When Saudi Arabia this week rebuked the United States, using media leaks to send a message to the kingdom's longtime ally, the episode was no petty fit of pique. It reflected a calculated decision by the Al Saud rulers that their own survival requires distancing themselves from the very country that has protected the royal family for more than half a century.
In a tribal society like Saudi Arabia's, it is well understood that weakness breeds contempt and invites aggression. To the Al Saud, the Obama administration's retreat from its red-line ultimatum on Syria's use of chemical weapons and the administration's unseemly rush to negotiate with Iran over its nuclear program are simply the latest evidence of such weakness. It diminishes U.S. influence in the region while offending and endangering America's allies. Already facing social tensions inside the kingdom and confronting growing instability throughout the Mideast, the ruling Al Saud have concluded that they can no longer risk being seen holding hands with a timorous great power.
Sadly for the Saudis, there is no alternative protector, which means the two countries will continue to share an interest, however strained, in combating terrorism and securing stability in the Persian Gulf. The kingdom has courted Russia and China in recent years, but they won't protect the Saudis from the primary threat of Iran. Indeed, they support the regime in Tehran. This reality makes Saudi Arabia's distancing itself from the U.S. all the more startling.
To understand the U.S.-Saudi rift, it is essential to realize that from the capital in Riyadh the world looks more threatening than at any time since the founding of modern Saudi Arabia in 1932. There have been other menacing times. Egypt's President Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1960s sought to destabilize the Al Saud by fomenting trouble in neighboring Yemen. In 1979, religious fanatics took over the Grand Mosque in Mecca and had to be ousted by military action. The Saudis feared, in 1990, that their kingdom was next after Iraq's Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. In all those troubled moments, the U.S. was either a trusted if silent supporter of the Saudis or an active defender, as in the 1990 Gulf War.
A few days later, the Saudi foreign minister abruptly canceled his own speech to the General Assembly. Then last week, Saudi Arabia took the extraordinary step of turning down a Security Council seat it had long sought. According to a Reuters report this week, Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan, head of the kingdom's intelligence and national security operations, told European diplomats that both moves at the U.N. were intended as a blunt message to the Obama administration.Today, the Saudis find themselves alone regarding Syria, trapped in a proxy war with Iran, their religious (Sunni Saudi Arabia vs. Shiite Iran) and political enemy. The Saudis had sought and expected U.S. help in arming the rebels against Syrian ruler Bashar Assad, but the military aid never materialized. Instead, last month at the United Nations General Assembly gathering, President Obama eagerly sought a private meeting with Iran's new president, Hasan Rouhani, to discuss its nuclear program. Mr. Obama seemed desperately grateful merely to get him on the phone.
Only a year ago, Saudi officials expressed great confidence that Assad would be ousted from Syria by this fall. Instead, the Saudis now find themselves trapped with their foot on the snake Assad: They can't step away, lest the snake strike, but lacking American help, they don't have the means to kill the snake either.
The kingdom's relationship with the rebels is similarly precarious. The longer the Saudis supply them with arms, the longer the war drags on, and the greater the risk that the rebels—whose ranks already include at least 500 Saudi jihadists—will grow more radical and eventually return home to fight the regime that funded them.
Worst of all for the Saudis is the new U.S. dialogue with Iran. The Saudis, much like the Israelis, fear the sort of deal likely to result from a weak and naïve U.S. administration eager to avoid a military confrontation. Such a deal, the Saudis worry, would paper over Tehran's nuclear ambitions while boosting Iran's prestige and influence at the expense of Saudi Arabia. If Iran can convince the U.S.—the country that Tehran still calls the Great Satan—to lift economic sanctions without first obtaining ironclad evidence that Iran has abandoned its nuclear program, in Mideast eyes Iran would be the clear winner.
The Saudi nightmare doesn't end there. Iran, supported by Russia and China, is seen by the Saudis as a direct threat to their oil exports, the lifeblood that keeps the ruling Al Saud in power by providing the billions of dollars annually that allow the regime to buy, bribe and, when it deems necessary, brutally repress its citizens.
Meanwhile, with U.S. oil and gas production soaring, Americans may increasingly question the wisdom of spending billions on a military presence to protect the Persian Gulf through which Saudi oil exports flow—increasingly to China. When President Obama briefly threatened to strike Syria for using chemical weapons on its citizens, Saudi Arabia understandably sought a larger U.S. naval presence in the Persian Gulf to protect against a potential Iranian counter-strike. The U.S. told Riyadh it lacked the ships to meet the request, another shock to the Saudis.
These external challenges come at a time when senior members of the Saudi royal familyare consumed with a generational succession. A geriatric band of brothers has ruled the kingdom since the death in 1953 of their father, Abdulaziz Ibn Saud, the country's founder. Power soon will have to go to a son of one of those three-dozen brothers.
But who? Each brother feels one of his own sons deserves the crown—which would keep his family's branch in line for royal succession and likely shut out the others. There are hundreds of these grandsons of the founder. Managing royal family politics must be a daunting task for the 90-year-old King Abdullah, already weakened by three back surgeries in four years.
Prince Bandar is among the many contenders who could be crowned, but he is not widely considered a future king because his mother wasn't a member of the royal family. He is nonetheless a powerful presence. A pilot and colorful raconteur, he spent nearly a quarter-century as the kingdom's ambassador to the U.S., a post he left in 2005.
The savvy diplomat was close to the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, but since his emergence last year as head of intelligence—and the kingdom's point man for securing U.S. cooperation in Syria—he has had little influence on the Obama administration. He hasn't taken kindly to the personal affront, and now he seems to be speaking for the Al Saud ruler in telling European diplomats of Saudi Arabia's anger with the U.S.
Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al Faisal is fond of saying that the U.S. and Saudi Arabia no longer have a Catholic marriage but rather a Muslim one. This is a clever way of saying that Saudi Arabia and the U.S. are not faithful to each other. In the absence of any major-power alternative to the U.S., for the Saudis in this Muslim marriage the U.S. may well remain Wife No. 1. Even if she is not about to be divorced, however, the Saudis are clearly declaring a trial separation.
Ms. House, a former publisher of The Wall Street Journal who won a Pulitzer Prize as a reporter for her coverage of the Middle East, is the author of "On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines—and Future" ( Knopf, 2012).
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3)ObamaCare Takes On Water

