Potential WW3 threat

[wayneL]

Watching it. Heard the Frankie goes to Hollywood line. Gee, I am sad I didn't get a chance to see this when it came out. I would have been 19 at the time and loved Sci Fi stuff like this. The Triffids, Hitch-hikers, Dr Who but this is more near future.

I was early 20s. It freaked me out, big time... especially after partially growing up in LA and doing nuclear attack drills at school.

 

[Knobby22]

English hit, big in Australia also.

 

[wayneL]

Depressing...

 

[Knobby22]

I was early 20s. It freaked me out, big time... especially after partially growing up in LA and doing nuclear attack drills at school.

I got the willies too. Didn't live that far from Essendon Airport and would wake up scared hearing jets and thinking of nuclear attack.
Ahh the late 70s early 80's. Thankfully Aids came along to let us forget about it.

(Divinyls band - Science Fiction - hit single ), "Never thought I would live this long, always thought that they wold drop the bomb."

 

[Dona Ferentes]

Netanyahu’s strike against Iran marks the West’s first win of Cold War II​

“One better way to look at what we are watching is simply that Netanyahu is fulfilling his historical mission,” writes historian Niall Ferguson.


After TACO, now BDCO: Bibi Doesn’t Chicken Out.

Early Friday morning, Israel launched a historic wave of attacks against Iran – the latest phase of the Israel-Iran war that effectively began on October 7, 2023.

Israel’s Operation Rising Lion included both airstrikes and a wave of Mossad-run assassinations across Iran that effectively decapitated the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. The Israel Defence Forces claims to have executed hundreds of strikes spread over five waves in the first phase of the operation, targeting Iran’s military infrastructure, its nuclear sites and its command structure. As many as 200 fighter jets were involved. The Israelis built a drone base inside Iran to strike the enemy from within, as if to say: anything Ukraine can do, we can do better.
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei declared Israel would receive a “bitter, painful” response, and that has now begun. As of writing, Israelis were in their bomb shelters. At least one missile has exploded in downtown Tel Aviv.
How to interpret this seismic event – and unfolding war

The alarmists are already penning their op-eds prophesying World War III. The BBC and most European media will doubtless portray Benjamin Netanyahu as a callous warmonger – as opposed to his nation’s Bismarck.

The professional Middle East experts will churn out the usual pabulum about avoiding a wider conflagration, despite the fact those experts almost all failed to foresee the beginning of that conflagration on October 7.

Ignore all of them.

One better way to look at what we are watching is simply that Netanyahu is fulfilling his historical mission. He long ago vowed to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons on the grounds that this would be the precursor to a second Holocaust. Few believed he would actually resort to war to deliver on this vow. But he has.

But widen the aperture beyond Israel. It is illuminating to put this latest Israeli coup in the broader context of the global war we’ve been in since 2018: Cold War II.

At the core of Cold War II is the challenge posed by the People’s Republic of China, the biggest economic rival the US has ever faced, which is catching up rapidly in terms of both technology sophistication and military capability.

In his first administration and again in his second, Donald Trump has used the blunt instrument of tariffs, as well as export controls to try to contain China’s rise with limited success.

Under the presidency that was nominally Joe Biden’s, his handlers and advisers made a series of poor foreign policy decisions that eroded American deterrence and allowed the formation of an Axis of Authoritarians: China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.

As in Cold War I, so in Cold War II: regional hot wars serve as proxies for the larger superpower conflict. One of those wars has been in Ukraine; the other began in October 2023 in Israel.

The new Axis has three democratic states in its collective sights: Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. The trilemma for the US is that it seems difficult, if not impossible, to defend all three of these at tolerable cost.

US foreign policy, Henry Kissinger once observed, is perceived from outside as a single coherent grand strategy, whereas in reality it is the net result of multiple interagency battles, and sometimes produces outcomes not one of the players precisely intended. So it is with the Trump administration.

While there are certainly influential actors at the State Department who have been pressing Trump for months to give Israel the green light for strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities, the President himself – as well as his foreign policy consigliere, Steve Witkoff – probably would have preferred further negotiations with the Iranian government.

