17 thoughts on “Israel’s Strategic Analyst: Attack Iran, Propose Mideast Peace Deal – Tikun Olam תיקון עולם إصلاح العالم
task-attention.png
Comments are published at the sole discretion of the owner.
 

  1. I love the Mao analogy. It blows me away that the lessons of the cold war that Americans are given, viz. the theory of Mutually Assured Destruction, have been totally forgotten. Why is no one quoting the theorists who proposed that the proliferation of nuclear weapons leads to stability? They were proven correct in the latter half of the 20th century, yet Israel is acting like nuclear weapons were just invented and that Iranians possess some different mental faculty from any previous humans.

    I think the underlying error in Dror’s thinking is that which pervades Israeli policy toward Palestinians. There is this illusion that if you beat someone down, they will want to make peace. I’ve never understood why this is the underlying political orientation in Israel’s war policy. This approach hasn’t been proven in fact in the history of Israel.

    The reality is if Israel attacks Iran, it will only provide a sort of “peace” for a few years. The only thing that would solve the imagined “problem” of a death-driven Iran would be 1) complete obliteration or 2) occupation. It’s the same error in reasoning the US had when they went into Iraq. There was this perception that they could just attack and end their perceived (as it turned out, false) danger. Instead, it turns out you need to occupy and cleanse. That will never happen with Persia – it’s totally a possibility for it to happen to us in Israel, just in terms of logistics and the neighborhood.

    These hawks are idiotic and on more of an insane mission that anything the Iranians would every consider.

  2. O Poor Dror, are these the last desperate sighs of a disappearing dream? Ooops he’s a ‘professor’?

    The Mad Professor !

    Whine, Baby, Whine. 🙂

  3. “It would not be difficult, Mein Fuhrer….I mean Mr. Prime Minister” LOL

    Ah. Where would we be without Kubrick?

    1. RE: “Ah. Where would we be without Kubrick?” ~ Shoded Yam

      MEMORABLE QUOTES FROM DR. STRANGELOVE (1963)

      President Merkin Muffley: There’s nothing to figure out, General Turgidson. This man is obviously a psychotic.
      General “Buck” Turgidson: We-he-ell, uh, I’d like to hold off judgement on a thing like that, sir, until all the facts are in.
      President Merkin Muffley: General Turgidson! When you instituted the human reliability tests, you *assured* me there was *no* possibility of such a thing *ever* occurring!
      General “Buck” Turgidson: Well, I, uh, don’t think it’s quite fair to condemn a whole program because of a single slip-up, sir.

      [Turgidson advocates a further nuclear attack to prevent a Soviet response to Ripper’s attack]
      General “Buck” Turgidson: Mr. President, we are rapidly approaching a moment of truth both for ourselves as human beings and for the life of our nation. Now, truth is not always a pleasant thing. But it is necessary now to make a choice, to choose between two admittedly regrettable, but nevertheless *distinguishable*, postwar environments: one where you got twenty million people killed, and the other where you got a hundred and fifty million people killed.
      President Merkin Muffley: You’re talking about mass murder, General, not war!
      General “Buck” Turgidson: Mr. President, I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks.

      SOURCE – http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057012/quotes

      1. …It is necessary now to make a choice, to choose between two admittedly regrettable, but nevertheless *distinguishable*, postwar environments: one where you got twenty million people killed, and the other where you got a hundred and fifty million people killed.

        Wow, that’s classic Yehezkel Dror. It’s like he was channeling Turgidson!

  4. So basically, he says the future is uncertain, so we should just bomb ’em anyway, just to be sure? And that’s called policymaking? “Bomb ’em, just in case”? Heck then Israel should be bombing…Canada. You never know, do you? Those Canadians could be up to no good one day…better safe than sorry.

  5. Nuclear weapons are not the only WMD.

    They are merely the only WMD that think tanks can get their heads around.

    The Iranian nuclear enrichment programme is very theatrical in nature and quite possibly intended to lead a sucker onto a sucker punch. There are a couple of ways the Iranians could have in the past or could in the future make a nuclear weapon without it, and rather more in which they could produce or obtain chemical weapons capable of killing many more people than a handful of nuclear bombs.