It's not just a buggy website, it's a disaster of Titanic proportions.

By Peggy Noonan

We should not lose The Headline in the day-to-day headlines. This is big history, not small. The ObamaCare rollout is a disaster for the White House, not a problem or a challenge or an embarrassment, not a gaffe or a bad few weeks. It is a political disaster, and the only question is whether it is partially recoverable, meaning the system can be made to work in a generally satisfactory way in the next few weeks. But—it has to be repeated—they had 3½ years after passage of the Affordable Care Act to make the program into something the American people could register for and feel they were benefiting from. Three and a half years! They had a long-declared start date: It would all go live Oct. 1, 2013, and everyone in the government, every contractor and consultant, knew it. The president put the meaning of his presidency into the program—it informally carries his name, it is his brand. It was unveiled with great fanfare, and it didn't work. For almost anybody. Crashed systems, frozen screens, phone registration that prompted you back to the site that sent you to the 800 number, like a high-tech Möbius strip.
All this from the world's greatest, most technologically sophisticated nation, the one that invented the computer and the Internet. And from a government that is able to demand and channel a great deal of the people's wealth.
So you'd think it would sort of work. And it didn't. Which is a disaster.
Even though it's huge, and those who are reporting the story every day are, by and large, seasoned and have seen a few things, no one seems to know how it will end. Because it's new territory. Does anyone believe the whole technological side can be fixed quickly? No. The president may eventually accept a brief delay in implementation—it is almost unbelievable that he will not—but does anyone think that the economics of the ACA, the content as set out and expressed on the sites, will flow smoothly, coherently, and fully satisfy the objectives of expanding health-insurance coverage while lowering its cost? You might believe that, but early reports of sticker shock, high deductibles and cancelled coverage are not promising. Does anyone think the president will back off and delay the program for enough time not only to get the technological side going but seriously improve the economics? No. So we're not only in the middle of a political disaster, we're in the middle of a mystery. What happens if this whole thing continues not to work? What do we do then?
It hardly matters if anyone is fired. That's the fifth paragraph in the Wikipedia history, or the 10th. Yes, a firing would be good democratic form, and it would acknowledge the idea of accountability—someone or some persons failed on a historic level and were removed. It would take some heat off the White House—"Look, we're doing something!"—so it's surprising they haven't done it and odd the Republicans are clamoring for it. But who would want to be the new HHS secretary? Who would take that job?
The Titanic. Some will see his comments as disloyal. Actually they were candid and realistic. Although in fairness, the Titanic at least had three good days, and Edward Smith chose to go down with the ship.It was Bill Daley—accomplished political player, former commerce secretary and, most killingly, former chief of staff of President Obama, who Thursday, on "CBS This Morning," admitted the scale of the problem. Asked whether Kathleen Sebelius should be fired, he said: "To me that's kind of like firing Captain Smith on the Titanic after it hit the iceberg."
He didn't deny the waters were icy; he failed to slow his ship, failed to show heightened concern. Mrs. Sebelius did not show overwhelming confidence in the days before the debut—there was no "God himself couldn't sink this program." She repeated her lines in a way that seemed almost furtive, appearing not confident but confused, and almost guiltily stubborn. Her message was almost always the same: There are no icebergs ahead.
