Reply #23: Bringing it on

[dave_p]

This is worrying stuff, more alarming than a few US carriers milling round the Gulf. Yes, Israel's bellicose enough to do it. There's no ambigiuty about Israel's possession of nukes, and no other power with a nuclear capacity's about to retaliate, which is why they're so hell-bent on stopping any potential enemy from getting one.

The Times may be owned by Murdoch, but it's his flagship, and it survives by its reputation despite its pro-US, pro-Israeli bias: it's definitely not Fox or one of his gutter tabloids. It has no reason to falsely attribute such a story to reliable "Israeli military sources" when many have long suspected such an attack's in the offing.

Israel's been the party driving the whole anti-Iran enterprise of recent years, since it suddenly decided Hamas (which it had once encouraged as a rival Palestinian faction) was a more dangerous foe enemy than the PLO. The BBC recently revealed that Israeli contractors had been working on airfields in Iraqi Kurdestan, useful in Israeli terms only as a refueling or emergency landing point for an attack on Iran.

Israel's a far likelier candidate for such an attack than the US, assuming it has the appropriate weapons - and there's no reason to believe it hasn't. Israel rightly calculates that it's so hated by most of its neighbours that it's little to lose in PR terms. Its government will be prepared for low-level conventional counter-strikes, which is the only likely blowback. And dead Israeli civilians only strengthen the government's grip on the public mind: this proves that they want to kill us all.

There's no reason to disbelieve the story, and every reason to credit it. Israel hopes to deter any future nuclear attack by a non-state enemy with the threat of nuclear retaliation against all neighboring opponents, and that suits the more Rapture-fixated of Bush's Fundie base just fine: this just brings us all a step closer to their beloved Armageddon. Be afraid, be very afraid.