Friday, December 02, 2005
The disappearing ultimatum and interdicting Iran
After March Israel must be prepared to use means other than diplomacy to halt Iran’s nuclear weapons program, warned the head of the military intelligence Wednesday.
Military Intelligence Chief Aharon Zeevi Farkash would not detail other options, but sources on the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, which Farkash was addressing, said it was clear that Israel would have to consider taking military action against Iran.
The headline as described by Charles and confirmed by my Google search was "Farkash sets deadline for strike on Iran," but both the headline and the underlying text through both the LGF and Google links have been replaced with the less belligerant "PM: Iran nukes unacceptable" and no quotation of Farkash. In other words, the Jerusalem Post entirely wrote through the original story and "disappeared" the threat from Farkash. Also, it seems that Ha'aretz reported essentially the same story, and that it, also, has blown away the Farkash statements by putting a new story into the original link. Somebody decided that it was in Israel's best interest to erase Farkash's line in the sand. (Do I get a Blogitzer for pointing this out?)
In any case, Israel is clearly getting jumpy. There are those who assume that it is preparing a decapitating strike against Iran's hardened nuclear facilities, not unlike its destruction of Saddam's Osirak reactor in 1981. But that might be difficult, especially since the Iranians are smart enough to learn from that history.
Fortunately, overt destruction of Iranian facilities is not the only aggressive option in Israel's bag of tricks. Perhaps Israel will take out the Iranian program piecemeal. Terence Henry:
In the debate over how to respond to Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons, much attention has been paid to the "Osirak option"—a reference to Israel's successful 1981 air strike on Iraq's Osirak reactor, which was then on the verge of producing plutonium for a nuclear weapon. Considerably less has been said about the seemingly star-crossed history of the reactor, and those involved with it, in the years before the bombing.
Iraq bought the cores for the Osirak reactor from France. Originally they were to be shipped to Iraq in April of 1979, but shortly before their departure an explosion ripped through the warehouse that held them. An organization calling itself the French Ecological Group, which had never been heard of before (and hasn't been heard from since), claimed responsibility. Shipment was delayed for six months while the cores were repaired.
The next year Yahya al-Meshad, an important scientist in Iraq's nuclear program, arrived in France to test fuel for the reactor. The morning he was to return home a maid entered his Paris hotel room and found that he had been stabbed and bludgeoned to death. (The only person known to have seen the scientist the previous night, a prostitute who called herself Marie Express, was killed a few weeks later in a hit-and-run accident. The culprit was never found.) Soon afterward workers at firms supplying parts for the reactor began to receive threatening letters from a mysterious group called the Committee to Safeguard the Islamic Revolution. Bombs went off at the offices of one of the firms, in Italy, and at the home of the company's director-general. Over the next several months two more Iraqi nuclear scientists died in separate poisoning incidents. It is of course unlikely that these events were coincidental; most experts today believe that Mossad—Israel's secret service—was behind each of them, though it has never claimed responsibility.
My guess is that we will see buried stories about disappearing ships, strange explosions, and murdered businessmen long before jets with the Star of David racing across the Iranian desert.
6 Comments:
By 
, at
Fri Dec 02, 02:21:00 AM:
By 
janice, at
Fri Dec 02, 07:39:00 AM:
I will nominate you for a blogitzer. Great post!
By , at
Fri Dec 02, 10:38:00 AM:
Sounds like work for John Rain.
By , at
Fri Dec 02, 11:03:00 AM:
We should have sent this type to find OsamaBL...if we had had them. Learn from Israel. Learn everything.
By , at
Fri Dec 02, 11:05:00 AM:
If indeed Israel is planning a military strike, the first step would be to gently stifle any warning signs of said strike. Therefore my Iranian weather forcast is "Partly cloudy with a chance of explosive rain for the next month, growing to a higher chance of explosive thunderstorms within the next three months"
Going farther out on a limb, it may be a high altitude Precision Guided Munitions (GPS) strike from a tight formation of planes designed to look like a passenger jet on radar. (although I would not bet money on any real military attack in the current pacifist environment)
Please allow 90 days before branding me as a Kook :)
--- georgfelis
By , at
Sun Dec 04, 12:14:00 PM:
Dear Mr.TigerHawk:
We have responded to this post with
Don't count on Israel to fix Iran.
Sorry to be a wet blanket, but Israel will not fix Iran. The Mossad won't have the same success with Iran's nuclear supply chain. And Israel's Arrow ABM system reduces the need for them to organize a highly risky pre-emptive strike on Iran.
The world will have to face the Iran problem "alone."
Westhawk