Norman Ornstein in National Journal this week reminds us of Democratic Sen. Max Baucus's iceberg warning—actually "train wreck"—at a hearing six months ago, in April. He warned implementation of ObamaCare could be a disaster. He told Mrs. Sebelius: "I understand you've hired a contractor. I'm just worried that that's going to be money down the drain because contractors like to make money more than they like to do anything else. That's their job." A lot of agencies are involved, he said, people are going to get confused, more simplicity is needed.
He was right. I happened to reread his warning while the House Energy and Commerce Committee questioned the four major contractors on the ObamaCare sites. The most pertinent query came from Rep. Marsha Blackburn, who asked the contractors to put on paper, and under oath, exactly how much money they had made from the federal government so far, and exactly how much they stand to make now, as they fix the sites, and in the future.
There are more questions on the failure to launch. Did Mrs. Sebelius and her top staffers know that the system was not ready and likely to fail? If they knew, did they not tell the White House? If they didn't know, how did it happen that they didn't? If the White House knew of the likelihood of a coming failure, why did they go full steam ahead? And if they didn't know, why?
Was there some degree of fabulism, or magical thinking, or reliance on blind luck within the White House and the greater administration? Many important people in the administration, and those contracting with it from the outside, would have had to ignore various signs of a coming failure. Did some of them know or have reason to know problems were both present and coming, and mislead or fail to inform their peers or superiors?
And there is the enduring mystery of why the president, who in his career has attempted to persuade the American people to have greater faith in and reliance on the federal government's ability to help, continues to go forward with an astounding lack of interest in the reputation of government.
He talks but he doesn't implement, never makes it work. He allows the IRS under his watch to be humiliated by scandal, waste, ill judgements prompted by ideological assumptions. He allows his signature program, the one that will make his name in the history books, to debut in failure. In response he says bland, rounded words that leave you wondering what just got said.
We're all reading of Jack Kennedy. He stayed up nights with self-recrimination after failure. "How could I have been so stupid?" he asked about the Bay of Pigs. A foreseeable mistake and he'd blown it, listened to the wrong people, made the wrong judgments. That man suffered over his missteps. He worried about his reputation, and the reputation of his government, and of America.
It is disorienting to not see this in a president. It is another thing about this story that feels not only historic, but historically strange.
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4)DJ Baby Steps Toward Tighter Money in China 
 By Richard Silk 

 China's central bank has shown signs of inching toward a tighter monetary
policy this week, pressed by rising inflation, runaway house prices and renewed
capital inflows. That's on top of the long-term job of getting mounting debt
under control before it overwhelms the economy. 

 Restricting lending fits authorities' goal to move the economy toward
consumption-led growth rather than an investment-driven model. But the People's
Bank of China must walk a tightrope: Moving too aggressively could aggravate
strains on the financial sector, already shaken by a severe cash crunch earlier
this year. 

 The PBOC has plenty of reasons to turn more hawkish. Consumer price inflation
ticked up to 3.1% in September, still well within the official 3.5% target but
the second-highest figure in a year. House prices are on a more alarming
trajectory, climbing 8.2% on average in the year to September, and even faster
in the largest cities. 

