Yuval Azoulay and Yossi Melman

Defense Minister Ehud Barak said Thursday he favored the use of diplomatic pressure and sanctions against Iran's nuclear program but cautioned that Israel was "not afraid to take action".

"Currently, the focus is international sanctions and vigorous diplomatic activity, and these avenues should be exhausted," Barak said during his speech at a Labor Party meeting, adding: "Israel is the strongest country in the region and has proved in the past it is not afraid to take action when its vital security interests are at stake."

Barak's remarks came hours after Iran test launched a second round of missiles in the Persian Gulf before dawn Thursday. On Wednesday, the Islamic republic tested nine ballistic missiles it claimed were capable to striking Israel

Wednesday's tests prompted the United States to declare that it would defend its allies at all costs. Meanwhile, Israel said Thursday it would exhibit an advanced aircraft capable of spying on Iran.

The Israel Aerospace Industries has planned an in-house exhibit Thursday of its Eitam airplane, unveiled a year ago and equipped with sophisticated intelligence-gathering systems.

On Thursday, Iranian state radio reported: "Deep in the Persian Gulf waters, the launch of different types of ground-to-sea, surface-to-surface, sea-to-air and the powerful launch of the Hout missile successfully took place." Iranian satellite channel Press TV said Hout was a torpedo.

Israeli experts have said that the missile launched as part of large-scale military exercise in Iran on Wednesday is not a more capable version of the Shahab-3 ballistic missile.

Revolutionary Guard Commanders said that the nine missiles tested were medium and long-range weapons including some that are capable of striking Israel.

General Hossein Salami, head of the Revolutionary Guards Air Force, claimed on Iranian television that a Shahab-3 long-range ballistic missile had been tested, which is capable of traveling longer distances, with greater accuracy, and with a larger payload.

"Our finger is always on the trigger, and our missiles are always ready to launch," he said.

However, Uzi Rubin, who was a program director of Homa, under which Israel developed the Arrow anti-missile system, is convinced that this was not a new version of the Iranian ballistic missile.

"From what I saw, this is an old version of the Shahab-3, and contrary to their claims, it is not capable of reaching 2,000 kilometers, only 1,300 kilometers," he said on Wednesday.

Rubin raised the possibility that a version of Shahab-3 with a 2,000 km range has still not been tested or is still not operational.

"Without being hasty, I note that the Iranians have a tendency to exaggerate to a certain extent the capabilities of their missiles," he said.

The test-firing of missiles was aimed at showing Israel and the U.S. that Tehran is capable of responding to threats against its nuclear installations.

Experts say that the Shahab-3 is based on a liquid fuel rocket that requires fueling prior to launch, a time consuming process that leaves the weapon vulnerable to beingidentified from the air.

But Dr. Nathan Farber of the Technion in Haifa says that the Iranians are in the process of developing a more advanced version of the Shahab, known as the Ashura, with a range of 2,000 km. According to Farber's assessment, the new missile uses solid propellants, which makes it easier to launch, although unlike the Shahab-3, its flight time to Israel is estimated at 14 minutes, compared to 11 of the older missile.

Intelligence analysts estimate that Iran has several hundred Shahab-3 in its arsenal, but a much larger stockpile, of several thousand shorter range missiles (up to 400 km) capable of targeting U.S. forces in Iraq or their allies in the Persian Gulf.

In Israel, even though the heads of the defense establishment do not often detail in public their preparations to counter a possible Iranian attack, a number of recent developments received center stage in Western media.

Most recently, a large-scale air force exercise, comprising approximately 100 aircraft, carried out a sortie to a distance of 1,500 kilometers over the Mediterranean - the same distance from Israel to some of Iran's nuclear installations in Isfahan. The air armada included fighters, aerial tankers, electronic warfare aircraft, and search and rescue helicopters.

On a number of occasions in recent months, defense officials stressed the need to bolster the "long arm" of the IDF through the air force. Recently retired air force chief Major General Eliezer Shkedi has called for the procurement of advanced strike aircraft, and Israel is expected to acquire F-35 stealth fighter bombers. Israel has asked the U.S. to consider moving forward the delivery date for such aircraft.

In parallel, Israel is preparing to carry out significant upgrades to the Arrow anti-missile system. The Arrow-3, which is funded in a multi-year program entitled Tefen, will be capable of intercepting ballistic missiles higher and further away from Israel.

One area in which Israel does not seem to be altering its preparations is on ways of preparing the home front for the possibility of missile strikes from Iran. A senior officer in the Home Front Command explained this week that plans for dealing with Iran's ballistic missiles are identical to the possibility that rockets or shorter-range missiles will strike Israel from Syria or Lebanon.

Defense officials to meet with U.S. counterparts on Iran threat

Senior defense officials will head to the United States over the coming weeks for talks with their American counterparts on the Iranian threat.