As I have argued elsewhere, Trump’s critics generally overlook that he is a pacifist at heart who prefers trade wars to real wars, and dreams of being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

To those who would prioritise checking China’s designs on Taiwan, yet more entanglement in the Middle East is a distraction from the main event. To the America Firsters who would prefer a hemispheric strategy focused on the Americas, it is the same old story of American interests being conflated with those of Israel. While this infighting continued, Israel acted.

The casus belli was clear. According to comments by the Iranian Atomic Energy Organisation and Foreign Ministry after the publication of the International Atomic Energy Agency Board of Governor’s report on May 31, Iran planned to upgrade enrichment capacity at Fordow with more advanced IR-6 centrifuges and four new cascades. It also announced a new hardened enrichment site.

Iran’s response to the IAEA’s censure – the first in 20 years – demonstrated a well-thought-out path to nuclear weaponisation. Adding another four cascades of IR-6 centrifuges at Fordow, replacing the rest of Fordow’s centrifuges, and unveiling another major enrichment site would expand Iran’s enrichment capacity by a factor of two to three at least, facilitating enrichment of a weapons-grade stockpile in just a few weeks. Israel cannot live with a nuclear-armed Iran. Bibi has said so for years. He had to act.

Israel also attacked because it knew Iran had been profoundly weakened. Having crippled Hezbollah in Lebanon last year and then witnessed the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, Israel felt confident it could achieve its objectives at acceptable cost.

Israeli intelligence had not only deeply penetrated Iran itself. There must have been confidence, too, that the other Axis powers – especially Russia – had done relatively little to rebuild Iran’s ravaged air defences.

Israel presented the case for striking Iran to US officials before the Trump administration convened a high-level strategy offsite at Camp David on Sunday, according to Axios.

A puzzle for future historians will be the extent of US opposition to, or complicity in, the Israeli attacks. President Trump had said on Friday that Washington was “fairly close to a pretty good agreement”, adding that he did not want Israel to attack Iran because it could “blow” the chances of a deal.

One possibility is that Trump tried and failed to restrain the Israelis, who acted unilaterally in defiance of Washington. The other is that the recent weeks of negotiation with Tehran were a feint designed to create an element of surprise while at the same time allowing Trump to disclaim responsibility for the Israeli strikes.

In recent weeks, Trump and his right-hand man, Witkoff, have shown themselves to be susceptible to pressure from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf governments, which had no appetite for an escalation of the Iran-Israel war.

The spike in oil prices triggered by the Israeli strikes will be unwelcome to Trump’s economic team, too. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Friday night explicitly described the Israeli action against Iran as “unilateral” adding: “Israel advised us that they believe this action was necessary for its self-defence … Let me be clear: Iran should not target US interests or personnel.”

Trump himself told Bret Baier of Fox News, “we are hoping to get back to the negotiating table” – though he could not resist adding there “are several people in leadership in Iran that will not be coming back” to that table. When CNN’s Dana Bash asked him if he meant Iranian hardliners were dead due to Israel’s airstrikes, Trump replied: “They didn’t die of the flu. They didn’t die of Covid.”

On the other hand, so long as they appear successful, Trump cannot resist presenting the Israeli strikes as in some sense his achievement.

“I gave Iran chance after chance to make a deal,” he posted on Truth Social on Saturday. “I told them, in the strongest of words, to ‘just do it,’ but no matter how hard they tried, no matter how close they got, they just couldn’t get it done. I told them it would be much worse than anything they know, anticipated … Iran must make a deal, before there is nothing left, and save what was once known as the Iranian Empire. No more death, no more destruction, JUST DO IT, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.”

An hour later he added: “Two months ago I gave Iran a 60 day ultimatum to ‘make a deal.’ They should have done it! Today is day 61. I told them what to do, but they just couldn’t get there. Now they have, perhaps, a second chance!” This is vintage Trump. He must surely know that the chance of an imminent resumption of negotiations is close to zero.

