Look at what his routine spawned:, National Empty Chair Day!
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From two friends and fellow memo readers in response to my note that Obama would not be meeting with Netanyahu; "To my co-religionists who continue to declare their support for President Obama.....you now officially meet Lenin's criteria as Useful Idiots. "
"If this is how Obama conducts himself before the election, I shudder to think how he’ll deal with Israel if he’s re-elected.
Please DON'T BE FOOLED, by sound-bytes and words, Israel and the Jewish People DO NOT I REPEAT DO NOT have a friend in the White House.
PLEASE Don't be blinded by the glare of the obvious........."
My response: "President Putz!" (See 1 below.)
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Now for some great humor for those why fly: "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBca1ixoEbg"---
'It ain't over til its over' but there is much to compel the reasoning behind this article . There is still time and then the debates. (See 2 below.)
But then let Mark's words reach G-d's ears. (See 2a below.)
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Two ads decades apart: ① Morning in America ② Mourning in America
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Stratfor's George Friedman and Iran etc. (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1)
Jews and American Conservatism
By Dov Fischer
Last year, when voters in the Queens-Brooklyn Ninth Congressional District of New York elected Bob Turner, a solid Republican conservative, to the seat abandoned by disgraced Anthony Weiner, it marked a watershed moment in American Jewish history, as Orthodox Jews finally flexed some muscle alongside Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union. That seat had not left the Democrats since 1923, and it seems that Jewish voters have been liberal Democrat as long, if not longer.Alongside African-Americans, Jewish Americans traditionally have been the Democrats' most reliable voting bloc. In that way, rather than advancing legitimate interests, Jews effectively throw away their voting influence, year after year, as do African-Americans. Democrats know that African-American votes mostly are in the bag, as are Jewish votes, so Democrats need not vie seriously for support. Contrary to increasing their influence by such group voting, they dilute by signaling to one party that they will be there no-matter-what, while signaling to the other party that virtually nothing will influence their voting.
First of all, as Bob Turner's election in 2011 evidenced, the Democrat fever is breaking. While Jews voted for Obama in numbers estimated around 85% in the last election, polls now show slippage to support in the 60% range. His support has dropped among Jews by some 25 percent, and that's not shabby. It is a start, perhaps the sign of an awakening. Voting pattern transformations take years, exactly as it took more than a century to wean White Southern Christians off the Democrats, and it is important to understand why these paradigm shifts do not happen overnight. In a way, it takes an Obama -- a "transformational figure in history" -- to help transform traditional Democrat voting blocs towards Republican conservatism.
Ironically, however, the political party that stands strongest behind Israel, her military security, her right to populate Jews in the liberated lands of Judea and Samaria, her right to build Jewish communities in East Jerusalem and her right to declare united Jerusalem as her national capital, and her right to refuse pressure to capitulate to demonstrable terrorists and to quasi-terrorists-in-suits who now run the "Palestinian Authority" is the Republican Party. Republicans support Israel not because that position will help garner Jewish votes, but because Republicans know that support is morally right, ethically right, and most importantly advances the national and strategic interests of the United States. Towards that support, the impassioned and overwhelming support of American Christians for Israel has been extraordinary.So why do so many American Jews not get it?
More than 90% of American Jews descend from grandparents and great-grandparents who arrived in the United States from Eastern Europe between 1881-1914. In 1881, there were approximately 250,000 Jews in America; by 1914, there were more than three and a half million. Centuries of anti-Semitism bred in many Jews a desperate need to find ways to escape the hate -- or just to escape their Jewishness. The kind of irrational hate that sees a person targeted from the moment of birth, no matter what he does or believes the rest of his life, leads to many reasonable and many other strange strategies aiming at just being left alone. One painful approach that gained sway among children of the American Jewish immigrants a century ago was to assimilate into America's "melting pot," to move away from authentic Jewish teaching and practice, the ways of Torah life, and to try hiding among the greater population. Cut one's overt ties to Jewishness. Hide the religion and the identity. Unlearn the languages of Yiddish and Hebrew. Pray in English. Eat non-kosher. Treat Saturday the way everyone else does. Melt into the melting pot. Dissolve if possible. And change the name.