On his visit to the U.S. next week, Defense Minister Ehud Barak may meet with President George Bush and other senior members of the dministration. Talks are already planned between Barak and U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi will also visit the U.S. in the near future, and according to recently released reports, Mossad chief Meir Dagan visited Washington this week.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Thursday warned Iran that
the United States would not back down in the face of Iranian threats against Israel.

Rice also stated that the Iranian missile tests showed the need for the United States to develop a missile defense system.

Iranian officials have strongly suggested the country's missile test on Wednesday was itself a warning to Israel not to attack Iran's nuclear facilities. Israel has left that option open.

Rice said Thursday, at the close of a three-day Eastern European trip, that the U.S. would defend its interests and allies.

Study urges long-term policies to influence Iran

A military strike on Iran would be unlikely to force changes in Tehran's nuclear policy, the Rand research organization said on Thursday in
an analysis recommending long-term policies to deal with the country.

The United States is leading international efforts to rein in Iran's suspected effort to develop nuclear weapons. Tehran says its nuclear program is for purely civilian energy purposes.

"If Iran's facilities were to be bombed, public support for any retaliation its government took would likely be widespread," the Rand report concluded.

"Attacks on Iran proper would generate a great deal of ill-will and, in our view, would be unlikely to change Iranian policy," said the report by the independent research group.

It added that "U.S. policy should focus on creating conditions for effective relations over the long haul."

The report recommended an expansion of contacts and exchanges with Iranian citizens; muting U.S. policy statements advocating "regime change" and penalizing the Iranian government and its officials for pursuing policies that harm U.S. interests.

"The U.S. government has some ability to foster favorable trends in Iran, but these policies will take time to come to fruition," the Rand report concluded.

2) How the Greens Captured Energy Policy
By J.R. Dunn

U.S. energy policy -- to stretch the meaning of the term - is appalling. It has been thrown together piece by piece over the decades to create a system that is dysfunctional, over complex, and internally contradictory. It is a system that victimizes American citizens, cripples the U.S. economy, makes the government a laughingstock, and empowers our enemies worldwide. While it's conceivable that somebody could actually design a policy that would do worse, they'd really have to work at it.

The only group in American that sees energy policy achieving some of their goals are the ones who oversaw its implementation from the beginning: the environmentalist Greens. It's obvious that our energy policy was intended not for the benefit of the public, or industry, or government, but almost solely to fit the agenda and goals of the Green movement, and not even the public agenda and goals, but the core agenda rarely referred to except through euphemism.

The irony here is that it has done next to nothing to fulfill the actual requirements of the environmentalists. Greens, it appears, are the worst judges of their own true needs.

A glance at the record will give us a clear idea as to how we reached this pass. One thing consistently overlooked is that American energy policy is literally the result of a series of accidents. Each of these incidents set off a blizzard of activity intended to "rationalize" the energy industry and its practices, prevent further mishaps, increase government control, and not the least, usher in the new Green Age. Each thrust American energy policy deeper into stagnation.

The first incident occurred at the very infancy of the modern Green movement (which is distinct from the conservation movement, a far older phenomenon, with no more true relationship between the two than between socialists and communists), and played a large part in defining environmentalism, setting its tactics, and establishing it as a political and social force

Santa Barbara

On January 29, 1969, a blowout occurred at a Union Oil platform six miles off Santa Barbara. The blowout itself was contained, but internal pressure ruptured the pipe, sending 200,000 gallons of crude spewing out in an 800 square-mile slick. Prevailing winds blew the oil directly onto the shore, fouling over 35 miles of coastline. Thousands of birds were threatened along with seals and dolphins.

The public rallied to save the wildlife with some success. Environmentalists rallied alongside them. Within days, an anti-oil activist group, GOO (Get Oil Out) was in operation, calling for boycotts and circulating petitions to end offshore drilling.

Ignored in all the uproar was the fact that Union Oil had been allowed to skimp on heavy-duty protective sheathing by the U.S. Geological Survey. If the piping had been reinforced as called for by standard procedure, the rupture might not have occurred, or might well have been contained. But, the logic of political activism being what it is, with the government having played a crucial role in causing the accident, environmentalists turned to... the government, to prevent them in the future.

The Santa Barbara blowout was critical in transforming environmentalism from a conservationist to an activist movement. It led to the foundation of Earth Day a few months later (an event still celebrated in certain backward communities such as Ann Arbor and Berkeley). The incident also established the Green worldview: industry was the enemy. Oil was not a resource to be utilized under proper safeguards, but a pollutant to be subject to the most stringent controls. Above all, environmentalism was no mere political or social movement, it was a crusade. A crusade to rescue nature and to "save the planet", even if it was at the cost of human civilization. (Or for that matter, human extinction.)