    The real unknown about Iranian capability, however, lies in signals intelligence and cryptology. If these turn out to be better than anticipated (or if the IDF and Israel’s mighty advisor haven’t even given the matter any thought at all, which would indeed be Hitler-like) then the Israeli attack might inflict nil damage as well as provoking and legitimising massive retaliation.

    It mustn’t be presumed that only superpowers can do this sort of thing: during WW2, the Siemens T52 and T53 series teleprinter cypher machines -orders of magnitude more complex than “Enigma”- were broken so completely and so much as a matter of routine by Swedish Intelligence, that British and American Intelligence largely ignored the “Sturgeon” traffic on the assumption they’d get a warning from Stockholm if anything was seriously up.

    If there was a single area of military technology where Persians ought to excel, it is cryptology -and the drone hijacking incident indicates a capability without really showing its scope and limits.

  6. RE: “…the Israeli analyst [Dror] creates a scenario that is riddled with mistaken judgments and false logic… He [Dror] continues by claiming that Iran’s deliberations regarding its nuclear program and whether to attack Iran ‘deviate from those accepted as reasonable in western culture’…” ~ R.S.

    MY COMMENT: This certainly does smell a lot like the neocon ‘Team B’ hooey. What a stench!

    FROM WIKIPEDIA [Team B]:

    (excerpts) Team B was a competitive analysis exercise commissioned by the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1970s to analyze threats the Soviet Union posed to the security of the United States. . .
    . . . The Team B reports became the intellectual foundation for the idea of “the window of vulnerability” and of the massive arms buildup that began toward the end of the Carter administration and accelerated under President Ronald Reagan.[4]
    Some scholars and policy-makers, such as Anne Cahn of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, later criticized the Team B project’s findings.[5][6] . . .
    . . . According to Fred Kaplan, “In retrospect, the Team B report (which has since been declassified) turns out to have been wrong on nearly every point.[27]. . .
    . . . Team B came to the conclusion in their report [28] that the Soviets had or could develop an entirely new anti-submarine detection system that used a system that did not depend on sound and was, thus, undetectable by contemporary Western technology, even though no evidence existed for it or its deployment, other than money spent on research, and when the Western experts believed that such a system would be impossible.
    When the CIA argued that the economic chaos in the Soviet Union was hindering their ability to produce an air defense system, Team B countered by arguing that the Soviet Union was trying to deceive the American public and claimed that the Russian air defense system worked perfectly. Some members were even considering promoting a first strike policy against the U.S.S.R.[8][11][29]
    Team B also concluded that the Soviet Union did not adhere to the doctrine of mutual assured destruction, but rather believed it could win a nuclear war outright. [Richard] Pipes — in his “Commentary” article — argued that CIA suffered from “mirror-imaging” (i.e., from assuming that the other side had to-and did-think and evaluate exactly the same way) . . .

    SOURCE – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_B

  7. Richard — thanks for the excellent analysis and commentary. Israelis should be embarrassed by this guy’s phoney baloney speculation, “doublethink”, and contradictions. Or are all Israelis so utterly short-sighted and sociopathic? Iran has forced Israel to attack; Jails are full of people who were forced into crimes by others, by victims. Israel is forced, every day, into abusing Palestinians and it was forced to murder 1400 in Gaza in 2009. Typical criminal rationalizations.

  8. It’s easy to spot where the Good Professor goes unhinged.

    It is right here:
    “A sometimes expressed view is that initiating a preventive war is morally wrong,”

    No, that statement is a (surely deliberate) misrepresentation of how the modern world works.

    An attacker can launch a “pre-emptive war”, but that reguires you to shout “He woz’ comin’ right at me!!!!” when you start pulling the trigger.

    But that’s not a “preventive war”.

    A “preventive war” is when you justify your attack by shouting “I can’t let him get his hands on that!!!!!” while you pull the trigger.

    That is a completely different scenario, and there is universal acknowlegement that a “preventive war” is completely and utterly illegal under post-ww2 international law.

    You can’t “legally” attack someone merely because you don’t want him to be armed, and especially not when the weapon that so offends you is one that you already possess.