 The U.S. Federal Reserve's decision last month to keep its economic stimulus
in place for now has prompted a renewed movement of capital into China. The
PBOC and other Chinese financial institutions bought a net 126.4 billion yuan
($20.7 billion) of foreign currency last month as money flowed into the
country. 

 The PBOC needs to suck cash out of the system to keep it from feeding
inflationary pressures. 

 At least a reviving economy means China is better placed to withstand
tightening than it was earlier in the year: GDP growth bounced back to 7.8%
on-year in the third quarter, from 7.5% in the second. 

 With growth on its side, the central bank drained 58 billion yuan ($9.54
billion) from the interbank market this week. The seven-day reverse repo rate,
a benchmark indicator of liquidity conditions, climbed to 4.79% on Friday from
3.49% a week earlier, showing that banks are having to pay more for their
funding.

Traders said liquidity began to loosen again Friday afternoon, probably
because of central bank intervention. The PBOC is likely wary of overshooting:
The last time it withheld liquidity, in June, the fragile interbank market all
but froze up.

Some economists detect a bigger agenda, saying the central bank may be moving
to stop lending -- both within and outside the traditional banking system --
from spiraling out of control.

In June, the PBOC made a concerted effort to stop borrowers using the
interbank market to fund speculative "shadow banking" activities. With the
central bank's liquidity support withdrawn, interest rates quickly went through
the roof.

After stock markets tumbled and panic began to take hold, the central bank
turned the taps back on, but the message had been sent. 

 Since PBOC Gov. Zhou Xiaochuan "started his new term in March he's been
trying to do this," said Ken Peng, an economist at BNP Paribas. "The looser
policy between July and September was a pause in a longer effort to try to rein
in growth of the money supply."

China's debt has been growing at a stupendous pace. Total social financing,
the broadest official measure of credit creation -- which includes shadow
banking and bond issuance in addition to bank loans -- declined to 808.8
billion yuan in July amid the tighter conditions, the first time in more than a
year that the monthly figure failed to top one trillion yuan. But it quickly
bounced back to 1.57 trillion yuan in August and 1.4 trillion in September.

Outstanding borrowing by businesses and households hit 170% of gross domestic
product at the end of 2012, up from 117% in 2008, according to the Bank for
International Settlements. It's the speed of the climb, as much as the total,
that worries economists.

With sustained growth and moves toward reform, some have faith that the
explosion of debt can be kept under control.

"We know there are leverage issues in the system, but the current pace of
credit creation is not as rapid as in the past," said Li Wei, an economist at
Standard Chartered. "The PBOC clearly wants to slow the pace of credit growth,
and policies are moving in the right direction." 

 But pessimists note that credit growth has run far head of the real economy,
which has needed ever bigger hits of funding to get short-lived bursts of
growth. That puts regulators in a bind. 

 "It's going to be difficult to tighten in an aggressive way because the
economy has become so reliant on credit," said Charlene Chu, an analyst at
Fitch who is deeply skeptical about China's ability to get its debt load under
control. "To rein in credit significantly without that itself slowing growth is
going to be very difficult." 