Offshore drilling was a major target. A concerted campaign soon saw the practice all but outlawed within U.S. waters. Less than a decade later, the first "gasoline shortage" occurred in the U.S.

Three Mile Island

Even as cars were lining up for miles at gas stations, a second front opened in the Green crusade. On March 28, 1979, a pumping failure occurred at the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor in south-central Pennsylvania. While the reactor shut down as designed, a relief valve stuck open (legend attributes this to its being put in backwards), allowing coolant water to escape. The ill-designed instrument suite failed to alert the operating crew. All unknown to them, the reactor core began to melt down.

Half the core had melted by the time anyone became aware of it. But the reactor's containment vessel held, and no major breach of radioactivity occurred. All the same, public reaction, nurtured on visions of Hiroshima and stoked by media hysteria (not to mention The China Syndrome, a Jane Fonda anti-nuke drama that had the good fortune to appear almost simultaneously with the accident), amounted to abject panic. A partial evacuation of nearby areas was carried out, amid media speculation that similar action would be required for the entire east coast.

The site was under control before the weekend was out. But the damage to nuclear power had already been done. The nuclear industry joined Big Oil as an enemy of mankind and nature. The Greens set out to shut down the entire industry, including all operational reactors. Although that effort failed, they did succeed in preventing the construction of any new reactors for a period of thirty years.

By the beginning of the 80s, the U.S. energy industry was paralyzed, the oil industry relegated to an ever-shrinking pool of permitted drilling areas, the nuclear industry effectively moribund. This put the U.S. in an excellent position to meet the depredations of OPEC, the rise of Saddam Hussein and the mullahs of Iran, and the manipulations of our Mideast "allies". That situation has prevailed ever since.

Chernobyl

The conclusions drawn from Santa Barbara and TMI were further underlined by two later incidents. On April 25, 1986, technicians at the Chernobyl nuclear plant decided to see what would happen if they shut down all safeguards and ran the reactor at its point of major instability. (This being a Soviet reactor, that point was at its lowest operational level. God forbid if it had been the other way around.) What happened was that the roof blew off, immediately killing several dozen people and irradiating large parts of the Ukraine. Aided by the regime's clumsy attempt at a cover-up, the accident played no small role in the collapse of the USSR.

On March 24, 1989, a captain challenged with alcohol problems allowed the supertanker Exxon Valdez to pile up on a reef in Alaska's Prince William Sound, dumping 11 million gallons of crude oil into the sea. Hysteria peaked at probably the highest level of any such incident. The company's management was threatened with criminal prosecution, and a federal judge hearing the case went so far as to say that the accident was "worse than Hiroshima". All inclinations to adapt more rational energy policies evaporated in the wake of these events.

No reform following failure

An unprejudiced eye will immediately see that the common factor in all these incidents was management failure. Union Oil (a company long vanished into mergers) colluded with government in an effort to cut corners. The nuclear industry -- a combination of government and private enterprise, with the worst aspects of both and the advantages of neither -- insisted on operating on the lowest possible level of execution. (A few months before the TMI breakdown, I met a man who had just accepted a job installing a piping system at the Indian Point reactor. An engineer, I thought. No, he replied -- a plumber. Simply to save a few bucks, the industry was hiring bathroom-and-hot tub plumbers for sensitive work rather than experienced pipe-fitters or engineers. No wonder crucial fittings were going in backwards, upside down, and inside out.)

Chernobyl was merely the ultimate expression of ingrained Soviet incompetence going back to the Revolution. The Exxon Valdez revealed that a critical oil shipping component -- maritime operations -- was completely isolated from any meaningful oversight. (This is in large part due to marine traditions; ship's captains are as close-mouthed as any surgeon or cop concerning ineptitude in the ranks -- and in large part is still the case. Noel Mostert's Supership, written in the 1970s, remains the standard work on the shortcomings of the tanker industry.)

The appropriate response in these cases (Chernobyl being the exception: the only solution there was to tear the system down and start over) would have been to convene a panel of experts, send out investigators, hold hearings, issue recommendations, and see to it that reforms went into effect. This is what occurs following aircraft disasters, large-scale fires, building collapses, or any other catastrophic incident where suspicion exists that things were not being handled according to best practice. (Consider the investigation following the Challenger disaster, for one example.)

But this is not what occurred in these cases. Not in any meaningful sense. Under the new Green paradigm, oil and nuclear energy were not industries to be reformed, but "evils" to be either contained or destroyed. The Greens could have served a useful purpose by pushing for serious reform in management of critical energy industries. Instead, we got the religious impulse, distorted into sheer apocalypticism, with the environmentalists fighting oil and fissionables (plutonium in particular) as products of dark sin, placed on earth to tempt humankind from the path that Gaia intended.

