Recently, the CBC ran through a few likely “Attacking Iran Scenarios” with Sam Gardiner, a retired US Air Force Colonel and teacher of strategy at the US National War College. The scenarios he goes through are:
[ol]
[li]Israeli air strike against Iranian nuclear program[/li][li]Israeli air strike against Iranian nuclear program leading to American involvement[/li][li]Israel and America do nothing leading to Iranian nuclear weapons[/li][/ol]
In the end his advice is to just live with a nuclear Iran.
Whereas Israel needs a captive labour force which native Siberians just can’t supply. Gotcha. Or, to quote Argent Towers, “enough others to provide the manpower”.
No. Their leader became the Prime Minister of Israel, but that’s not the same thing at all
You’re right insofar as Siberia is actually quite a nice place. There was a documentary on Channel Four about a man calling himself The Vossarion, aka the Second Coming, who has a very pleasant cult compound up there. Magnificent architecture. Especially considering it was all hand carved from wood. Just shows what talent was going to waste in the local soviet police. His former partner has also done well, he’s now head of the local traffic police.
The rest, though, no. The fertile crescent was never free of vegetation, or the Israelis wouldn’t have to bulldoze all those palestinian olive groves and orchards when they steal some more land for settlements. Unless your position is that it was one of those deserts infested by fruit trees or that the Jews took some time out after magicing trees into being to hand them out to the natives.
Some people seem to have quite strong positive opinions about it too. I mean, there’s no Abkhazian AIPAC or BICOM. And there’s no-one on this board arguing that magic Abkhazians would have solved stalinism and that “No matter where Abkhazians are, they bring technology and progress”, or such like. There are also no crazy Christian cults who think the independence and racial purity of Abkhazi is necessary to fulfil Biblical prophecy.
Hmmm…I wonder who else was a subject of ethnic cleansing?
“As much land as they could”. Have you ever seen a map of the ME and the size of Israel compared to the rest of the ME countries? Guess not.
BTW, why exactly does Iran care about Palestinians. Are they related? Probably not any closer than the Jewish population which it rails against. The only reason Iran cares about Palestinians is because they share one common attribute. Care to guess what it is? Care to guess why all the other groups in the ME support their Palestinian brothers (well in words and weapons, not enough to allow them to move to better accommodations among them)? Care to have guess as to why all those people want their ‘brothers’ (who aren’t really brothers) in control of the land that the Jews have now? I’ll give you a hint although you are real close: It has something to do with religion.
Let me see - you know that there’s a country named “Israel”, and you know that you don’t like it. Other than that, you know absolutely nothing about my country.
And yet you’re still talking. Fascinating.
Did you even read what it is being developed for or how much the thing weighs? It’s a 30,000-lb bomb being developed for use by the B-2 and Next-Generation Bomber. You can’t just slap a 30,000lb bomb under the wing of an F-16. Or does Israel secretly possess large intercontinental bombers? That Israel has an arsenal of nuclear weapons that it has never officially declared isn’t seriously disputed; I could give dozens of cites about the program and estimates of the size of the arsenal from respected sources. I have heard no one ever suggest that Israel has 30,000lb deep earth penetrating bombs and aircraft large enough to carry them aside from you.
Huh?
Was that meant to be a serious point?
Yes, Begin became the Israeli PM 30 YEARS LATER. That was well after the Irgun had been disbanded and it took him decades of hard work for him to become politically acceptable amongst Israelis and he become politically acceptable despite the actions of what he’d done thirty years ago, which is dramatically different than Arafat or the other leaders of Fatah.
Like I said, for Brooks’ statement to make sense we’d have to believe that Palestinians considerably more moderate than not just Hamas, but Fatah as well would take over if an independent Palestinian state was created.
You seem to be admitting that your problem isn’t just with Israelis but Jews in general, though you display a jaw-dropping level of ignorance about Jews, Zionism, and Israel.
Why do you feel so passionately about a part of the world, a culture, and a history you know very little about and have at best a superficial understanding of?
Back to the OP - in my opinion, essentially any efforts to attack a country’s nuclear program are “delaying tactics”. No matter what you do, you can’t forever prevent them from putting together a program - but what you can do, is make it much more expensive and time-consuming, and this is just what Israel has done.
For example, it is widely suspected that Iran has decentralized its program and hidden key components of it in bomb-resistant bunkers - because they remember the lessons of previous Israeli attacks on such instillations. Such efforts of course impose costs and delays.
Next, parties unknown (but perhaps the US and/or Israel) sabotaged the Iranian centerfuges with a computer virus - completely bypassing those elaborate and expensive defences.
And so it goes.
Expecting the next attack to be exactly the one prepared for is futile - it may bear no resemblence to it.
In the end, of course, there is no guarantee that any amount of attacks will work, because aside from dominating the country, you can’t actually prevent them from getting nukes if they have enough time and resources to pour into the attempt - but you can delay them, and sometimes delay is sufficient.
