There are a lot of people in the West who feel that since Israel is a nuclear power it’s not really under much of a threat. That’s true only in the sense that none of the other nuclear powers have ever expressed any desire to destroy Israel and that people also believe that Israel would not use nuclear weapons even if she was losing a conventional war. I’m not so sure about that, given NATO’s stance during the Cold War and the recent sabre-rattling by Putin over the Ukraine War.

In military intelligence a threat is assessed not on the basis of what an enemy might do – since motivations and the desire to act on them is very difficult to predict – but what they could do, of which analysis is based on the more solid ground of counting weapon systems and assessing their lethality.

Mind you, it pays not to forget the motivations, right Adeel?

He was a CNN contributor from Pakistan, with some 50 CNN articles to his name over the years, even as he unloaded other Jew-hating stuff on Twitter. In this respect he was not much different to the Hamas Covenant of 1988:

Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious. It needs all sincere efforts. It is a step that inevitably should be followed by other steps. The Movement is but one squadron that should be supported by more and more squadrons from this vast Arab and Islamic world, until the enemy is vanquished and Allah’s victory is realised.
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There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. 

It almost goes without saying that Iran backs Hamas.

Raja is hardly alone in the MSM, although most of the anti-Israeli stuff steers carefully away from such obviously self-discrediting statements. The starting point for recent MSM coverage of Israel was undoubtedly the death of Muhammad al Durah at Netzarim Junction on Sept. 30, 2000, which small video/photo propaganda effort turned into something much larger and horrific:

It became an instant global sensation, enraging the Muslim world and provoking angry protests where Western progressives and militant Muslims joined to equate Israel to the Nazis. Ironically, for the first time since the Holocaust, “Death to Jews” was heard in the capitals of Europe. From that point on, for many, Israel was to blame for all violence, a pariah state.

Even had the child died in a crossfire, blaming his death on deliberate Israeli action made it a classic blood libel: A gentile boy dies; the Jews are accused of plotting the murder; violent mobs, invoking the dead martyr, attack the Jews. In Europe, the attacks the al Durah libel incited were mostly on Jewish property. In the Middle East, a new round of suicide bombers, “revenging the blood of Muhammad al Durah” targeted Israeli children to the approval of 80% of the Palestinian public. It was, in fact, the first postmodern blood libel. The first blood libel announced by a Jew ([France 2’s reporter,] Enderlin), spread by the modern mainstream news media (MSNM), and carried in cyberspace to a global audience. It was the first wildly successful piece of “fake news” of the 21st century, and, as an icon of hatred, it did untold damage.

At the link you can read how, over three years, the lie was dismantled – but all too late, and in any case these lies apparently served “a higher truth”, an excuse used not just by Palestinian journalists but increasingly Western ones, which brought forth this article in The Atlantic, What the Media Gets Wrong About Israel:

The Western press has become less an observer of this conflict than an actor in it, a role with consequences for the millions of people trying to comprehend current events, including policymakers who depend on journalistic accounts to understand a region where they consistently seek, and fail, to productively intervene.

So the motivations to hurt, damage or even destroy Israel are present in great breadth and depth (and the MSM is a vital accomplice to that), although the means to do so are limited.

But there is one nation that could change the equation and are bent upon doing so – Iran. They desire to build a nuclear weapon, and have got closer to doing so every single day now for twenty years.

As a result there has increasingly existed a Cold War in miniature between the two Middle Eastern nations, and the actions taken are very similar in their “unattributed” nature, although far more shockingly direct than anything the USA and USSR pulled on each other in the original series. While Israel has had espionage triumphs, like the lifting of tons of documents about Iran’s nuclear weapon programme from a warehouse in the capital city Tehran – which proved Iran had told many lies about the programme – there have been increasing numbers of direct actions.

ASSASSINATIONS

Multiple Iranian officials have been assassinated over the years, including a number of scientists in their nuclear programme, and while the Iranians have not been slow to blame Israel the latter have never directly acknowledged responsibility, responding only with “leaks” to reporters some time after the hit. The standard attack method is with guys on motorbikes, as was the case with the killing of Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, Al Qaeda’s second-highest leader, in Iran in August of 2020. More recently the killing of Hassan Sayad Khodayari, a senior member of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard outside his home in Tehran.

Iranian Billboard celebrating Fakhrizadeh’s “martyrdom”

Probably the most significant was the death in 2020 of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, long considered to be the top man in Iran’s nuclear program. Israel had tried killing him before but failed, which was why he had a lot of security. But even being surrounded by body guards is no guarantee. Initial reports were the usual fog-of-war stuff, with tales of an IED car explosion to stop his convoy and then 12 gunmen on motorbikes and a car surrounding him, with the kill shot delivered to the head by somebody hauling him out of the car to do it.

The truth was more prosaic and yet more incredible: he was killed by a remote-controlled robot machine gun:

[The weapon] was a Belgian-made FN MAG machine gun attached to an advanced robotic apparatus, according to an intelligence official familiar with the plot. The official said the system was not unlike the off-the-rack Sentinel 20 manufactured by the Spanish defense contractor Escribano.
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The Israelis … wanted to control the weapon from, as the Times puts it, an “undisclosed location more than 1,000 miles away.” Read: from Israel.