The Green Agenda

Through its influence in the media and government (both bureaucracy and congress), the Greens effectively abolished nuclear power, curtailed domestic oil production, and left the American energy industry in the comatose state in which it abides to this day. Nor this was an error or overreaction - it was a deliberate effort to fulfill the Green agenda.

What is the nature of this agenda? Greens were much more open about it during the early years of the movement. (As for example in the utopian novel Ecotopia.) The end point of all Green efforts is a kind of Edenic state in which humans exist in "partnership" with nature. In which humanity is simply another species. In which the human "footprint" (a purely Green concept with no literal meaning) is reduced to a minimum. A world which has returned in large part to a pre-industrial state, where whatever small amounts of power are needed are provided by solar and wind. Where every last damn item is recycled. A kind of universal Northern California, where all living things from spirochete to grizzly exist in harmony under the cloak of Gaia.

(Such a world could sustain perhaps a hundred million human beings, tops. What happens to the rest is something most Greens have been less than straightforward about.)

Greens have become quieter about this vision as it has grown more distant. Which does not mean that they have ceased working toward it. Like all true believers, the Greens simply grow more fanatical the more unlikely their dreams become. And that is why the long overdue reform of America's energy sector, of the kind supported by John McCain and a few forward-looking GOP politicians (now there's a threatened species), is no certainty, in no way a slam-dunk, and will require a lengthy and hard-fought battle if it's going to happen at all.

Current energy policy -- or non-policy, however you wish -- lies at the very center of the Green agenda. It is the only element in which any progress has been achieved. First, we need to rid ourselves of our "addiction" to nukes and oil. Then we adapt to solar and wind, and.... Here it peters off into silence. Because no such second step has ever, or will ever be made. Solar, wind, alcohol, ethanol... all these are single-digit energy sources. (And the low single digits as well, able to replace perhaps two or three percent of power generation at best.) Replacement of oil and nuclear power is a fantasy. Therefore, the rest of the Green dream is as well.

But the gutting of the American energy sector remains the Green's chief accomplishment, their single achieved step toward paradise. They will defend it tooth and nail. The Green lobby, comprised of organizations such as the Sierra Club and the World Wildlife Federation, is immensely powerful and has deep pockets -- not to overlook the many politicians who are avid converts (e.g., Hudson Valley congressman John Hall, who as leader of the execrable 70s soft-rock band Orleans wrote an anti-nuke anthem, "Plutonium is Forever").

The Green crisis ahead

They'll still lose. Americans are not going to freeze in the dark. Nuclear technology has gone through several revolutions in the past decades. Entire families of reactors exist -- including the CANDU and pebble-bed designs -- that are far safer from kind of catastrophic failure. Evolution in oil drilling and exploitation has followed similar paths. We need to catch up on these technical advances. There are already 30 new nuclear plants proposed in the US and some are even in early stages of licensing. The plants use new designs which make use of passive safety systems that substantially reduce the chance of a major accident.

Other aspects of the Green argument have also collapsed. New discoveries off Brazil and in the Gulf of Mexico have nearly doubled international oil reserves, pushing backwards from the "peak oil" date. And global warming, that notorious by-product of "oil addiction," has faded to the point that its advocates are now reduced to threatening dissenters with prison.

Energy reform is an egg and rock situation for the Democrats. (From the old Irish proverb: "When the rock hits the egg, alas for the egg. When the egg hits the rock, alas for the egg.") The Democrats -- Obama chief among them -- can neither adequately defend it nor abandon it, as is clearly shown by their refusal to even consider loosening drilling restrictions. The GOP holds all the cards on this one, and all they need to do is keep building the pressure. (Always granted, of course, that they play it better than their last few runs of hands.) No better electoral tool will be found during this cycle. We just can't expect results immediately - this will be a long and drawn-out battle, requiring maximum, sustained effort from all involved.

It has gone almost completely unacknowledged that with oil shale, offshore deposits, and new resources such as the hydrocarbon sludge deposits off B.C. and Alaska, the OPEC of the late 21st century is going to be right here. That's a goal worth working toward. Breaking the power of the Greens is yet another possible benefit.

Environmentalism is a luxury, and like all such, is best taken in moderation. The environment requires protection, but that's all. Primitive panthiesm has no place in this millennium. Nature is not an utterly benign continuum, and human beings are not a disease. Pseudo-religious environmentalism has long outlived its welcome. It's time to bring down the curtain.

3) Editor's Notes: No repeat of Osirak
By DAVID HOROVITZ


It was late afternoon, Sunday, June 7, 1981, and Zeev Raz was leading his squadron of F-16s across Iraq toward the Osirak nuclear reactor. Anxiously, he scanned the terrain ahead for the last checkpoint of their hair-raising mission, a little island in the middle of the Bahr al-Mihl Lake, about 100 kilometers west of the target, from which the pilots would calculate their final assault on Saddam Hussein's impending bomb factory.