No doubt. Also in the past few years Iranian nuclear scientists have been (both covertly and overtly) suffering from bouts of assassinations. The list of things like motorcycle bombers is impressive: [ul]
[li]Masoud Alimohammadi[/li][li]Majid Shahriari[/li][li]Fereydoon Abbasi[/li][/ul]
There’s also the plain shooting of Darioush Rezaeinejad (again by motorcyclists) and a mysterious blast killing Maj. Gen. Hassan Moghaddam; but the total disappearance of Shahram Amiri during Hajj and Ardeshir Hosseinpour’s “radioactive gas poisoning” sounds downright whimsical.
If I was Iranian, nuclear physics would be the **last **career path I’d choose.
Shahram Amiri is no longer missing
[QUOTE=Wikipedia]
According to a 2011 report by NPR news, he “was believed to be an agent-in-place for the CIA,” who decided “he wanted out of Iran”, but once in the US “got cold feet” and “made his way back to Iran”
[/QUOTE]
Palestinians? If we’re talking specifically about the Nazis then there’s a list as long as your arm.
You think the political elites of the middle east are genuinely motivated by religion? It’s just political expediency. Not that being “related” constitutes a legitimate reason for political sympathy. If the Iranians were all meant to be semites, that wouldn’t change anything.
My problem is with Zionism, not Jewry, although I’m not too enthusiastic about people who think Jews constitute a superior race.
Who are these guys?
I’d like to borrow money from them.
“My problem is with Zionism.” Zionism barely even exists anymore. The concept of Zionism was to establish a Jewish state in Israel during the early 1900s; it was accomplished; end of story. What do people even mean nowadays when they criticize “Zionism”? Half the time, they seem to be talking about Jews and just saying Zionism; the other half, I don’t think they know what they mean, they just want to criticize something that Israel is doing. The term Zionism is egregiously abused over and over again in these kinds of debates.
I believe many countries in the area would rather use the term “Zionists” than refer to Israel as a country.
That’s a very weird viewpoint, IMO. It’s kind of like saying there should be no controversy about being pro-choice, ever since the Roe v. Wade decision.
In other words, 100% of the time they are either lying or ignorant. Who died and made you Queen of the May?
I’ll clear it up for you. Some people have a tendency to label as anti-Semitic anyone who implies that Israel doesn’t have the bestest government ever. But there are a lot of people, including a lot of Jews, who simply think that Israel had no right to take over what they perceive as Palestinian land, and to continue to occupy more and more of it today.
If you think they have their facts wrong, you are welcome to refute them. If you think they are on the wrong side of some moral issue, you are welcome to argue that point. But IMO you have no right to question their motives or intelligence.
[QUOTE=brocks]
I’ll clear it up for you. Some people have a tendency to label as anti-Semitic anyone who implies that Israel doesn’t have the bestest government ever. But there are a lot of people, including a lot of Jews, who simply think that Israel had no right to take over what they perceive as Palestinian land, and to continue to occupy more and more of it today.
[/QUOTE]
That’s as clear as mud. You haven’t explained where the term “Zionism” fits into any of that. Are you saying that “Zionism” is the same as “Israel’s right to exist?”
Zionists wanted to return to the land of Zion, and felt that the area belonged to Jews for religious and historical reasons.
One of the Rabbis at the Beth Din asked me if I were a Zionist.
Of course not. I think you have a right to exist, but not to take over my house at gunpoint. If you want to buy my house at a price I like, then we will get along fine. On the other hand, if I don’t want to sell at any price, then you need to find someone who does.
Besides, “Zionism” a pretty loose term, and thus very easy for people on either side to attack, since it can refer to various mostly political movements, most famously one that came to prominence in the late 19th century, as well as more nebulous religion-based justifications that have been around, I guess, since the first century, and continue today in speeches and writings you see from Israeli Jews and American conservative Christians, among others. You may be too young to remember a big hit song called “Exodus,” IIRC from the early 60’s. It begins, “This land is mine; God gave this land to me.”
But I would think that anyone smarter than Herman Cain understands what people mean when they say they are anti-Zionist, rather than anti-Semitic. It has little to do with Israel’s right to exist per se, it’s more about the how, why, and where of it.
And it’s a moving target — most (if not all) of the Arab countries that attacked Israel in 1948 have signed on to a policy that accepts Israel’s existence (under conditions that Israel rejects). If it’s OK with them, it’s OK with me.
So I can let you keep your house under conditions that you don’t agree to? 
Based on your previous reply to me, I’m not at all surprised that you see no difference between throwing me out of my house, and moving my fence in a few feet.
But if you can think of a way to solve the Israeli-Palestinian problem that leaves everyone perfectly happy, I’ll revise my opinion.