The move to liberalism and Democrat politics among Jews intensified between the 1920s-1950s, as a subtle but distinct anti-Semitism in America kept Jews out of exclusive country clubs, excellent universities, and white-shoe law firms that were perceived as synonymous with "Republican types." Jews could not spend a night in many decent American hotels, could not rent apartments even in parts of Manhattan, were barred from Ivy League schools each year after the universities filled their respective annual Jewish admissions quotas, were barred from practicing medicine in many of America's best hospitals, and even were kept out of prominent American law firms or relegated solely to practicing then-disfavored bankruptcy law. Republicans were not identified with giving Jews a break, while Democrats did open some doors. Woodrow Wilson named Louis Brandeis to the Supreme Court, the first Jewish jurist ever so named, met by a torrent of anti-Jewish opposition. Franklin Roosevelt brought Jews into his cabinet, albeit the kinds of Jews who "knew their place" and (but for one exception, Henry Morgenthau) would not bother the President with such mundane parochial Jewish concerns as saving victims being slaughtered during the Holocaust or advancing a burgeoning Jewish national enterprise in the Holy Land.
Names were changed from Emmanuel Goldenberg to Edward G. Robinson, Leo Jacob to Lee J. Cobb, Bernie Schwartz to Tony Curtis, Betty Perske to Lauren Bacall, Jacob Julius Garfinkle to John Garfield. They were changed from Judith Tuvim to Judy Holliday, Benjamin Kubelsky to Jack Benny, Joseph Abraham Gottlieb to Joey Bishop, Jacob Cohen to Rodney Dangerfield, Arthur Leonard Rosenberg to Tony Randall. Even among the more recent, Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz became Jon Stewart, Andrew Silverstein became Andrew Dice Clay, and Jerome Silberman became Gene Wilder. Early Jewish immigrants flooded to the United States from Eastern Europe between 1881, when Tsar Alexander II's assassination set off anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia that spread throughout the region, through 1914 when America closed its borders to all immigrants at the outset of World War I. As the naïve immigrants flooded into New York Harbor and Ellis Island, unschooled in Western ways of democracy and untutored in English, the New York Democrat political machine was there to greet them and sign them up, much as they did in New York, Boston, and other cities with the ethnic Catholic immigrants from Ireland, Italy, and Poland. They smelled votes.
Through a quirk of modern history, American Jews mistakenly misinterpreted an historical coincidence as reflecting that Roosevelt was their friend. Because Adolph Hitler was elected Germany's Chancellor in March 1933, only months after Roosevelt led a liberal sweep of the White House when he won his first term in November 1932, a false coincidental perception arose among the large body of uninformed American Jewish immigrants that the liberal FDR was a freedom fighter courageously leading the war against the Jew-hater Hitler. In reality, FDR was nothing of the sort. However, he just-so-happened to be President on December 7, 1941 when Japan hit Pearl Harbor nine years after his first election, and he consequently was left with no choice but to defend America militarily against the Japan-Mussolini-Hitler axis. So a quirk of history convinced the unsophisticated that liberals are the bulwarks against tyrannical Jew-haters. The old guard of Jew-haters like the Tsars of Russia were associated with the Right, and the new anti-Semites of fascism like Hitler, who happened to rise while Franklin Roosevelt was President, were perceived as manifestations of a newer Right (although Jonah Goldberg has shown that Hitler Nazism actually was an extreme of the Left). FDR was no friend of Jews, actively preventing Jewish refugees from entering America during the Nazi years, even authorizing a naval blockade to bar a Jewish refugee ship, "The St. Louis," from debarking in Florida after its prior port of call at Havana, Cuba had refused to allow entry to the nearly thousand refugees from Hitler aboard that "voyage of the damned." In the end, the ship had to sail back to Europe.
Once liberalism had set in among American Jews, they naively passed their liberalism down to their kids, much as a century of Southern Democrats passed their Party affiliation to their kids. Initially, Southern Democrats had voted Democrat because Lincoln, the first Republican President, was their arch-foe when they tried seceding from the Union. So the Republicans, a liberal anti-slavery party based in the north, were their enemy. The Democrats were the slave-owners, the racists, the Ku Klux Klan. Even into the modern era, the worst anti-Black hatred and most intense political segregationism came out of the Democrat Party and their leading racial separatists like Alabama Governor George Wallace and Georgia Governor Lester Maddox. Somehow, even as the national Democrat Party had shifted leftward through the 1930s and beyond, Southern conservatives continued blindly voting for Democrats, voting against interest and belief for decades and decades, not breaking their trance until George McGovern carried the Democrats' standard into the 1972 Presidential elections. Even afterwards, for yet another forty years, Southern conservatives continued electing primarily Democrats to their local state offices throughout the South. As with Christians in the American South, the same irrational voting patterns continue among Jews.