At 5.34 p.m., bang on schedule, Raz spotted the lake. Or at least he thought he did. Except that it looked rather larger than it had in the satellite photos they'd pored over. And that little island - the crucial last reference point - was nowhere to be seen.

Flashing through Iraqi air space at 10 kilometers a minute, Raz was second-guessing himself. Had he miscalculated? Had he strayed from the meticulously planned route? Was he leading his colleagues to disaster? What had gone wrong?

Too late, Raz realized what had happened. The previous winter's heavy rains had swollen the lake and submerged the island. The satellite image was out of date. He had been in the right place, and should have trusted himself. Quickly, he reset his computer, inputting his new position, obtaining the adjusted parameters for the bombing run.

But minutes later, when Raz closed in on his target, it became appallingly clear that the miscalculation at the sunken island had profoundly distracted him. This expert airman, leading the pride of the Israel Air Force across vast swathes of hostile terrain on a mission deemed by prime minister Begin to be critical to Israel's very existence - a mission that the chief of the General Staff, Raful Eitan, had told them that day "must be successful, or we as a people are doomed" - found to his horror that he had, almost amateurishly, overflown the target. He had begun his bombing dive too late.

Israel's legendary destruction of Osirak - a near-impossible operation, pushing the F-16s further than they had been built to fly, evading enemy radar for hundreds of miles, to precision bomb a heavily protected nuclear target - has entered the pantheon of acts of extraordinary Zionist daring as a clinical example of pre-emptive devastation, executed with breathtaking, ruthless accuracy.

But as detailed in American journalist Rodger Claire's overlooked study of the mission, 2004's Raid on the Sun - in which he spoke, uniquely, to all the pilots, their commanders, and key players on the Iraqi side of the raid as well - the bombing of Osirak was far from error-free. It was an astonishing, envelope-pushing assault all right. It succeeded, utterly, in destroying Saddam's nuclear program - a blow from which he would never recover. It safeguarded Israel from the Iraqi dictator's genocidal ambitions. But Raz's mistake on the final approach was only one of several foul-ups that could so easily have doomed it.

Recognizing that Raz, the lead bomber, was not going to be able to hit the target, the No. 2 pilot in the squadron, Amos Yadlin, streaking along behind him, made the incredibly risky split-second decision to depart from the bombing sequence, cut in beneath Raz's plane, and try to drop his two 2,000-pound bombs first. As he would later tell author Claire, Yadlin thought to himself: "I'm not going to end up being hanged in some square in Baghdad because of a screwup."

Yadlin did indeed get his bombs away, and saw them pierce the Osirak dome and disappear inside as he peeled off.

Simultaneously, Raz was executing an astoundingly ambitious "loop-de-loop" in the skies above the reactor, and was able to come back over Osirak, at the correct angle this time, and hit the target.

The potential consequences of these radical departures from the intended bombing process - the potential for misunderstanding, for collision, for disaster - can hardly be overstated.

And that wasn't all that went wrong. The sixth pilot of the eight, Yiftah Spector, had not been one of the original octet selected for the mission, but, as commander of the base where the F-16s were stationed, had forced his way into the team late in the day. On the morning of the raid, he had woken with the flu, not told a soul, and spent the entire flight fighting to stay level-headed and focused. Come the moment of truth, perhaps because he blacked out, he too lost track of the target but, unlike Raz, was unable to recover and fired too late. One of his unexploded bombs was subsequently found inside the destroyed reactor.

The troubles had started even before takeoff. Lining up on the tarmac earlier, one of the planes, flown by Doobi Yaffe, had encountered a fueling malfunction, precluding the vital pre-takeoff final "top up" that was thought might be crucial for the pilots to cover the unprecedented distance to Osirak and back.

Another of the planes, that of Amir Nachumi, suffered complete electrical failure on the tarmac. Ten minutes before takeoff, Nachumi was forced to abandon the F-16 in which he'd trained for months and requisition a backup plane, which would inevitably handle a little differently, from the nearby hangar. (The next day, safely returned from their mission, when IAF ground crews rolled out the eight F-16s for maintenance checks, all eight failed to start, sporting an array of mechanical failures. As Claire quotes Nachumi remarking wryly: "Who says planes do not have souls.")

Potential disaster also struck when, as the eight F-16s violated Jordan's airspace en route to their target, flying low to evade radar, they were spotted by King Hussein, out sailing his royal yacht at Aqaba. The king phoned his defense headquarters in Amman to report the sighting of what, despite the camouflage paint, were all-too evidently Israeli F-16s streaking eastward on a bombing run. He was assured that his security apparatus had picked up nothing suspicious. If the king tried to alert the Iraqis, he evidently failed to do so.