But which was it? Unilateral Israeli action? Or a Trump-approved hit because the Iranians had disregarded his ultimatum? Only when the relevant documents have been declassified, and Signal chats decrypted, will we know how far Israel acted unilaterally and how far with Trump’s blessing. All we know is that the major Middle East war that has been brewing since October 7, 2023 is finally here. And while Israel carried out targeted attacks on military sites and select personnel, Iran is hitting back at Israel’s most densely populated city.

This war has become existential. My next essay may have to be “Iran after the Islamic Republic”.

Will it achieve the transition to a free society that so many Iranian people crave? Or, as in Iraq, Libya, and now Syria, will the downfall of an authoritarian regime be followed by civil strife, creating new opportunities for jihadists to establish their Islamic State, as envisioned nearly 20 years ago by Abu Bakr Naji in The Management of Savagery? We do not yet know.

What we can say confidently is that the theocracy in Tehran badly miscalculated, believing Trump would restrain Netanyahu. The Iranians may also have believed their membership of the Axis entitled them to some protection from their Russian and Chinese confederates. But they were wrong on both scores. As we have seen more than once in the past year, Bibi Does Not Chicken Out. And that means that, whether it was intended or not, the US and its principal Middle Eastern ally have now taken a vital first step toward restoring the credibility of the West.

Of course, the final outcome of Cold War II will not be decided at Natanz and Fordow, any more than it will be decided at Pokrovsk and Novopavlivka, where fighting has been raging between Russian and Ukrainian forces this week. The decisive battle will be fought – or not – over Taiwan. The ultimate verdict on the grand strategy of Donald Trump, if such a thing exists, will therefore depend on how successfully he contends with the Chinese challenge to American primacy.

For now, however, those who have criticised the President for his erratic trade policy – myself included – must admit our misjudgment. The trade war has turned out to be a phony war. This is the real thing. And so far, at least, our side is winning.

 

[Knobby22]

Netanyahu’s strike against Iran marks the West’s first win of Cold War II​

“One better way to look at what we are watching is simply that Netanyahu is fulfilling his historical mission,” writes historian Niall Ferguson.


After TACO, now BDCO: Bibi Doesn’t Chicken Out.

Early Friday morning, Israel launched a historic wave of attacks against Iran – the latest phase of the Israel-Iran war that effectively began on October 7, 2023.

Israel’s Operation Rising Lion included both airstrikes and a wave of Mossad-run assassinations across Iran that effectively decapitated the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. The Israel Defence Forces claims to have executed hundreds of strikes spread over five waves in the first phase of the operation, targeting Iran’s military infrastructure, its nuclear sites and its command structure. As many as 200 fighter jets were involved. The Israelis built a drone base inside Iran to strike the enemy from within, as if to say: anything Ukraine can do, we can do better.
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei declared Israel would receive a “bitter, painful” response, and that has now begun. As of writing, Israelis were in their bomb shelters. At least one missile has exploded in downtown Tel Aviv.
How to interpret this seismic event – and unfolding war

The alarmists are already penning their op-eds prophesying World War III. The BBC and most European media will doubtless portray Benjamin Netanyahu as a callous warmonger – as opposed to his nation’s Bismarck.

The professional Middle East experts will churn out the usual pabulum about avoiding a wider conflagration, despite the fact those experts almost all failed to foresee the beginning of that conflagration on October 7.

Ignore all of them.

One better way to look at what we are watching is simply that Netanyahu is fulfilling his historical mission. He long ago vowed to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons on the grounds that this would be the precursor to a second Holocaust. Few believed he would actually resort to war to deliver on this vow. But he has.

But widen the aperture beyond Israel. It is illuminating to put this latest Israeli coup in the broader context of the global war we’ve been in since 2018: Cold War II.

At the core of Cold War II is the challenge posed by the People’s Republic of China, the biggest economic rival the US has ever faced, which is catching up rapidly in terms of both technology sophistication and military capability.

In his first administration and again in his second, Donald Trump has used the blunt instrument of tariffs, as well as export controls to try to contain China’s rise with limited success.