    There’s nothing new in this: the British felt the same existentialist fears when it saw the Kaiser building up the German High Seas Fleet but those fears did not justify (neither morally nor legally) the Royal Navy mounting a “preventive” bombardment of Kiel and Wilhelmshaven in 1908.

    The British did no such thing, even though they were mortally afraid that the German’s would overtake Britain in that “battleship race” and, if tht happened, then the British Empire was doomed.

  9. Here is a quote that would make a very good summary of the Good Professor’s theory:
    The strong do as they will, and the weak suffer what they must.

    That’s the entire basis of this fellow’s advice i.e. Israel is strong, Iran is weak, and since that might just change in the future then it is “the moral thing” for Israel to Slap Them Down Now.

    You know, while Israel can still do it, and Iran can’t yet prevent it.

    Q: Sooooo, where did that quote originate?
    A: From the Greeks, circa 400BC.

    That tells you all you need to know i.e. “Israel’s premier strategic analyst” has his head very firmly wedged two and a half thousand years up his own arse.

    1. Offhand, I think that’s the Athenian justification for the conquest of Melos, a small island state that had chosen to stay out of the Peloponesian War.

      Athens lost the war, incidentally.

  10. I have to say that Dror’s “outline” of what should be in an Israeli peace initiative is as breathtaking in its scope as it is mindboggling in its shallowness.

    It consists of sentence after sentence of Motherhood Statements.

    “, the establishment of a comprehensive and stable Middle East peace as a basis for the development and thriving of the region and its inhabitants”

    As Richard points out, a platitude, and nothing more.

    “Israeli withdrawals”

    From where, and to where?

    “an accord on Jerusalem”

    Why not an accordian instead, heh?

    Because on its own the phrase “an accord” is meaningless flatulence plucked from Dror’s nether regions.

    The rest goes on in the same vain i.e. contextless references to Peace And Brown Rice, amounting to little more than advice to Israel that Bibi should offer to lead the multitude in a rousing chorus of Kumbaya.

    Why should they sing along to that nonsense, Dror?
    After all, you’re not **actually** offering them anything.

  11. Hello all:
    The only reliable, truthful and verifiable claim in Dror’s argument is that some 200 or 300 people make the crucial decisions in Israel. It is also reliable, truthful and verifiable that he is an elitist. But, what do I know, I’m just one person of the “public” who should be completely ignored. Prof. Dror’s analysis is the epitome of Israeli Ashkenazi democracy and elitist way of thinking. The real problem is that those 200 decision making people do believe and act upon Dror’s analysis (especially its elitist approach). They have the power and they have the means to do what he considers as “truth”. This is our real problem.

    By the way, why not suggest a serious peace initiative before the war in order to do away with the most significant reason for war? Well, this is, again, just an opinion of a person from the people who can safely be ignored.

    As the former member of the Israeli parliament Geula Cohen used to say: “we offer the Arabs peace for peace – nothing more nothing less”.

    Yallah let’s go and eat Humus. Ahmed, two beers!!

    Meir Amor

  12. And just for those of use keeping score at home, it appears that Professor Dror dismises nearly 1,000 years of “just war” theory, when he says:

    **********
    “A sometimes expressed view is that initiating a preventive war is morally wrong, all the more so when one cannot be sure that without it a harsh war is sure to occur in the future. However, this view, though honorable, is primitive and should be rejected. It lacks understanding of the nature of policy as a tool that, by nature, must deal with the future, which is never certain; and it does not give any weight to the important value of preventing pain in the future.

    ” Furthermore, such a view clings to what is “certain,” ignoring what “may come” even when very likely or very significant, thus further negating every effort to influence the future, which is always contingent and uncertain.

    ************

    Americans who can remember ten years back should recall hearing the same sort of talk when the Bush administration “sold” the invasion of Iran. It is not often, in politics, that a proposition is so completely refuted by events. Most often the political elites leave themselves some wiggle-room.

    Dror and his American counter-parts — Perl, Wolfowitz, Cheney — argued then and now that the US should “just” replace the government of a foreign country. As a Republican front-man recently said: “oops”.

    The Joint Chiefs of Staff think that the US should not attack Iran. Does Dror know more than the Pentagon?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *