June 5, 2008
Courtesy Of Asia Times Online
Most men, it is generally agreed, will do anything to survive. In my favorite World War II/Holocaust movie, Lina Wertmuller's 1975 Seven Beauties, a harmless little nebbish of an Italian petty thief, Pasqualino (Giancarlo Giannini), finds himself in a horrible, hellish Nazi concentration camp; the camp setting is some sort of huge, enclosed, indoor hall, a setting so evil that the inmates never even see the sun.
To survive, Pasqualino agrees to make love to the camp commandant, a ghastly, sadistic, Brobdingnagian-girthed gorgon-like SS officer, played by Shirley Stoler. Pasqualino outlasts both the camp and the war, but his soul dies. He did what he had to do to survive.
Failing being placed in a circumstance where their lives are at stake, there are things that men don't want to do. One of those is to kiss another man. In 1978, on the NBC Network program Saturday Night Live, the troupe performed a skit lampooning the legends of white slaveowners forcing themselves onto their black slaves in the US ante-bellum south. The script called for comedian Bill Murray, playing a slaveowner, to attempt to force his desires on an unwilling slave; the comedy was in that the slave was not a woman, but America's favorite, cheerful, non-threatening African-American of the time, O J Simpson.
The show went out live, and you could clearly see that, as Murray pressed his lips towards Simpson's, Simpson turned his face away; not even as comedy could he kiss another man on the lips. His life was not the line, so Simpson wouldn't do it; at his trial for double murder 17 years later, Simpson, too, proved that he would do anything to survive.
But one thing that men apparently need no threats or intimidation to do is to plan, plot, scheme, even to detail and diagram, the killing of millions of their fellow men, women and children. As evidence of this, I present before the bar of humanity this item I recently came across on the Internet, a report authored by respected military analyst Anthony H Cordesman of the US Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) think-tank, entitled "Iran, Israel and Nuclear War" [1].I have always enjoyed Cordesman's informed, educated and enlightening commentaries on matters strategic and military, particularly his take on the military and political situation in Iraq. In no way do I think of him as a sort of Dr Strangelove-like figure, from the 1964 Stanley Kubrick movie of the same name, warped in both mind and body from a lifetime of contemplating mass death. But, just as we have extensively studied and documented the effects of nuclear weapons when they detonate, perhaps this is an under-investigated line of inquiry - what happens when they don't.
Remarkable - just the presence of nuclear weapons among them turns even the best of men at least a little bit mad.
The 77-page report is formatted in the US Pentagon's current dominant lingua franca, the ubiquitous Microsoft Powerpoint - my goodness, you'd almost think that it was destined to be shown there! How foolish it was for Osama bin Laden to think he could take down the entire US military with just one plane, or even a dozen, slamming into the Pentagon; a virus or bug that disabled all the Powerpoint software the US Department of Defense runs would have brought the world's most powerful military to its knees. In slide after slide, the report catalogs the weaponry, tactics, targets, contingencies, most importantly the results, that would occur should everybody in the Middle East with a button, perhaps simultaneously, perhaps in sequence, push it.I was once invited to give an economics guest lecture to a class studying this discipline, the possible scenarios and wargames that were popular intellectual parlor games during the Cold War. Of the 35 students in class, none but one was a young woman. Yes, studying this was OK for men; it wasn't something horrible like kissing another man.
The first and core scenario of the report involves a nuclear exchange between Israel and Iran, some time between 2010 and 2020. It is speculated that during this period, the Iranians would have about 50, mostly minimum-yield, nuclear weapons at their disposal. Thirty would be in the form of missile warheads to be emplaced on their Shahab 3 and 4 intermediate range ballistic missiles, 20 in the form of bombs that would be carried on the now antique F-14 Tomcats bought from the US by the Shah of Iran in the 1970s, along with a few on the old Russian SU-24s, and the more modern SU-37s, that Iran has recently purchased during shopping trips to the world's global arms swap meet.
Israel has been a nuclear-capable power since at least the mid 1960s; it is speculated in the report that by 2010 it will have over 200, higher-yielding nuclear warheads in its arsenal, deliverable by both Jericho 3 ballistic missiles and American-supplied F-16 and F-15 fighter bombers.
The differing technological capabilities of the two countries would dictate their respective strategies once the missiles and bombs started flying. Israel has access to America's super-sophisticated satellite reconnaissance and targeting technology. Besides knowing just where to point their nukes, Israel also possesses the technology that assures that its weapons will fall where desired.
Thus, if Israel decides to commence the war with a pre-emptive strike against Iran's nuclear research and production facilities, shown in the report as lying in a northwest/southeast axis from Lashkar A'bad on the southwestern shores of the Caspian Sea to Gachin, just west of the Strait of Hormuz, it could do so without inflicting the massive casualties of a nuclear strike on Teheran.
Included in the report are satellite images of the Iranian nuclear facilities at Arak and Isfahan; to me, they look a lot like what an Israeli pilot in his F-16, or maybe an American pilot in his F-22, would tape to the canopy of his cockpit in order to provide a visual verification that he was bombing the right target.
The Iranians lack the ability to precision-target their weapons in the same manner in which the Israelis can, so the report postulates that the main targets for their nukes would be the core coastal Israeli metropolis, from Haifa in the north to Ashkelon just north of the border with Gaza. Haifa, the report notes, is surrounded by hills, which means that the destructive force of any nuclear device detonated over the city would bounce off the mountains and double back onto the city, greatly amplifying its damage. Tel Aviv is on a long, flat coastal plain, but it is a very densely populated city, with an estimated 7,445 of population per square kilometer.
Of course, if the war commenced not with the "limited" Israeli strike against Iran's nuclear production facilities (this attack would be classified as "counterforce" by the nuclear cognoscenti ), but with a full-blown "countervalue" Iranian strike against Israel's cities, it is doubtful that the Israelis would feel obligated to limit their retaliatory vengeance to just Iran's military targets.
From out of their hardened silos would fly the Israeli missiles and bombers, with their primary target being Tehran, along with Iran's other population centers. With over 7 million people just within the bounds of Tehran itself, 15 million in the surrounding metropolitan area, the city contains over 20% of Iran's population and is the center of the nation's communications, production, educational and cultural infrastructure.
Casualties from this exchange would be nightmarish, horrific, incalculable - except by Cordesman and his CSIS team.
The lower yield and less accurate Iranian volley, sparing Jerusalem due to its centrality to the Moslem faith, would inflict between 200,000 to 800,000 Israeli fatalities along the coastal plain in the first 21 days. These are called "prompt" casualties; it's who dies before people start dropping from longer-term radiation exposure. Any surviving residents of the central core of urban Tel Aviv would still be exposed to 300 REM (roentgen equivalent man) of radiation 96 hours after the blasts, as opposed to an exposure during an average dental X-ray of about .010 REM.
The more accurate and bigger Israeli nukes, the report speculates, would inflict a far greater toll on Iranian cities - in between 16 million and 28 million in just "prompt" fatalities. The report says that that an Israeli recovery from its damage would be "theoretically possible in population and economic terms", whereas an Iranian recovery would be "not possible in normal terms"; in essence, the Iranian nation will be destroyed.
Thus, what the report is saying is that one day next decade you might wake up with an Iran, after almost 6,000 years as a national entity and still there at sunrise, would be wiped off the map by sunset.
The rest of the report speculates on various other assorted scenarios for Mid-East Armageddon. Syria, generally assumed to be many years away from possessing a nuclear capacity, might, for some reason, decide to launch a CBW (chemical, biological weapon) missile strike on Israeli population centers.
Israeli dead under this scenario would once again be between 200,000 and 800,000. Recovery, however, would be quicker, since this type attack spares civilian buildings and infrastructure. Syria, with 80% of its population concentrated in just 11 cities, would suffer between 6 million and 18 million dead in a counterattack; the higher number would represent about 95% of its estimated 2007 population. Not since the Roman destruction of Carthage at the end of the Third Punic War in 146 BC would one nation have made another suffer so dearly as punishment for losing a war.
The report does not speculate as to why this might happen, but if Egypt got drawn into all this the results would be pretty dammed bad for the Western world's cradle of civilization on the Nile as well. From Alexandria in the north to Luxor in the south, with Cairo in between, just a few rounds from Israel's nuclear clip could devastate Egypt's Nile River-based population centers; over 12 millennia of human civilization in the Nile Delta would end.
Once again, not speculating as to why this would happen, the report games out the results of a possible Iranian nuclear strike against the six Arab nations of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The Iranian strike could maybe kill 2 million to 8 million of the 40 million population of the GCC; once again,
Iran would suffer many times what it wrought from the inevitable US nuclear retaliation.