So it is about process and the quirks of the voting system, voting for the party that your parents and grandparents backed, aligning with that party and therefore committing your political aspirations to that party, even as that party no longer represents anything that it stood for a century earlier and today stands for values inimical to your own. Consider: As a core value, Democrats advocate raising taxes on businesses, while Republicans advocate reducing tax pressure on corporations. The Hollywood community is a haven for Obama fundraising, and he and the Secret Service repeatedly mess up rush-hour traffic in the Greater Los Angeles region as he continues helicoptering in for soirees with the glitz set. Those Beautiful People back Obama's vision of increasing taxes on business, on the rich, on the "One Percent" -- on them. But they are not really as selfless as they may seem. The movie industry has been fleeing Hollywood and now makes more films than ever before outside California, in order to avoid the taxes
It took Ronald Reagan time to determine that, rather than leaving the Democrats, it was the Democrat Party that had left him. So, too, the American South. Once Southerners had aligned with the Democrats during the Lincoln years, they put their hopes in that party, joined that party, and regularly voted for that party. A century later, when they truly were conservative Republicans in spirit, they still were joining the Democrat Party, people like Rick Perry in Texas, because that was where political opportunity for advancement and a career in government lay. Similarly, in liberal northeastern cities, it became so hopeless for a conservative to seek office as a Republicans that it became commonplace instead to see election campaigns pitting the "mainstream Democrat" against the "conservative Democrat." Because the local state Republican parties could not get their acts together in such a climate, national elections would see "Democrats for Nixon" or "Democrats for Reagan" as the major Republican organizing models in one northeastern city after another. In the same way, rock-solid conservatives, such as Orthodox Jewish New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind, who has represented his rock-solid conservative, Orthodox Jewish district in Brooklyn for 30 years since 1983, still run on the Democrat line. If Hikind had tried running as a Republican in 1983, he knew he would not have been elected, much as conservatives in the South could not get elected on the Republican line until the most recent era, finally terminating the paradox with the 2010 watershed nationwide shellacking of Democrats. The Republican Party owes a great deal to George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, and Barack Obama.
As the 2010 watershed shellacking elections evidenced, Obama has been transformational, opening new vistas for Republicans. That transformation slowly is reaching the Jewish electorate, reflected by Orthodox Jews electing non-Jewish Republican conservative Bob Turner, even as America's most prominent conservative analysts today include deeply conservative voices like Mark Levin and Michael Savage, as well as mainstream conservative thinkers like Ben Stein, Dennis Prager, Michael Medved, Charles Krauthammer, Jeff Jacoby, and Rabbis like Daniel Lapin and Aryeh Spero. They continue in a tradition going back to American Jewish conservatives and libertarians like Norman Podhoretz, Milton Friedman and even Ayn Rand (renamed from Alisa Rosenbaum). Newly emerging Jewish voices in conservative America include Eric Cantor and Josh Mandel, who is seeking the U.S. Senate seat in Ohio now held by Sherrod Brown, as well as Ben Shapiro, Steven Plaut, and the late Andrew Beitbart, who was raised Jewish by his adoptive parents. There are many more in the blogosphere. Major Jewish support for Republican conservative candidates has been coming from a geometrically expanding base of donors best typified by Nevada casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, now offsetting those on the left. Obama has been transformational.
Centuries of irrational hatred eventually bred in many Jews irrational responses. If you have not faced it, you cannot imagine it. Some of the responses border on outright crazy. Virtually the entire political science department at Israel's Ben Gurion University in Beersheba is internationally famous as a world center of virulently anti-Israel advocacy. An Israeli Ph.D. candidate, doing a doctoral thesis aimed at proving that Israelis are racists, focused on data evidencing that soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces do not perpetrate rapes. The insane thesis: since most armies include soldiers who rape civilians, therefore it must be that Israel's armed forces do not rape civilians because they are racist. (Nazi German officers never raped women in groups that the Nazis hated?)
At the head of virtually every anti-Israel organization in the world, we find Jews. Flotillas aimed at supporting Hamas terrorists in Gaza include Jews. When there is a full-page newspaper advertisement attacking Israel, it is challenging to find non-Jewish names, as they are crowded out by Jewish liberals desperately trying to prove their universalism. Whether groups like Breira in the 1970s or the George Soros-funded "J Street" in Washington, punctuated by the strangest Jews in academia, whether Noam Chomsky the linguist or Norman Finkelstein the child of Holocaust Survivors, these troubled outliers continue a tradition that traces back to a tragic psycho-social phenomenon in past centuries among small numbers of Jews animated by values antithetical to Judaism. Yet, ironically, it is Barack Obama, darling of ogling Jewish liberals in Hollywood and other predictable Democrat redoubts, who now has opened doors unimaginably for Jewish Americans to see the perils of continuing in alliances that make no sense. Like the deeply conservative American White Anglo-Saxon Protestants of the American South who continued voting into 1972 for Democrats as President, and until 2010 for Democrats to dominate local state offices, we now are seeing the century's first maturing of the American Jewish voter, as Obama now polls worse among Jews than has any other Democrat since Jimmy Carter. There is light at the end of the tunnel.
