Hillary goes bellicose

[mivona]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/apr/22/hillaryclinton.barackobama3


So, Hillary says she will "obliterate Iran" if it launches a nuclear attack on Israel.

And what will she do if Israel chooses pre-emptive warfare?

[kailin]

The sad thing is that more people are paying attention to whether or not Barack is a Muslim (yes, that smear has taken on a life of its own) than this shocking remark by Hillary.

[Whale Spirit]

What would you expect the American president to do if Iran launched a nuclear attack against Israel?

[3Parrots]

What would you expect the American president to do if Iran launched a nuclear attack against Israel?

I would expect the president to attack. I want the president to make this very clear to Iran.

I'm hoping Hillary means it.

[mivona]

As weaponry becomes available to terrorists - outside the control of government - do you think it is legitimate to destroy a nation and kill millions of innocents because of the actions of rogue elements?

If Iran launched such an attack, under domestic control, then I might have different thoughts - but not much. I fail to see how nuclear conflagration in the Middle East will make the world a safer place.

It is astonishing to me that we have now moved on from imagining nuclear war with Russia to striking a developing nation with nuclear weapons. How moral to murder innocent people because of the actions of their government. It is straight out of the terrorist book of rationales...

[la gazza ladra]

I would expect the president to attack. I want the president to make this very clear to Iran.

I'm hoping Hillary means it.


This puts Hillary to the right of McCain. It shows how the American mindset is so fucked up they just accept such things. Israel has nukes and they know how to use them. They probably have the best army in the world since ours is going to shit, quickly. We have to stop acting all John Wayne and get out of the middle east.

[tabbinosity]

I think Hillary's just making supportive noises. In reality, the Israelis are perfectly capable of taking care of their own business as they have demonstrated in the past.

I'm not sure what point there would be for the US to involve itself any further in these Middle Eastern dustups. We don't belong in Iraq, we don't belong anywhere in the Middle East at all. That's a conflict that predates the concept of God -- let them sort it out.

[bluekazoo]

Israel has nukes and they know how to use them. They probably have the best army in the world since ours is going to shit, quickly. We have to stop acting all John Wayne and get out of the middle east.

:icon_yeahthat:

[bluekazoo]

We don't belong in Iraq, we don't belong anywhere in the Middle East at all. That's a conflict that predates the concept of God -- let them sort it out.


and THAT, too!

[3Parrots]

Deterring the Undeterrable


By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, April 18, 2008; Page A27

The era of nonproliferation is over. During the first half-century of the nuclear age, safety lay in restricting the weaponry to major powers and keeping it out of the hands of rogue states. This strategy was inevitably going to break down. The inevitable has arrived.

The six-party talks on North Korea have failed miserably. They did not prevent Pyongyang from testing a nuclear weapon and entering the club. Now North Korea has broken yet again its agreement to reveal all its nuclear facilities.

The other test case was Iran. The EU-3 negotiations (Britain, France and Germany) went nowhere. Each U.N. Security Council resolution enacting what passed for sanctions was more useless than the last. Uranium enrichment continues.

When Iran's latest announcement that it was tripling its number of centrifuges to 9,000 elicited no discernible response from the Bush administration, the game was over. Everyone says Iran must be prevented from going nuclear. No one will bell the cat.

The "international community" is prepared to do nothing of consequence to halt nuclear proliferation. No one wants to admit that. Nor does anyone want to contemplate the prospect of nuclear weapons in the hands of one, two, many rogue states.

We must. The day is coming, and quickly. We must face reality and begin thinking how we live with the unthinkable.

There are four ways to deal with rogue states going nuclear: preemption, deterrence, missile defense and regime change.

Preemption works but, as a remedy, it is spent. Iraq was defanged by the 1981 Israeli airstrike, by the 1991 Persian Gulf War (which uncovered Saddam Hussein's clandestine nuclear programs) and finally by the 2003 invasion, which ended the Hussein dynasty, père et deux fils.

A collateral effect of the Iraq war was Libya's nuclear disarmament. Seeing Hussein's fate, Moammar Gaddafi declared and dismantled his nuclear program. And if November's National Intelligence Estimate is to be believed, the Iraq invasion even induced Iran to temporarily suspend weaponization and enrichment.

But the cost of preemption is simply too high. No one is going to renew the Korean War with an attack on Pyongyang. And the prospects of an attack on Iran's facilities are now vanishingly small. What to do?

Deterrence. It worked in the two-player Cold War. Will it work against multiple rogues? It seems quite suitable for North Korea, whose regime, far from being suicidal, is obsessed with survival.

Iran is a different proposition. With its current millenarian leadership, deterrence is indeed a feeble gamble, as I wrote in 2006 in making the case for considering preemption. But if preemption is off the table, deterrence is all you've got. Our task is to make deterrence in this context less feeble.


Two ways: Begin by making the retaliatory threat in response to Iranian nuclear aggression so unmistakable and so overwhelming that the non-millenarians in leadership would stay the hand or even remove those taking their country to the point of extinction.

But there is an adjunct to deterrence: missile defense. Against a huge Soviet arsenal, this was useless. Against small powers with small arsenals, i.e., North Korea and Iran, it becomes extremely effective in conjunction with deterrence.

For the sake of argument, imagine a two-layered anti-missile system in which each layer is imperfect, with, say, a 90 percent shoot-down accuracy. That means one in 100 missiles gets through both layers. That infinitely strengthens deterrence by radically degrading the possibility of a successful first strike. Even Mahmoud Ahmadinejad might refrain from launching an arsenal of, say, 20 nukes if his scientific advisers showed him that there was only an 18.2 percent chance of any getting through-- and a 100 percent chance that a retaliatory counterattack of hundreds of Israeli (and/or American) nukes would reduce the world's first Islamic republic to a cinder.

Of course, one can get around missile defense by using terrorists. But anything short of a hermetically secret, perfectly executed, multiple-site attack would cause terrible, but not existential, destruction. The retaliatory destruction, on the other hand, would be existential.

We are, of course, dealing here with probabilities. Total safety comes only from regime change. During the Cold War, we worried about Soviet nukes, but never French or British nukes. Weapons don't kill people; people kill people. Regime change will surely come to both North Korea and Iran. That is the ultimate salvation.

But between now and then lies danger. How to safely navigate the interval? Deterrence plus missile defense renders a first strike so unlikely to succeed and yet so certain to bring on self-destruction that it might -- just might -- get us through from the day the rogues go nuclear to the day they are deposed.

We have entered the post-nonproliferation age. It's time to take our heads out of the sand and deal with it.

letters@charleskrauthammer.com

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/17/AR2008041703165.html

[kailin]

3Parrots -- I live near the East coast of the USA.

Do you happen to know of any good preventive medicine or herbs or other remedies to protect people and maybe pets from radiation sickness?

I'd heard there were some developed after Chernobyl -- sure would like to get some in stock!

[3Parrots]

3Parrots -- I live near the East coast of the USA.

Do you happen to know of any good preventive medicine or herbs or other remedies to protect people and maybe pets from radiation sickness?

I'd heard there were some developed after Chernobyl -- sure would like to get some in stock!

(((Kailin))) I know. It's all very scary...the world is in a bad way...

Lol, I'll ask my (pharmacist-trained and he keeps up with his reading) dh about it. Maybe he can help us find the medication. He's not fond, to put it lightly, of drug companies tho' so he'd only support getting the word out to help people. No stock interest here.

[toys-to-treasures]

As weaponry becomes available to terrorists - outside the control of government - do you think it is legitimate to destroy a nation and kill millions of innocents because of the actions of rogue elements?

If Iran launched such an attack, under domestic control, then I might have different thoughts - but not much. I fail to see how nuclear conflagration in the Middle East will make the world a safer place.

It is astonishing to me that we have now moved on from imagining nuclear war with Russia to striking a developing nation with nuclear weapons. How moral to murder innocent people because of the actions of their government. It is straight out of the terrorist book of rationales...


Geez Mivona, you ever heard of deterrance? In this case she said exactly what she should say whether she means it or not. The way she stated it the question is what she would do if IRAN nuked Israel, not independent (no such thing really) terrorists. Besides the best way to make sure the "rouge elements" are kept under control is to put the fear of Allah into the governments in places where they find safe harbor.

Some people can't be just talked to nicely with good results. Ask Neville Chamberlin.

[krisinluck]

I'm not sure what point there would be for the US to involve itself any further in these Middle Eastern dustups. We don't belong in Iraq, we don't belong anywhere in the Middle East at all. That's a conflict that predates the concept of God -- let them sort it out.Butbutbut...they have the O.I.L.!!!!!

I agree completely that Israel has proven themselves more than adept at protecting themselves.

[tabbinosity]

Kris, you don't really think it's about something like oil, do you? ;)

There's a devout Christian who has been hard at work raising money to fund a search-and-drill effort in Israel because a particular Bible passage has convinced him that there's oil there. (I'm going to pass on googling for a link because I need to get back to baking, but there was a piece about him on TV a few months ago, on either 20/20 or 60 Minutes.)

I'll be LMAO if they find some -- as probably would the late Golda Meir (z"l), who once quipped, "Moses dragged us for 40 years through the desert to bring us to the one place in the Middle East where there was no oil."

[gigilee]

Hillary stated this as part of her "umbrella-of-deterrance" policy. One of the key aspects of the umbrella defense is to shelter ALL mid-eastern nations who are not now nuclear-capable, but under threat of nukes by Iran, might decide to become so. (Saudia Arabia as a nuclear power, anyone?)

Excellent diary by Big Tent Democrat, an Obama supporter, about the value and rationale behind Hillary's plan:

Talk Left Blog (http://www.talkleft.com/story/2008/4/21/22559/9864)