A weapon like that is going to be able to penetrate normal car windscreens and even armoured glass without the bullets bouncing off. Only 15 machine gun bullets were needed to kill Fakhrizadeh, in a moving vehicle, without harming those around him, including his wife sitting in the passenger seat.

The weapon was mounted on the deck of a ute parked on the side of the road, which in true Mission Impossible fashion promptly blew itself up to destroy all the key evidence.

MILITARY ATTACKS

These are somewhat more serious, like “casus belli” serious. Given the control of such weapons it’s not surprising that Israel has launched drone attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities:

A military strike that utilized quadcopter drones launched from inside Iran hit the top-secret Iranian military base at Parchin. It’s believed the strike targeted Iran’s drone research and development complex and not its missile or nuclear research facilities.
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Last June, another quadcopter drone hit the centrifuge manufacturing facility that was making advanced centrifuges to spin up nuclear fuel.

Plus drone-on-drone action:

Israel has been busy trying to disrupt Iranian development of sophisticated drone technology. In February, drones attacked a drone facility in the city of Kermanshah. It was Iran’s main manufacturing and storage plant for military drones, according to U.S. intelligence.
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The drone attack on Wednesday was launched from inside Iran, not far from the Parchin military base, according to the Iranian sources with knowledge of the attack. Quadcopter drones have a short flight range, and Parchin is a long way from Iran’s borders.

This would not be the first time that Israel had used operatives inside Iran to carry out attacks.

That last is what must be really screwing with the minds of the Mullahs and all their henchmen in the military and security forces. That Israel, time and time again, launches these operations deep inside Iran, a clear indication of just how far they have penetrated into Iranian systems, riddling them with double agents, spies and so forth. As a result there have been attacks that were launched by humans:

On Easter Sunday [2021], a massive explosion ripped through the top-secret Iranian nuclear weapons research facility at Natanz. There were some interesting aspects to the explosion. In a way, this was deja vu because, in July 2020, the same facility was hit by a cyberattack that damaged the centrifuge production plant inside the Natanz facility.
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The Iranian official stressed that such an operation takes years, saying “the design of the enemy was very beautiful.”

Well that’s certainly a very Iranian way of describing it. Israel repeated the dose with another drone attack on June 23, 2021 and satellite images certainly showed a lot of damage:

Today’s incident follows a string of unexplained fires and explosions striking Tehran’s clandestine nuclear weapons program since the Biden administration intensified efforts to rejoin the 2015 nuclear deal.

No! Really? As this 2021 article points out, all these mysterious explosions show that Mossad Neither Slumbers Nor Sleeps:

A large fire was reported at the Kangan Petro Refining Co. (KPRC) in southern Iran along the coast of the Persian Gulf on Monday, just a day after an explosion reportedly impacted a drone factory in the center of the country.
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And on May 26, Iranian state media reported on still a third explosion, this one at an oxygen pipeline in a petrochemical plant in Assaluyeh on Iran’s Gulf coast. There was no mention of its cause.

This Twitter thread by one Matthew Brodsky (from some Washington D.C. “think tank) gives an excellent background going back to the days of Obama negotiating the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan Of Action) to try and restrict Iran’s nuclear weapons development – and getting pissed off with the Israelis, who clearly did not have any faith in the process and decided to keep taking action.

And now that guy is president, and he’s trying to re-create the JCPOA. But times have changed:

It’s quite likely Israel is already incorporating the idea that Team Biden will leak & acting accordingly. 2021 isn’t 2012-15. Israel may now be broadcasting messages along with its actions that it used to keep secret.

Not only that:

  • The Iranians have been far more intransigent in their demands, to the point where it’s becoming clear even to saps like Secretary of State Blinken.
  • Biden is not Obama, so his policies can be directly challenged without being labeled a racist.
  • President Trump has reordered the Middle East’s strategic landscape, creating an Arab-Israel security partnership to confront Iran, which mean Israel has Arab allies.

The time that Obama, Biden and others thought they were buying in 2015 with the JCPOA was always an illusion. Iran always wanted an atomic bomb; just one of the tells was their ongoing ballistic missile program, which in the age of cruise missiles, JDAM warheads and drones is obsolete for delivering conventional explosives accurately – but still fine for a nuclear warhead. This 2021 article makes a comparison about the strategic implications of always trying to buy time:

The sad truth is that had Chamberlain been willing to fight Hitler right then, World War II could have been avoided since the German High Command was ready to overthrow Hitler. The time supposedly “bought” by Chamberlain’s weakness at Munich came at the cost of 60 million lives, the devastation of Europe and Asia, and the Holocaust.

The two cases are not quite similar, except for this one central lesson. Once the wish to gain time drives a willingness to accept the demands of a ruthless, totalitarian regime hell-bent on subversion and destruction, the tragic consequences are inevitable. It is this insight that should be imparted to friends in American politics and diplomacy.

The Israeli military and spies have also bought them much time. However, just the other day, as Iran demolished dozens of International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA) cameras at their nuclear sites, rendering the IAEA “blind”, came this analysis:

“Due to the growth of Iran’s 60% enriched uranium stocks, Iran has crossed a dangerous new threshold: its breakout timeline is now at zero,” the scientists say. 

Time is up on this Cold War.