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The Christians of the American South did it. We are getting there, too.Dov Fischer, adjunct professor of law at Loyola Law School, is a columnist for several online magazines and is rabbi of Young Israel of Orange County. He blogs at rabbidov.com.
2) Christopher Ruddy¹s Perspective: Earlier this year it seemed to many that
Mitt Romney was a shoo-in to become our next president.
Not anymore.
Back then the landscape looked quite promising for Romney to beat Barack
Obama. After all, Obama was a Democratic president presiding over one of the
worst recessions since the Great Depression, a doctrinaire liberal out of
sync with most Americans, and a man who apparently has lacked the leadership
to forge compromises in Washington to get the nation moving again.
But months later, Mitt Romney is behind in national tracking polls, most
importantly in almost every swing state. A leading GOP official on Capitol
Hill told me in Tampa that Romney can't win Ohio, and he won't win Virginia.
How could this happen?
If I could put my finger on it, I would say the Romney campaign has been
poorly managed. They haven't staged their candidate well, and their
messaging has been incoherent, to put it nicely.
We saw this mismanagement early in the primary. Those in the Romney campaign
should have locked up their candidate's nomination by January. But the
campaign team decided they didn't want to owe the conservative base of the
GOP much, so they decided to forego the usual outreach efforts. Instead,
they spent tens of millions of dollars in attack ads against fellow
Republicans.
Four months later, they had the nomination, but at a nasty political cost.
Since April, many of us thought a united GOP and the party's nominee, flush
with a remarkable amount of cash, would come out swinging against Obama and
offer a platform of new, positive ideas to win over the undecideds.
This hasn¹t happened. In fact, one gaffe and misstep seem to follow another.
Political pros say a presidential campaign has two opportunities to really
shine, first at the convention and then with the first presidential debate.
The first opportunity has already been lost, demonstrating again the
weakness of the political managers around Romney.
The amateurish way the Tampa convention was organized was revealing.
Consider they spent $2.5 million of critically important campaign funds
building the Frank Gehry-inspired wood stage. One billionaire supporter of
Romney jokingly told me that the odd stage and the wood-slat designed podium
looked odd, like "a Swedish sauna."
Another major gaffe by campaign organizers was placing the stage in the
middle of the convention center, instead of at its end. With that placement,
a swathe of empty seats on both sides of the stage was evident every time
the national television cameras panned the audience. (Interestingly, the
Democrats correctly placed their stage at the end of their center, obviating
the empty seat problem.)
But the really stunning thing about Tampa was that I couldn't figure out the
key message Romney's people wanted the American people to know.
There were so many messages, it was disorienting: "Mitt is a regular guy."
"We're a diverse party." "Hi, I'm Chris Christie, and I'm running for
re-election." "Ann humanizes Mitt." "We're proud of the Mormon faith." "The
Bush years were not as bad as you thought." "Bain Capital is not an evil
company." Add to these a bunch of sub-themes that have faded into oblivion.
The message, repeated in mantra fashion by every speaker and shouted by
every placard-carrying delegate, should have been a simple one: Obama failed
to do the job he promised. Mitt Romney, a man of integrity and incredible
business skill, has the plan to get the job done.
Such a message never permeated.
On the other hand, the Democratic convention went like clockwork with superb
messaging ‹ a clear and consistent message that ran through every speaker's
remarks. The message: Only Obama and the Democrats can protect you and your
benefits from those rich Republican elitists. Mitt Romney simply can't be
trusted.
So, the first major chance the GOP had to let the American people connect
with Mitt Romney was obviated by the campaign's decision to allow Clint
Eastwood to hijack the night with his comedy routine.
Sure it was funny. Did it win over swing voters? No. Did it overshadow
Romney? Yes.
It is beyond belief that seasoned political pros would allow Eastwood, whose
political views and loyalties have been all over the map through the
decades, to take the stage right before the nominee's speech and ad lib a
speech.
I thought the most telling moment of the Tampa convention was Chris
Christie's speech. Christie was given the keynote speaking slot. It is
considered the most important speech second to the nominee's and afforded
prime-time coverage.