 The PBOC may want to cut down the dosage, but China won't be deleveraging
cold turkey any time soon. 
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5)Iran may be month from a bomb
By Oren Dorell 
 Iran could produce enough weapons-grade uranium to build a nuclear bomb in as little as a month, according to a new estimate by one of the USA's top nuclear experts.
The new assessment comes as the White House invited Senate staffers to a briefing on negotiations with Iran as it is trying to persuade Congress not to go ahead with a bill to stiffen sanctions against Iran.
“Shortening breakout times have implications for any negotiation with Iran,” stated the report by the Institute for Science and International Security. “An essential finding is that they are currently too short and shortening further.”
David Albright, president of the institute and a former inspector for the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency, said the estimate means that Iran would have to eliminate more than half of its 19,000 centrifuges to extend the time it would take to build a bomb to six months.
The Obama administration has said Iran is probably a year away from having enough enriched uranium to make a bomb.
Bernadette Meehan, an NSC spokeswoman for President Obama's National Security Council, said the intelligence community maintains “a number of assessments” regarding potential time frames for Iran to produce enough weapons-grade uranium for one weapon or a testable nuclear device.
“We continue to closely monitor the Iranian nuclear program and its stockpile of enriched uranium,” Meehan said.
World powers are seeking an agreement “that ultimately resolves all of the international community's concerns about Iran's nuclear program,” she said. “The ultimate goal is a comprehensive agreement that is credible, transparent, and verifiable.”
In the report, Albright said negotiations with Iran should focus on so-called “breakout” times, or the time required to convert low-enriched uranium to weapons-grade.
Albright, who has testified before Congress, said the negotiators should try to find ways to lengthen the breakout times and shorten the time that inspectors could detect breakout. ISIS' analysis is based on the latest Iranian and United Nations reports on Iran's centrifuge equipment for producing nuclear fuel and its nuclear fuel stockpiles.
Iran's stockpile of highly-enriched uranium has nearly doubled in a year's time and its number of centrifuges has expanded from 12,000 in 2012 to 19,000 today.
Sen. Mark Kirk, an Illinois Republican whose Senate Banking Committee is considering legislation to tighten Iran sanctions, said the report shows that Iran is expanding its nuclear capabilities under the cover of negotiations.
“The Senate should move forward immediately with a new round of sanctions to prevent Iran from acquiring an undetectable breakout capability,” he said.
The White House has said new sanctions legislation should wait while current negotiations — scheduled to resume officially in Geneva next month — are moving forward.
The White House said Thursday it will continue consulting with Congress “so that any congressional action is aligned with our negotiating strategy as we move forward,” said Caitlin Hayden, a spokeswoman for President Obama's National Security Council.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has said his country has no interest in nuclear weapons but that producing nuclear fuel is Iran's right. His foreign minister, Javad Zarif, has said Iran will not ship its nuclear stockpile to a third country.
However, Iran has blocked international inspectors from some suspected nuclear facilities to verify they are being used for peaceful purposes, access required under international agreements it has signed.
United Nations inspectors have found evidence of a weapons program in violation of Iran's commitment under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The USA and the U.N. Security Council have implemented crippling economic sanctions on Iran to sway it to take steps to assure the world it is not developing a bomb.
Israel, which sees an Iranian nuclear bomb as a threat to its very existence, has said it will take military action to prevent Iran from getting a bomb.
ISIS estimated in October 2012 that Iran could produce enough highly-enriched uranium for a bomb within two to four months. The new estimate is based on an analysis of the latest reports by Iran and the the IAEA.
ISIS considered various scenarios, including if Iran decided to build a covert enrichment plant like it has under a mountain in Fordow, near the city of Qom, that was designed for optimal efficiency and minimal time to enrich enough uranium for bomb making. Such a facility built with current Iranian technology could produce enough material for a bomb in a week, according to the ISIS report.
“If they did that and they were caught it would be a smoking gun of a nuclear weapons program,” Albright said.
If Iran moves ahead with installation of its more efficient, second generation centrifuges, it would be able to produce enough nuclear fuel for a bomb with so few of them, between 2,000 and 3,300 centrifuges, that they could fit in a small warehouse, Albright said.


5a)

Lessons for Israel from Ancient Chinese Military Thought: Facing Iranian Nuclearization with Sun-Tzu

Louis René Beres 

I first wrote about the modern applications of ancient Chinese military principles, as articulated specifically in Sun-Tzu’s classic, The Art of War,[1]over ten years ago, and returned to the topic from time to time. At least one other author has developed this theory as it pertains specifically to U.S. strategy, as well. The time is right to revisit this conversation, and to integrate classical Greek notions of dialectical reasoning, which I have considered separately in the context of an “avant-garde” approach to decisionmaking, and which makes increasing sense as a complement, indeed, a necessary component, of a strategic thought process inspired by Sun-Tzu.
For Israel, in particular, now already at the eleventh hour with respect to any remaining unilateral options for preemptive self-defense against a steadily-nuclearizing Iran, ancient principles could signify a possibly last opportunity to learn something genuinely indispensable. An examination of Sun-Tzu’s The Art of War should focus upon Israel’s nuclear deterrent, and on its corollary but routinely changing order of battle.
Israel’s Defenses and Deterrence
Israel’s national defense against aggression has never been solely vested in technological remedies. Instead, it has relied, from its national beginning in 1948, on assorted forms of deterrence, including nuclear deterrence. It is true, of course, that Israel has recently been placing an increasing emphasis on its ballistic missile defenses, especially the Arrow, or Hetz, programs. But, because any system of BMD could ultimately display unacceptable levels of “leakage,” the ultimate guarantor for national survival has steadfastly and more-or-less conspicuously remained the country’s (now still tacit, or undeclared) nuclear threat.
Ironically, as U.S. President Barack Obama pursues rapprochement with Iran’s new president, Hassan Rouhani, pressure will build upon Jerusalem to join the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (1968), and/or to enter into a “Nuclear Weapon Free-Zone.” If Israel denuclearizes, the deteriorating balance of power in the Middle East caused in part by the so-called “Arab Spring” and Iranian nuclearization – which I have described elsewhere in my writings and lectures as a “correlation of forces” issue – could fundamentally threaten the Jewish State.
If, as is likely, Israel’s comparative power vis-à-vis regional state and sub-state adversaries deteriorates further, security functions grounded in its nuclear threat will become progressively more important. There are at leastseven such essential functions to be studied and borne in mind: (1) deterrence of large-scale conventional attacks by enemy-states; (2) deterrence of all levels of unconventional attack by enemy-states; (3) preemption of enemy-state nuclear attacks; (4) support of conventional preemptions against enemy-state nuclear assets; (5) support of conventional preemptions against enemy-state nonnuclear assets; (6) nuclear war-fighting; and (7) the so-called “Samson Option.” In making any preemption decisions, Israel would first of all need to determine whether expressions of “anticipatory self-defense” would be tactically or operationally cost-effective.
How does jurisprudence affect nuclear threat functions, primarily deterrence? Contrary to the generally prevailing conventional wisdom on law and geopolitics, nuclear deterrence, as well as its various associated forms of nuclear posture and infrastructure, do not necessarily function outside the authoritative expectations of international law. This is true even for preemption, insofar as a state could have the right to resort to anticipatory self-defense using even nuclear weapons if it’s leaders felt national survival was at stake, in accordance with a July 8, 1996 advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice.
In the end, the ability of international law to prevent both nuclear and conventional war in the Middle East will depend upon far more than formal treaties, customs, and those general principles “recognized by civilized nations.” It will also be contingent, especially, upon the success or failure of individual countries’ military strategies in the region. This position was first explicitly codified at the landmark Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which recognized that national sovereignty, driven by self-interested states, created the greatest incentive for peace.
If Israel’s transforming nuclear strategy should serve to reduce the threat and/or seriousness of war, either because of its successful forms of nuclear deterrence, or even because of presumptively “no alternative” preemptive strikes launched against an illegally nuclearizing Iran, this strategy could then be “counted” as an authentic component or expression of international law enforcement. This is because we continue to live in a “Westphalian” system of international law, a system without any designated supranational authority or arbiter, and one in which the historic role of a balance-of-power must continue to assume at least a quasi-legal function.
Shaping a New Strategic Posture with The Art of War
How, then, should Israel proceed? Drawing upon Sun-Tzu, its leaders should consider the ancient Chinese strategist’s favored principles concerningdiplomacy. Political initiatives and agreements may be useful, Sun-Tzu instructs, but, nonetheless, certain military preparations should never be neglected. Fusing power and diplomacy, says Sun-Tzu, the primary objective of every state should be to weaken enemy states without ever actually engaging in armed combat. In his classic work, this always overriding objective links the associated ideal of “complete victory,” in which an enemy may be subjugated by attacking its plans, to a controlled and reciprocal “strategy for planning offensives.”