And over the target zone itself, the operation was immeasurably eased by the fact that not only had the Iraqi anti-aircraft artillery units taken a break for their evening meal just prior to the raid - as the Mossad had established they would - but they had also, inexplicably, shut down their radar systems. These systems were still only warming up when the Israeli pilots bombed the reactor; the Iraqi defense teams thus had no radar or computer guidance as they tried to fire back and the Israelis - right through to the last, most endangered of the pilots, Ilan Ramon - were able to bomb and escape the scene. The only people hit by the panicked defensive fire, indeed, were Iraqi soldiers on the far side of the Osirak complex, several of whom were killed in the chaos.

AS ONE of his chapter headings, Claire cites the US Army maxim that "No plan, no matter how perfect, survives first contact with the enemy."

The raid on Osirak, though perceived as peerlessly clinical and precise, was certainly no exception.

And yet, compared to the challenge that Israel would face if it attempted something similar against Iran's nuclear facilities, Osirak was a walk in the park.

The potential Iranian targets are, obviously, significantly further away. The very success of Osirak has ensured that there can be no element of surprise. And if the Iranians were inclined to any relaxedness, the reported Israeli strike in Syria last September will have put them all on the highest of alerts. It's a safe bet that the teams protecting key installations across Iran don't troop out en masse for dinner, switching off their radar systems as they go.

The last few weeks have seen all kinds of warnings and counter-warnings, bluffing and counter-bluffing, playing out among Israelis, Americans, the rest of the international community and the Iranians: widely reported Israeli bombing drills as far out west over the Mediterranean as the IAF would have to fly east to target Iran; reports and denials about American coordination with Israel or, alternatively, American wariness about an Israeli attack; Iranian drills and missile tests and threats; new peaceful nuclear cooperation carrots being proffered by the West, and nibbled, then rejected, then nibbled again by Iran; new sanction sticks being wielded.

The Israeli defense establishment's tight-lipped insistence remains that Israel does have "a military option" for Iran. The Israeli political establishment's rather looser lipped position remains that we hope we won't have to use it.

But the key Osirak lesson to be internalized in the current face-off, the maxim that ultimately facilitated that operation's success, is to continue to expect the unexpected.

Saddam may have recognized that Israel might attempt an audacious raid on his French-supplied reactor; he may even have realized that the series of sabotage operations that had already blighted his nuclear project foretold an Israeli refusal to countenance its completion. But he had evidently not fully internalized the extent of Osirak's vulnerability; he hadn't put in place sufficient defensive provisions to safeguard it. He didn't really believe it was going to be hit.

Iran, for all of its leadership's derisive insistence that Israel would not dare attack, is clearly bracing for the possibility. Its entire nuclear project, indeed, has been constructed with paramount attention to defense and minimal vulnerability - constructed, that is, with Saddam's failure to adequately protect Osirak as a case study. It has placed sensitive installations deep underground. It has relentlessly sought to acquire the most advanced defensive missile systems. And it has worked to maintain the utmost secrecy around key elements of the project, to the extent that nobody can even be confident that all relevant Iranian nuclear facilities have even been located, much less that they can be put out of commission.

In short, if the IAF attempts some kind of Osirak replication - against targets such as the Natanz facility, where the Iranian enrichment centrifuges are spinning to hotly debated effect - Iran will be waiting. Israel knows this. As Osirak squadron leader Raz told this newspaper in an interview two years ago, "The IAF can do damage to some of the [Iranian] facilities, but cannot stop them as a whole."

And so, since Israel's position is that it cannot be reconciled to a nuclear Iran, one has to anticipate that Israel has other options in mind if international pressure fails to deter the ayatollahs. One has to hope that, however profound our concerns about the expertise of our political leadership and its ability to think outside the box, the glorious tradition of Israeli military innovation, creativity, dedication and daring that enabled operations such as Osirak, remains intact.

INTERESTINGLY, 27 years later, Amos Yadlin, the pilot who cut in under his commander's slightly errant F-16 to drop the first pair of bombs on Osirak, is now Maj.-Gen. Yadlin, head of IDF Military Intelligence.

Interestingly, too, David Ivri - the IAF commander who oversaw the Osirak raid, subsequently served as Israel's ambassador to the US and is now Boeing's Israel representative - is currently refusing to give interviews, as are many of the senior Israeli military figures who might have keen insights into the challenge posed by Iran's nuclear drive.