Much has been made of the fact Christie used it as an infomercial for
himself, and barely mentioned either Romney or Obama for that matter.
It's important to remember that Romney's campaign strategists also have
worked for Christie. So reading the tea leaves of Christie's "out for
himself" speech, I can only conclude Romney's advisers are either
incompetent or have significant doubts about Romney's will to win, hence
Christie's distancing act.
Romney himself seems to have a difficult time grappling with messaging.
Granted, his strengths are in business, not in communications. This is why
his campaign team is so important. So far, their advice and messaging have
fallen woefully short.
Romney hasn¹t helped. His selection of Paul Ryan, a rising star congressman
who few thought had presidential stature and has no foreign policy
credentials, has further confused Romney's message.
By tapping Ryan, Romney highlighted congressional Republican efforts to
abolish Medicare, a dream issue for the Obama campaign.
So a campaign that should have been increasingly focused on Obama's job
performance has become one about Medicare and the Ryan plan.
This past Sunday on ³Meet the Press² we saw another messaging fumble by
Romney. He has stated unequivocally for months now he would fully "repeal
Obamacare." But he told NBC's David Gregory he likes certain provisions of
the president's healthcare law, and said he would keep some, including the
requirement that insurance companies take people with pre-existing
conditions and allow young adults to be covered by their parents¹ policies
until age 26.
Not only is this a major reversal of Romney's position, it also counters
claims he will repeal the individual mandate.
Here's why: The federal government estimates that 25 million uninsured
people have pre-existing conditions. If Romney gets his way and insurance
companies are forced to give them coverage, it will swamp the system,
forcing insurers to pass on these enormous costs to those currently insured.
Premiums will skyrocket even more under Romney's plan than Obama's.
(Obamacare "solves" this problem by using the individual mandate, as it
forces tens of millions of healthy people to get insurance, evening out the
risk pool and lowering costs to the insured. Still, I oppose the individual
mandate.)
Once again, the Romney campaign team didn't bother to think about the
implications of this new and surprise policy turn.
Earlier this summer Rupert Murdoch tweeted a message that may turn out to be
prophetic: "Tough O Chicago pros will be hard to beat unless [Romney] drops
old friends from team and hires some real pros. Doubtful."
Obama critics have been touting Edward Klein's new best-selling book about
Obama entitled "Amateur." But it's looking more and more that Obama is no
amateur, while the Romney campaign has more than its fair share of them.
Christopher Ruddy is CEO and editor of Newsmax Media Inc. Read more
© 2012 Newsmax. All rights reserved.
2a)November? Economists Make Shocking Prediction
By Mark Skousen
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|---|
Finally, after years of campaigning, debates and never-ending television coverage, the November elections are upon us. Who will win and will it make any difference in your investments?
Yes and yes!
Will President Obama win re-election, or will Governor Romney occupy the White House in January?
Yes and yes!
Will President Obama win re-election, or will Governor Romney occupy the White House in January?
Right now Intrade, the political futures market, shows Mr. Obama as the heavy favorite by 58% to 42%.
But much could change between now and November 6, and Intrade has had a checkered past in its ability to predict winners...
A better record has been recorded by several economists who have developed economic models that have been surprisingly accurate.
And all of them agree: President Obama is in serious trouble and is likely to lose in November!
Here are the results of four of the best forecasters in the business:
1. Two political scientists at the University of Colorado, Ken Bickers and Michael Berry, used their economic indicator model to predict who would win in November. Their model has correctly predicted the outcome of the past eight elections, and this year they predict a big Romney victory with nearly 53% of the vote, with Romney winning almost all the swing states.
2. Nigel Gault, the chief U.S. economist at IHS Global Insights, a Boston-based research firm, uses proprietary methods and various economic variables to show the president in even worse shape. The high unemployment rate (8.1%) is a "crucial variable," he states, and based on his model, Obama will garner only 45.4% of the popular vote.
3. Two economists, David Rothschild of Microsoft Research and Patrick Hummel of Google, have created a model that is both political and economic, and they too show President Obama losing.
4. Ray C. Fair, the Yale economics professor, has developed a successful prediction model that covers elections since 1916. His model depends entirely on the strength of the economy. Right now he has Romney leading by only one percentage point, 50.5% to Obama's 49.5%, but he says there is a 2.5% "standard error," so the election is "too close to call."
What Does This Mean?
I am convinced that a Romney victory would be extremely positive for Wall Street, as his election bodes well for maintaining low taxes on capital gains and dividends, oil and gas stocks, and he's viewed as more "pro-business" than President Obama.
And the best way to play a Romney victory... Buy Northern Oil & Gas(NYSE: NOG), a fast-growing energy play in the Midwest. Main Street Capital (NYSE: MAIN), a business development company, is another good choice. And for Eaton Vance Floating Rate Fund (NYSE: EFT), a prime rate fund that will benefit from rising interest rates, an economic recovery will result in higher rates.
Heck, these stocks may also do well in an Obama second term.
Good Investing, AEIOU,
Mark
But much could change between now and November 6, and Intrade has had a checkered past in its ability to predict winners...
A better record has been recorded by several economists who have developed economic models that have been surprisingly accurate.
And all of them agree: President Obama is in serious trouble and is likely to lose in November!
Here are the results of four of the best forecasters in the business:
1. Two political scientists at the University of Colorado, Ken Bickers and Michael Berry, used their economic indicator model to predict who would win in November. Their model has correctly predicted the outcome of the past eight elections, and this year they predict a big Romney victory with nearly 53% of the vote, with Romney winning almost all the swing states.
2. Nigel Gault, the chief U.S. economist at IHS Global Insights, a Boston-based research firm, uses proprietary methods and various economic variables to show the president in even worse shape. The high unemployment rate (8.1%) is a "crucial variable," he states, and based on his model, Obama will garner only 45.4% of the popular vote.
3. Two economists, David Rothschild of Microsoft Research and Patrick Hummel of Google, have created a model that is both political and economic, and they too show President Obama losing.
4. Ray C. Fair, the Yale economics professor, has developed a successful prediction model that covers elections since 1916. His model depends entirely on the strength of the economy. Right now he has Romney leading by only one percentage point, 50.5% to Obama's 49.5%, but he says there is a 2.5% "standard error," so the election is "too close to call."
What Does This Mean?
I am convinced that a Romney victory would be extremely positive for Wall Street, as his election bodes well for maintaining low taxes on capital gains and dividends, oil and gas stocks, and he's viewed as more "pro-business" than President Obama.
And the best way to play a Romney victory... Buy Northern Oil & Gas(NYSE: NOG), a fast-growing energy play in the Midwest. Main Street Capital (NYSE: MAIN), a business development company, is another good choice. And for Eaton Vance Floating Rate Fund (NYSE: EFT), a prime rate fund that will benefit from rising interest rates, an economic recovery will result in higher rates.
Heck, these stocks may also do well in an Obama second term.
Good Investing, AEIOU,
Mark
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3)War and Bluff: Iran, Israel and the United States
By George Friedman
Using nuclear weapons against Israel would be catastrophic to Iran. The principle of mutual assured destruction, which stabilized the U.S.-Soviet balance in the Cold War, would govern Iran's use of nuclear weapons. If Iran struck Israel, the damage would be massive, forcing the Iranians to assume that the Israelis and their allies (specifically, the United States) would launch a massive counterattack on Iran, annihilating large parts of Iran's population.While a nuclear program has given Iran political leverage, actually acquiring nuclear weapons would increase the risk of military action against Iran. A failed military action would benefit Iran, proving its power. By contrast, a successful attack that dramatically delayed or destroyed Iran's nuclear capability would be a serious reversal. The Stuxnet episode, assuming it was an Israeli or U.S. attempt to undermine Iran's program using cyberwarfare, is instructive in this regard. Although the United States hailed Stuxnet as a major success, it hardly stopped the Iranian program, if the Israelis are to be believed. In that sense, it was a failure.
Read more: War and Bluff: Iran, Israel and the United States | Stratfor
3)War and Bluff: Iran, Israel and the United States
By George Friedman
For the past several months, the Israelis have been threatening to attack Iranian nuclear sites as the United States has pursued a complex policy of avoiding complete opposition to such strikes while making clear it doesn't feel such strikes are necessary. At the same time, the United States has carried out maneuvers meant to demonstrate its ability to prevent the Iranian counter to an attack -- namely blocking the Strait of Hormuz. While these maneuvers were under way, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said no "redline" exists that once crossed by Iran would compel an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. The Israeli government has long contended that Tehran eventually will reach the point where it will be too costly for outsiders to stop the Iranian nuclear program.
The Israeli and American positions are intimately connected, but the precise nature of the connection is less clear. Israel publicly casts itself as eager to strike Iran but restrained by the United States, though unable to guarantee it will respect American wishes if Israel sees an existential threat emanating from Iran. The United States publicly decries Iran as a threat to Israel and to other countries in the region, particularly Saudi Arabia, but expresses reservations about military action out of fears that Iran would respond to a strike by destabilizing the region and because it does not believe the Iranian nuclear program is as advanced as the Israelis say it is.
The Israelis and the Americans publicly hold the same view of Iran. But their public views on how to proceed diverge. The Israelis have less tolerance for risk than the Americans, who have less tolerance for the global consequences of an attack. Their disagreement on the issue pivots around the status of the Iranian nuclear program. All of this lies on the surface; let us now examine the deeper structure of the issue.
Behind the Rhetoric
From the Iranian point of view, a nuclear program has been extremely valuable. Having one has brought Iran prestige in the Islamic world and has given it a level of useful global political credibility. As with North Korea, having a nuclear program has allowed Iran to sit as an equal with the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany, creating a psychological atmosphere in which Iran's willingness merely to talk to the Americans, British, French, Russians, Chinese and Germans represented a concession. Though it has positioned the Iranians extremely well politically, the nuclear program also has triggered sanctions that have caused Iran substantial pain. But Iran has prepared for sanctions for years, building a range of corporate, banking and security mechanisms to evade their most devastating impact. Having countries like Russia and China unwilling to see Iran crushed has helped. Iran can survive sanctions.
Using nuclear weapons against Israel would be catastrophic to Iran. The principle of mutual assured destruction, which stabilized the U.S.-Soviet balance in the Cold War, would govern Iran's use of nuclear weapons. If Iran struck Israel, the damage would be massive, forcing the Iranians to assume that the Israelis and their allies (specifically, the United States) would launch a massive counterattack on Iran, annihilating large parts of Iran's population.While a nuclear program has given Iran political leverage, actually acquiring nuclear weapons would increase the risk of military action against Iran. A failed military action would benefit Iran, proving its power. By contrast, a successful attack that dramatically delayed or destroyed Iran's nuclear capability would be a serious reversal. The Stuxnet episode, assuming it was an Israeli or U.S. attempt to undermine Iran's program using cyberwarfare, is instructive in this regard. Although the United States hailed Stuxnet as a major success, it hardly stopped the Iranian program, if the Israelis are to be believed. In that sense, it was a failure.
It is here that we get to the heart of the issue. While from a rational perspective the Iranians would be fools to launch such an attack, the Israeli position is that the Iranians are not rational actors and that their religious fanaticism makes any attempt to predict their actions pointless. Thus, the Iranians might well accept the annihilation of their country in order to destroy Israel in a sort of megasuicide bombing. The Israelis point to the Iranians' rhetoric as evidence of their fanaticism. Yet, as we know, political rhetoric is not always politically predictive. In addition, rhetoric aside, Iran has pursued a cautious foreign policy, pursuing its ends with covert rather than overt means. It has rarely taken reckless action, engaging instead in reckless rhetoric.
If the Israelis believe the Iranians are not deterred by the prospect of mutually assured destruction, then allowing them to develop nuclear weapons would be irrational. If they do see the Iranians as rational actors, then shaping the psychological environment in which Iran acquires nuclear weapons is a critical element of mutually assured destruction. Herein lies the root of the great Israeli debate that pits the Netanyahu government, which appears to regard Iran as irrational, against significant segments of the Israeli military and intelligence communities, which regard Iran as rational.
Avoiding Attaining a Weapon
Assuming the Iranians are rational actors, their optimal strategy lies not in acquiring nuclear weapons and certainly not in using them, but instead in having a credible weapons development program that permits them to be seen as significant international actors. Developing weapons without ever producing them gives Iran international political significance, albeit at the cost of sanctions of debatable impact. At the same time, it does not force anyone to act against them, thereby permitting outsiders to avoid incurring the uncertainties and risks of such action.
Up to this point, the Iranians have not even fielded a device for testing, let alone a deliverable weapon. For all their activity, either their technical limitations or a political decision has kept them from actually crossing the obvious redlines and left Israel trying to define some developmental redline.
Iran's approach has created a slowly unfolding crisis, reinforced by Israel's slowly rolling response. For its part, all of Israel's rhetoric -- and periodic threats of imminent attack -- has been going on for several years, but the Israelis have done little beyond some covert and cyberattacks to block the Iranian nuclear program. Just as the gap between Iranian rhetoric and action has been telling, so, too, has the gap between Israeli rhetoric and reality. Both want to appear more fearsome than either is actually willing to act.
The Iranian strategy has been to maintain ambiguity on the status of its program, while making it appear that the program is capable of sudden success -- without ever achieving that success. The Israeli strategy has been to appear constantly on the verge of attack without ever attacking and to use the United States as its reason for withholding attacks, along with the studied ambiguity of the Iranian program. The United States, for its part, has been content playing the role of holding Israel back from an attack that Israel doesn't seem to want to launch. The United States sees the crumbling of Iran's position in Syria as a major Iranian reversal and is content to see this play out alongside sanctions.
Underlying Israel's hesitancy about whether it will attack has been the question of whether it can pull off an attack. This is not a political question, but a military and technical one. Iran, after all, has been preparing for an attack on its nuclear facilities since their inception. Some scoff at Iranian preparations for attack. These are the same people who are most alarmed by supposed Iranian acumen in developing nuclear weapons. If a country can develop nuclear weapons, there is no reason it can't develop hardened and dispersed sites and create enough ambiguity to deprive Israeli and U.S. intelligence of confidence in their ability to determine what is where. I am reminded of the raid on Son Tay during the Vietnam War. The United States mounted an effort to rescue U.S. prisoners of war in North Vietnam only to discover that its intelligence on where the POWs were located was completely wrong. Any politician deciding whether to attack Iran would have Son Tay and a hundred other intelligence failures chasing around their brains, especially since a failed attack on Iran would be far worse than no attack.
Dispersed sites reduce Israel's ability to strike hard at a target and to acquire a battle damage assessment that would tell Israel three things: first, whether the target had been destroyed when it was buried under rock and concrete; second, whether the target contained what Israel thought it contained; and third, whether the strike had missed a backup site that replicated the one it destroyed. Assuming the Israelis figured out that another attack was needed, could their air force mount a second air campaign lasting days or weeks? They have a small air force and the distances involved are great.
Meanwhile, deploying special operations forces to so many targets so close to Tehran and so far from Iran's borders would be risky, to say the least. Some sort of exotic attack, for example one using nuclear weapons to generate electromagnetic pulses to paralyze the region, is conceivable -- but given the size of the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem-Haifa triangle, it is hard to imagine Israel wanting to set such a precedent. If the Israelis have managed to develop a new weapons technology unknown to anyone, all conventional analyses are off. But if the Israelis had an ultrasecret miracle weapon, postponing its use might compromise its secrecy. I suspect that if they had such a weapon, they would have used it by now.
The battlefield challenges posed by the Iranians are daunting, and a strike becomes even less appealing considering that the Iranians have not yet detonated a device and are far from a weapon. The Americans emphasize these points, but they are happy to use the Israeli threats to build pressure on the Iranians. The United States wants to undermine Iranian credibility in the region by making Iran seem vulnerable. The twin forces of Israeli rhetoric and sanctions help make Iran look embattled. The reversal in Syria enhances this sense. Naval maneuvers in the Strait of Hormuz add to the sense that the United States is prepared to neutralize Iranian counters to an Israeli airstrike, making the threat Israel poses and the weakness of Iran appear larger.
When we step back and view the picture as a whole, we see Iran using its nuclear program for political reasons but being meticulous not to make itself appear unambiguously close to success. We see the Israelis talking as if they were threatened but acting as if they were in no rush to address the supposed threat. And we see the Americans acting as if they are restraining Israel, paradoxically appearing to be Iran's protector even though they are using the Israeli threat to increase Iranian insecurity. For their part, the Russians initially supported Iran in a bid to bog down the United States in another Middle East crisis. But given Iran's reversal in Syria, the Russians are clearly reconsidering their Middle East strategy and even whether they actually have a strategy in the first place. Meanwhile, the Chinese want to continue buying Iranian oil unnoticed.
It is the U.S.-Israeli byplay that is most fascinating. On the surface, Israel is driving U.S. policy. On closer examination, the reverse is true. Israel has bluffed an attack for years and never acted. Perhaps now it will act, but the risks of failure are substantial. If Israel really wants to act, this is not obvious. Speeches by politicians do not constitute clear guidelines. If the Israelis want to get the United States to participate in the attack, rhetoric won't work. Washington wants to proceed by increasing pressure to isolate Iran. Simply getting rid of a nuclear program not clearly intended to produce a device is not U.S. policy. Containing Iran without being drawn into a war is. To this end, Israeli rhetoric is useful.
Rather than seeing Netanyahu as trying to force the United States into an attack, it is more useful to see Netanyahu's rhetoric as valuable to U.S. strategy. Israel and the United States remain geopolitically aligned. Israel's bellicosity is not meant to signal an imminent attack, but to support the U.S. agenda of isolating and maintaining pressure on Iran. That would indicate more speeches from Netanyahu and greater fear of war. But speeches and emotions aside, intensifying psychological pressure on Iran is more likely than war.
Read more: War and Bluff: Iran, Israel and the United States | Stratfor
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