Here is an example. Presently, in spite of an alleged rapprochement on nuclear issues between Iran and the United States, Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu remains prudently determined to maintain a suitable preemption option. In terms of diplomacy, the initial task must be to convince his Iranian counterparts that proceeding with nuclearization (now, apparently, proceeding via both enriched uranium and plutonium routes) could never be gainful.
To accomplish this important goal, Tehran must soon be made to realize that going beyond a certain point of nuclear no-return (a so-called “red line”) would assuredly prompt an Israeli preemption against pertinent hard-target infrastructures. In Chapter Four, “Military Disposition,” Sun-Tzu tell his readers: “One who cannot be victorious assumes a defensive posture; one who can be victorious attacks…Those who excel at defense bury themselves away below the lowest depths of Earth. Those who excel at offense move from above the greatest heights of Heaven.”
Even today, this advice may seem obvious enough. Yet, current Israel Defense Force strategic posture depends substantially upon various implemented forms of ballistic missile defense (BMD), especially the Arrow.By mistakenly placing too much hope in its active defense systems, particularly at a time when Arrow-3 programs are facing perilously reduced funding due to budget cuts, Israel could effectively be forced to disavow any remaining preemption options.
In consequence, Israel could have to plan to survive at the pleasure of its most recalcitrant enemies. Because placing too much faith in Arrow and related active defenses could place the country in needless existential peril, Jerusalem must always assure that it can maintain a recognizably secure and aptly robust second-strike or deterrent nuclear force. Taken together, a proper amalgam of efficient active defenses and wide-ranging strategic weapons would be necessary should Iran succeed in becoming fully nuclear.Sooner or later, therefore, having been permitted to develop weapons of mass destruction because both Israel and the United States had been burying themselves away “below the lowest depths of Earth,” certain of these enemy states could choose to attack. Plainly, the most conspicuous threat in this regard would be a now-nuclear Iran.
None of this is meant to suggest that Israel’s nuclear deterrence can remediate all conceivable existential threats. Israel’s advanced deterrent posture notwithstanding, there could still come a time when its implicit nuclear threat would be rendered powerless in a number of ways, even if it were dealing with an adversary that was reliably rational. Rationality, after all, would say nothing about the actual accuracy of the information used in that leadership’s rational calculations. Hence, altogether rational Iranian decision-makers might still make certain errors in calculation which would lead them to nuclear war.
Furthermore, some might argue the only response to an enemy who multiplies its stockpile of pertinent weapons, disperses those weapons across various platforms, and secures those weapons in hardened silos, is an after-the-fact retaliation. Inevitably, if this argument is correct, any such total reliance upon deterrence and active defenses could represent an existential (and potentially fatal) Israeli indifference to the enduring general principles of classic Chinese military strategy.
“Unorthodox” Strategies
Sun-Tzu’s repeated emphasis on the “unorthodox” can help Israel to compensate for any disproportionate reliance upon implicit nuclear deterrence and ballistic missile defense. This tricky but nuanced passage could represent a subtle tool for tactical implementation, one that might usefully exploit a particular enemy state’s identifiable matrix of military expectations.
As I’ve explained before, Israel should refine and develop “unorthodoxy”before the battle. To prevent the most dangerous forms of battle, those engagements which could become expressions of all-out unconventional warfare, Israel should examine and fashion a number of promising new military postures. These postures would focus more-or-less upon a reasoned shift from an image of “orthodox” rationality to one of “unorthodox” irrationality. This thinking may have played a decisive role back in October 1962, when U.S. President John F. Kennedy had threatened to board any Soviet ship that defied his “quarantine” of Cuba.
For now, as I have argued, every enemy of Israel can predict with considerable confidence, how Israel would initiate major military action, and also how it would respond to an armed attack or armed conflict initiated by others.  If, however, Israel did not always signal such perfect rationality to its enemies – that is, if its actions (both defensive and offensive) were not always so utterly measured and predictable – it could plausibly enhance both its overall deterrence posture, and its capacity to carry out certain still-needed preemption options. This identical lesson applies to the United States, which is similarly mired in all-too-plainly predictable military policies and parameters.
Unorthodoxy Revisited: The Samson Option