Given the spate of frequently contradictory reports about US-Israeli coordination or tension over a strike on Iran, it might be worth noting that in the more garrulous past, Ivri would occasionally speak with a certain quiet satisfaction about a treasured picture he kept hanging on the wall facing his desk in Washington. It features an enlarged black-and-white US satellite photograph of Osirak, taken a few days after the IAF raid had smashed the facility to pieces. And it bears a handwritten inscription that reads: "For Gen. David Ivri, with thanks and appreciation for the outstanding job he did on the Iraqi nuclear program in 1981 - which made our job much easier in Desert Storm." It is signed: Dick Cheney.

Such thanks, however profound, came belatedly. Although president Ronald Reagan reportedly responded to first news of Osirak's destruction with a lighthearted "boys will be boys" and later spoke admiringly of "a terrific piece of bombing," the US formally protested the raid and approved a condemnatory UN resolution which branded it a violation of international law.

Israel, of course, had chosen not to breathe a word to the Americans ahead of that attack.

4)New and improved: From The Economist
The only problem with Barack Obama’s move to the centre is that he’s not moving far enough


THE reaction to Jesse Helms’s death on July 4th is a reminder of how bipolar American politics has become. The right praised him as a man of principle who also overflowed with the milk of human kindness. The left retorted—rightly, in our view—that he was also a bigot and a bully. But at least conservatives and liberals have discovered one thing they can agree on: Barack Obama is a cynical opportunist, a flip-flopper and a shape-changer, a man who brushes aside his principles with the same nonchalance that lesser mortals reserve for their dandruff.

Bob Herbert of the New York Times worries Mr Obama is “not just tacking gently to the centre. He’s lurching right when it suits him, and he’s zigging with the kind of reckless abandon that’s guaranteed to cause disillusion, if not whiplash.” Some 22,000 people have protested on his website about his change of heart on wiretapping. A group called “Recreate68” promises to complain about his move to the centre at the Democratic convention in Denver in August.

For its part, the right has discovered that Mr Obama is not a “hard left” liberal, as it had previously thought, but a standard-issue politician who will “say and do anything to get elected”. Charles Krauthammer calls him a “man of seasonal principles”. Bo Snerdley, Rush Limbaugh’s sidekick, describes him as “the first black Clinton”. “Has there ever in recent political memory been so much calculation and bad faith by a politician who has made so much of eschewing both?”, asks Rich Lowry, the editor of the National Review.

This is all overstated. Mr Obama was always clear that he was running for the presidency of the United States, not the chairmanship of MoveOn.org. He has repeatedly presented himself as a post-partisan problem-solver who wants to work with Republicans as well as Democrats. His enthusiasm for “faith-based” social services is long held. Even on the issue that first endeared him to the left—the Iraq war—he made it abundantly clear that he was opposed to that particular war, not to the exercise of American power. Still, there is no doubt that he has engaged in a bit of vigorous repositioning in the past few weeks.

The old Obama pledged to take public financing in the general election. The new one will spend what it takes. The old Obama pledged to filibuster a bill giving legal immunity to telecoms companies that co-operated with the government on terrorist surveillance. The new one supports the bill. The old Obama failed to wear a flag pin. The new Obama talks about patriotism in a sea of American flags, praises General David Petraeus, the chief commander in Iraq, raises doubts about partial-birth abortion, agrees with the Supreme Court on gun rights, supports the death penalty for child-rapists and embraces faith-based social work.

But isn’t moving to the centre just sensible politics as the primary turns into a general election? Ronald Reagan devoted a great deal of energy to persuading people that he was not a trigger-happy ideologue. Bill Clinton sold himself as a New Democrat who felt Middle America’s pain. George Bush initially styled himself a “compassionate conservative”. The likes of Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis, on the left, and Barry Goldwater, on the right, may have won brownie points from their supporters for sticking to their principles. But they went down to calamitous defeats. The oddity of this election cycle is not that Mr Obama is moving to the centre but that John McCain is moving to the right.

Mr Obama’s flip-flop on public finance is certainly cynical (and his willingness to justify it as an act of high principle even more so). But polls suggest that Americans are happy with a certain amount of flip-flopping: Mr Bush has all but destroyed the market in stubborn consistency. And Mr Obama’s hard-edged cynicism also helps to quell one of the biggest doubts about his candidacy—that he is too naive and soft-minded to hold the most powerful job in the world.

Mr Obama is capitalizing not only on his huge fund-raising advantage over Mr McCain but also on his rival’s problems with his base. He is occupying the middle ground in order to reassure white voters that he shares their values. This is no airy-fairy liberal who is going to allow himself to be pushed around by Middle Eastern despots. This is a shrewd opportunist at work.
John Kerry’s shadow

The vital question is not whether Mr Obama is changing his positions but whether he is changing them for better or worse. Here the picture is largely positive. His new-found enthusiasm for NAFTA and free trade could help to avert a prosperity-destroying drift to protectionism. Indeed, his chief economics adviser, Jason Furman, sounds like the very model of good sense. Mr Obama’s willingness to support wiretapping in certain circumstances suggests that he is trying to strike a balance between security and privacy in what he calls a “dangerous world”: the policy challenge is not to pursue vendettas against the Bush administration but to find a reasonable set of rules to govern surveillance. His repositioning on the Iraq war represents a recognition that the situation on the ground in Iraq has changed dramatically.