Under the presidency that was nominally Joe Biden’s, his handlers and advisers made a series of poor foreign policy decisions that eroded American deterrence and allowed the formation of an Axis of Authoritarians: China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.

As in Cold War I, so in Cold War II: regional hot wars serve as proxies for the larger superpower conflict. One of those wars has been in Ukraine; the other began in October 2023 in Israel.

The new Axis has three democratic states in its collective sights: Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. The trilemma for the US is that it seems difficult, if not impossible, to defend all three of these at tolerable cost.

US foreign policy, Henry Kissinger once observed, is perceived from outside as a single coherent grand strategy, whereas in reality it is the net result of multiple interagency battles, and sometimes produces outcomes not one of the players precisely intended. So it is with the Trump administration.

While there are certainly influential actors at the State Department who have been pressing Trump for months to give Israel the green light for strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities, the President himself – as well as his foreign policy consigliere, Steve Witkoff – probably would have preferred further negotiations with the Iranian government.

As I have argued elsewhere, Trump’s critics generally overlook that he is a pacifist at heart who prefers trade wars to real wars, and dreams of being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

To those who would prioritise checking China’s designs on Taiwan, yet more entanglement in the Middle East is a distraction from the main event. To the America Firsters who would prefer a hemispheric strategy focused on the Americas, it is the same old story of American interests being conflated with those of Israel. While this infighting continued, Israel acted.

The casus belli was clear. According to comments by the Iranian Atomic Energy Organisation and Foreign Ministry after the publication of the International Atomic Energy Agency Board of Governor’s report on May 31, Iran planned to upgrade enrichment capacity at Fordow with more advanced IR-6 centrifuges and four new cascades. It also announced a new hardened enrichment site.

Iran’s response to the IAEA’s censure – the first in 20 years – demonstrated a well-thought-out path to nuclear weaponisation. Adding another four cascades of IR-6 centrifuges at Fordow, replacing the rest of Fordow’s centrifuges, and unveiling another major enrichment site would expand Iran’s enrichment capacity by a factor of two to three at least, facilitating enrichment of a weapons-grade stockpile in just a few weeks. Israel cannot live with a nuclear-armed Iran. Bibi has said so for years. He had to act.

Israel also attacked because it knew Iran had been profoundly weakened. Having crippled Hezbollah in Lebanon last year and then witnessed the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, Israel felt confident it could achieve its objectives at acceptable cost.

Israeli intelligence had not only deeply penetrated Iran itself. There must have been confidence, too, that the other Axis powers – especially Russia – had done relatively little to rebuild Iran’s ravaged air defences.

Israel presented the case for striking Iran to US officials before the Trump administration convened a high-level strategy offsite at Camp David on Sunday, according to Axios.

A puzzle for future historians will be the extent of US opposition to, or complicity in, the Israeli attacks. President Trump had said on Friday that Washington was “fairly close to a pretty good agreement”, adding that he did not want Israel to attack Iran because it could “blow” the chances of a deal.

One possibility is that Trump tried and failed to restrain the Israelis, who acted unilaterally in defiance of Washington. The other is that the recent weeks of negotiation with Tehran were a feint designed to create an element of surprise while at the same time allowing Trump to disclaim responsibility for the Israeli strikes.

In recent weeks, Trump and his right-hand man, Witkoff, have shown themselves to be susceptible to pressure from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf governments, which had no appetite for an escalation of the Iran-Israel war.

The spike in oil prices triggered by the Israeli strikes will be unwelcome to Trump’s economic team, too. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Friday night explicitly described the Israeli action against Iran as “unilateral” adding: “Israel advised us that they believe this action was necessary for its self-defence … Let me be clear: Iran should not target US interests or personnel.”

Trump himself told Bret Baier of Fox News, “we are hoping to get back to the negotiating table” – though he could not resist adding there “are several people in leadership in Iran that will not be coming back” to that table. When CNN’s Dana Bash asked him if he meant Iranian hardliners were dead due to Israel’s airstrikes, Trump replied: “They didn’t die of the flu. They didn’t die of Covid.”

On the other hand, so long as they appear successful, Trump cannot resist presenting the Israeli strikes as in some sense his achievement.

“I gave Iran chance after chance to make a deal,” he posted on Truth Social on Saturday. “I told them, in the strongest of words, to ‘just do it,’ but no matter how hard they tried, no matter how close they got, they just couldn’t get it done. I told them it would be much worse than anything they know, anticipated … Iran must make a deal, before there is nothing left, and save what was once known as the Iranian Empire. No more death, no more destruction, JUST DO IT, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.”

An hour later he added: “Two months ago I gave Iran a 60 day ultimatum to ‘make a deal.’ They should have done it! Today is day 61. I told them what to do, but they just couldn’t get there. Now they have, perhaps, a second chance!” This is vintage Trump. He must surely know that the chance of an imminent resumption of negotiations is close to zero.

But which was it? Unilateral Israeli action? Or a Trump-approved hit because the Iranians had disregarded his ultimatum? Only when the relevant documents have been declassified, and Signal chats decrypted, will we know how far Israel acted unilaterally and how far with Trump’s blessing. All we know is that the major Middle East war that has been brewing since October 7, 2023 is finally here. And while Israel carried out targeted attacks on military sites and select personnel, Iran is hitting back at Israel’s most densely populated city.

This war has become existential. My next essay may have to be “Iran after the Islamic Republic”.

Will it achieve the transition to a free society that so many Iranian people crave? Or, as in Iraq, Libya, and now Syria, will the downfall of an authoritarian regime be followed by civil strife, creating new opportunities for jihadists to establish their Islamic State, as envisioned nearly 20 years ago by Abu Bakr Naji in The Management of Savagery? We do not yet know.

What we can say confidently is that the theocracy in Tehran badly miscalculated, believing Trump would restrain Netanyahu. The Iranians may also have believed their membership of the Axis entitled them to some protection from their Russian and Chinese confederates. But they were wrong on both scores. As we have seen more than once in the past year, Bibi Does Not Chicken Out. And that means that, whether it was intended or not, the US and its principal Middle Eastern ally have now taken a vital first step toward restoring the credibility of the West.

Of course, the final outcome of Cold War II will not be decided at Natanz and Fordow, any more than it will be decided at Pokrovsk and Novopavlivka, where fighting has been raging between Russian and Ukrainian forces this week. The decisive battle will be fought – or not – over Taiwan. The ultimate verdict on the grand strategy of Donald Trump, if such a thing exists, will therefore depend on how successfully he contends with the Chinese challenge to American primacy.

For now, however, those who have criticised the President for his erratic trade policy – myself included – must admit our misjudgment. The trade war has turned out to be a phony war. This is the real thing. And so far, at least, our side is winning.

I agree, the war is existential for Iran.

I think there will be an invasion if there is no regime change. everyone is hoping for that but how can it be facilitated?
How else can Israel be certain they won't develop the nuclear weapons?
I feel the USA will need to get involved, at least with bunker buster bombs.

Russia are busy with Ukraine and are not going to help Iran.
Conversely Iran will no longer be able to help Russia with the drone supply to attack Ukraine.

 

[wayneL]

I can't see the Islamic regime surviving this, and that will be the prime objective of Israel and their allies. You can be sure that apart from the West, the moderate, non Shia regimes will have the same hope. FWIW

 

[basilio]

This is a bigger re run of the Gaza re development project isn't it ? Start by decapitating the leadership. Then systematically destroy the top tier of critical infrastructure as a start.

Stop.... for a moment. Demand capitulation or Israel will get really serious with the next round of leadership strikes (to kill those they missed and the ones who got picked as replacements) and second round attacks on power supplies, hospitals, administration centres, transport hubs and critical industrial infrastructure.

After a few rounds of these actions Iran should be a broken country with little industrial or civil capacity and largely destroyed leadership capacity.

All Israel has to do then is find a willing satrap to become figure head leader.

Interestingly enough that was the military/political model that Putin attempted on Ukraine.