Here is an item from a Jane’s email newsletter that caught my attention:
Iran-Israel shadow war escalates
The covert war between Israel and Iran has seemingly escalated, with attempts being made on the lives of Israelis in both India and Georgia. On 13 February, CCTV cameras in New Delhi, India, captured footage of a motorcyclist attaching a magnetic bomb to a vehicle being driven by the wife of an Israeli diplomat
I fear the Middle East will be a self-curing problem through self-immolation in a localized Armageddon. We must not forget the hatred for Israel is secondary to the hatred of some elements of each of the major Islamic sects for each other. Once Iran has a viable stockpile of deliverable nuclear weapons, the Saudi’s will do the same. Pakistan already has them. Israel has them. It will be a nuclear free-for-all that will only stop when there is no one left standing. We can hope the Israeli’s can manage to survive with more of their society intact than the others, primarily because they are not stark raving lunatics like many of those with whom they share the region.
There it is. “stark raving lunatics”. With such savages it’s amazing that a nuclear weapon hasn’t been used yet (well, aside from that one time that civilized society HAD to use it). Not like people can actually be rational, or MAD actually make sense.
…As if the devote’s of are any different. If Iran is building nuclear weapons (and that’s still an if!) they are only responding to stimuli. In this world the only way to not get invaded is to have a nuke, otherwise you are forced to do what the bully on the block wants.
Fear mongering abounds in Iraq part deux.
Cheap parallelism alert: Otherwise level-headed observers in the 1920s and 1930s asserted that communist Russia could not possibly be deliberately starving its own population, because that would be “irrational”. But of course they were, following both the implacable dictates of class warfare, and the more ancient asiatic practice of “laying waste” rebellious provinces. So too today, many in the West insist that the mullahs cannot really believe what they say about wiping Israel off the map, because that would be catastrophic for Iran’s chances of rejoining the civilized world. The rationalists ignore the chapter and verse that is cited, giving the reasons for the looming atrocity. Yes, evil people have reasons. But they are their reasons, not ours.
Alternatively, when Iran, Israel and Saudi Arabia are all nuclear armed, they will learn to live in peace. True, it won’t be a particularly easy peace; but the US and Soviet Union learned to live in uneasy peace with one another, simply because the alternative was mutual annihilation.
Perhaps, with the hydrogen bomb, humanity finally invented a weapon which is too terrible to use.
It’s like a drive-by shooting in a gang war, multiplied by millions.
Though it’s politically incorrect, I feel the same way about both: it’s thugs killing thugs. If they don’t start killing bystanders, I see no reason to interfere. Unfortunately, gangs aren’t much on battle discipline. They always end up killing bystanders.
Ellen, quite right. Just make sure to pass a law forbidding any of that nasty radioactive waste from going through your airspace, and you’ll have no trouble!
The Israelis won’t commit their infantry to fight the Arabs according to the First Rule War ensuring their defeat besides the Western Meeja would go ballistic and when the Israelis are being over run then they’ll use their nuclear weapons i.e. If you’re going to go take as many as you can with you.
“humanity finally invented a weapon which is too terrible to use”
Agreed there, for all of recorded history, most human tribes/countries have been fighting it out with each other. Since WWII its pretty much been world peace apart from a few limited wars. Nukes are good in my book
Nuke – the amount of nuclear weapons in the Middle East would hardly make enough fallout to cause desperate trouble — certainly not as much trouble as a Middle East fully overpopulated with murderous fanatics who think they should own the whole world. They are colonizing the West already.
Well, judging by food prices vs. average income, overpopulation isn’t going to be any sort of problem in the near future, anyway. Raw demographics suggests that Israel will win simply by virtue of being last-man-standing.