If there is a problem with all this repositioning, it is that it is not going far enough for most American moderates. Mr Obama has punted on partial-birth abortion rather than denouncing the whole gruesome procedure. He has insisted on putting restrictions on faith-based social services that most churches find unacceptable. On July 3rd he held not one but two press conferences on Iraq—one in which he seemed to suggest that he would adjust his policy in the light of new realities, another in which he insisted that his position “has not changed”. Mr Obama needs to embrace centrism as a matter of conviction rather than flirting with it as an instrument of political expediency. Otherwise the accusations of flip-flopping that did John Kerry so much harm in 2004 will begin to bite.

4a) The Audacity of Listening
By GAIL COLLINS


I know, I know. You’re upset. You think the guy you fell in love with last spring is spending the summer flip-flopping his way to the right. Drifting to the center. Going all moderate on you. So you’re withholding the love. Also possibly the money.

I feel your pain. I just don’t know what candidate you’re talking about.

Think back. Why, exactly, did you prefer Obama over Hillary Clinton in the first place? Their policies were almost identical — except his health care proposal was more conservative. You liked Barack because you thought he could get us past the old brain-dead politics, right? He talked — and talked and talked — about how there were going to be no more red states and blue states, how he was going to bring Americans together, including Republicans and Democrats.

Exactly where did everybody think this gathering was going to take place? Left field?

When an extremely intelligent politician tells you over and over and over that he is tired of the take-no-prisoners politics of the last several decades, that he is going to get things done and build a “new consensus,” he is trying to explain that he is all about compromise. Even if he says it in that great Baracky way.

Here’s a helpful story: Once upon a time, there was a woman searching for a guy who was ready to commit. One day, she met an attractive young man.

“My name is Chuck,” he said, grinning an infectious grin. “I’m planning to devote my entire life to saving endangered wildlife in the Antarctic. In five weeks I leave for the South Pole, where I will live alone in a tent, trying to convince the penguins that I am part of their flock. In the meantime, would you like to go out?”

“I have just met the man I’m going to marry,” she told her friends. She had been betrayed by poor listening skills, which skipped right over the South Pole and the tent. Of course, after five weeks of heavy dating, Chuck flew away and was never heard from again.

A year and a half of campaigning and we still haven’t heard Obama’s penguins, either. It’s not his fault that we missed the message — although to be fair, he did make it sound as if getting rid of the “old politics” involved driving out the oil and pharmaceutical lobbyists rather than splitting the difference on federal wiretapping legislation. But if you look at the political fights he’s picked throughout his political career, the main theme is not any ideology. It’s that he hates stupidity. “I don’t oppose all wars. What I am opposed to is a dumb war,” he said in 2002 in his big speech against the invasion of Iraq. He did not, you will notice, say he was against unilateral military action or pre-emptive attacks or nation-building. He was antidumb.

Most of the things Obama’s taken heat for saying this summer fall into these two familiar patterns — attempts to find a rational common ground on controversial issues and dumb-avoidance.

On the common-ground front, he’s called for giving more federal money to religious groups that run social programs, but only if the services they offer are secular. People can have guns for hunting and protection, but we should crack down on unscrupulous gun sellers. Putting some restrictions on the government’s ability to wiretap is better than nothing, even though he would rather have gone further.

Dumb-avoidance would include his opposing the gas-tax holiday, backtracking on the anti-Nafta pandering he did during the primary and acknowledging that if one is planning to go all the way to Iraq to talk to the generals, one should actually pay attention to what the generals say.

Touching both bases are Obama’s positions that 1) if people are going to ask him every day why he’s not wearing a flag pin, it’s easier to just wear the pin, for heaven’s sake, and 2) there’s nothing to be gained by getting into a fight over whether the death penalty can be imposed on child rapists.

His decision to ditch public campaign financing, on the other hand, was nothing but a complete, total, purebred flip-flop. If you are a person who feels campaign finance reform is the most important issue facing America right now, you should either vote for John McCain or go home and put a pillow over your head. However, I believe I have met every single person in the country for whom campaign finance reform is the tiptop priority, and their numbers are not legion.

Meanwhile, Obama has made it clear what issues he thinks all this cleverness and compromising are supposed to serve: national health care, a smart energy policy and getting American troops out of Iraq. He has tons of other concerns, but those seem to be the top three. There’s definitely a penguin in there somewhere.