The “Samson Option” is generally thought to reference a last-resort survival strategy, one wherein Israel’s nuclear weapons are used not for the prevention of war, or even for unavoidable war-waging, but simply as a “last spasm of vengeance.” Here, faced with an End of the Third Temple scenario, Israel’s leaders would have accepted that the Jewish State could no longer survive, but would insist, nonetheless, that it would consent to “die” only together with its pertinent enemies.
The view of the Samson Option, as I have predicted, from the Arab/Iranian side should be clear. Israel would resort to nuclear weapons only in reprisal, and only in response for overwhelmingly destructive first-strike attacks. Correspondingly, anything less than an overwhelmingly destructive enemy first-strike would elicit “merely” a measured and duly “proportionate” Israeli military response. Nonetheless, although it is always in Israel’s overall interest to avoid any actual resort to nuclear weapons use, there are certain identifiable circumstances in which nuclear war-fighting could become unavoidable, such as where an enemy first-strike against Israel does not destroy the Jewish State’s nuclear second-strike, or retaliatory nuclear capacity.
By striking first, an Iranian enemy would likely expect to have an advantage in controlling the metaphoric ladder of escalation, based on a presumed Iranian opinion that Israel would confine itself to limited reactions.
Israel could enhance its national security if it simultaneously reformulates its Samson Option and its policy of nuclear ambiguity. By selectively taking the bomb out of the “basement,” and by indicating, simultaneously, that its nuclear weapons were not limited to Third Temple scenarios, Jerusalem would not be revealing the obvious – that is, that Israel merely has nuclear weapons – but rather Jerusalem would begin articulating that these particular weapons are distinctly usable, sufficiently invulnerable, and penetration-capable.
In essence, Jerusalem could update and incorporate Sun-Tzu’s timeless principles of war, in part by exhibiting a visible departure from perfect rationality; by displaying, in other words, the rationality of threatened irrationality.
To identify most efficiently the ways that Israel could make the “unorthodox” appear “orthodox,” Israel requires a pattern of thinking adapted historically not only by Sun-Tzu, but also by certain of his non-military contemporaries in ancient Greece.   This pattern of thinking, a strategic “dialectic,” originates from an ancient Greek (Platonic) expression for the art of conversation. Adapted to a specifically Israeli military planning point of view, essential but non-exclusive components of a potentially useful strategic dialectic would include: (1) a method of refutation; (2) a method of repeated logical division of broad categories into their components; (3) logical reasoning that uses premises that are probable, or at least generally accepted; (4) formal logic; and (5) a logical development of thought via thesis and antithesis, oriented toward a purposeful synthesis of opposites.  To codify a nuclear doctrine that Israel’s decisionmakers can apply to specific tactical and strategic questions, Israel’s leaders will need to engage in a “strategic dialectic,” asking and answering pertinent questions, again and again, and approaching their most urgent security problem as an interrelated series of thoughts, until core survival problems are confronted frontally.
Contained in this strategic dialectic, as Sun-Tzu was already deeply aware, is an unavoidable obligation to continue thinking. Logically, this imperative could never be met entirely, because of what the philosophers would call an “infinite regress problem,” but it must still be attempted. Armed with such an explicitly dialectical form of military strategy, moreover, Israel could focus not only upon assorted unique threats and situations (e.g., Iranian nuclear weapons development), but also upon various dynamic interactions between discrete threats, complex interactions known commonly as “synergies.”
As Israel considers the overlapping and varied threats it faces, insights from ancient Greece and Rome could usefully reinforce the instructive principles of Sun-Tzu, especially in regard to the lawfulness of any still-contemplated preemption against Iran. I am fond of Cicero’s explanation, as recalled by Hugo Grotius in his Commentary on the Law of Prize and Booty, that a justification for anticipatory self-defense exists ”whenever he who chooses to hesitate will be obliged to pay an unjust penalty, before he can exact a just penalty… For, as Aelian says, citing Plato as his authority, any war (preemption) that is undertaken for the necessary repulsion of injury, is proclaimed not by a crier, nor by a herald, but by the voice of Nature herself.”
Grotius, of course, the proverbial “father of international law,” wrote these strong and unambiguous words in the seventeenth-century, long before any state had ever needed to consider its existential security from enemy nuclearattacks. Recalling Sun-Tzu, the French maxim, for the most part, has it right.Plus ça change [the more that changes, the more it's the same thing]…
Louis René Beres was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971), and is the author of many books and articles dealing with nuclear strategy and nuclear war. In Israel, he was Chair of Project Daniel (PM Sharon, 2003). Professor Beres is a recent prior contributor to the Harvard National Security Journal.
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