Herman Kahn, the physicist turned Cold War nuclear strategist, had a name for these musings of mass murder, these cerebrations of ultimate catastrophe; he called it "thinking the unthinkable".
As I left the class, the professor gave out the week's homework, to investigate who would be the "winner" of a US/USSR nuclear "exchange" where one country suffered 20 million dead, but whose industrial infrastructure was degraded by a mere 20%, the other lost "only" 7 million dead, but 50% of its industry.Good Question:
The extent of these investigations, both the Cordesman study and the reams of similar studies that came out during the Cold War, may be a lot more detailed than necessary or seemly, but they do serve an important purpose. The fear can be controlled, made to serve an important purpose.Then Came The Problem With Iraq:
In an October 7, 2002, speech in Cincinnati, President George W Bush, whipping an America shellshocked by September 11, 2001 into a frenzy against his Oedipal nemesis, Saddam Hussein, warned, "America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof - the smoking gun - that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud." In this, he turned away from the strategy that won the Cold War, the strategy that allowed the people of the US and USSR a half century of albeit uneasy peace.
Early on in the nuclear age, it was seen, first by America, eventually by the Soviets, that there was no real defense against the new weapons. If you shot down 95% of the conventional bombers of World War II, you were doing very well, yet letting 5% of bombers carrying nuclear weapons past your defenses would devastate your society, and that was before the advent of the infinitively harder to shoot down nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles.
If you could not defend against the threat, was all hope lost? No, even if you couldn't defend against the threat, you could deter it. If your nuclear force could be deployed in such a way that it would be assured of surviving an opponent's first strike, by being in hardened silos or on hidden submarines, any possible aggressor would know that any potential attack would be pointless, since the surviving retaliatory volley, which also could not be defended against, would then devastate the attacker's society.
Called "Mutual Assured Destruction", and then given the pejorative acronym MAD, the strategy worked; its horrific implications made sure that, when the US and the Soviets came closest to the nuclear brink during the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis, president John F Kennedy and premier Nikita Khrushchev found a compromise that very quickly pulled their countries away from the precipice.
But the strategy did not guarantee total security, for its operation depended on the existence of those tens of thousands of nuclear weapons. The United States maintained its deployment of Nike anti-aircraft missiles along the nation's periphery into the late 1960s; during that time, it also started to deploy, but then bargained away, a limited, rudimentary anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system.
In 1983, president Ronald Reagan proposed the development of the futuristic, space-based "Star Wars" satellite missile defense system. Popular with the public, and effective as a campaign issue, the concept was unpopular with most US military officers, who thought it unnecessary, expensive and ultimately impossible. Quietly, president George H W Bush slashed funding for "Star Wars" during his term following Reagan's.
But after a decade of enjoying the "peace dividend" in the 1990s, America returned its gaze to the world it had been ignoring after 9/11. There it saw a frightening place, filled with mad, irrational terrifying enemies. Like a child wanting the security of a warm blanket during a dark night's thunderstorm, America yearned once again for the its traditional, comfortable security of inviolability.
Even before 9/11, George W Bush saw the political power of this desire - the attacks of that day forced then-national security advisor Condoleezza Rice to cancel an address she was planning to give that very day in advocacy of missile defense. After 9/11, Bush proposed billions of dollars in new ABM funding, even withdrawing from the 1972 US/USSR ABM treaty to build a small ABM missile station at Fort Greely, Alaska.
As Democrat Senator Hillary Clinton has learned to her regret, after 9/11, no American politician could deny, or even attempt to rationalize away, the seemingly obvious, boiling, eviscerating hatred the Arab and Muslim worlds (few Americans know the difference) held for America. "Why do they hate us?" Americans, whose maximal extent of contact with Arab culture was often just a box of microwaveable couscous mix, asked in fear and trepidation.In 1985, Sting, in his song, "Russians", sang of an additional factor keeping world leaders fingers off the nuclear button.
Deterrence was never all that popular when applied to the Russians; the American public was told that it was obvious that there was no way it would work against the mad Saddam Hussein and the crazy Arabs. Not willing to entertain the mere possibility that the secular Saddam and the fundamentalist Osama bin Laden were anything but identical hatebots rolling off the same terrible anti-American assembly line, the country was fertile ground for Bush's fearmongering. Saddam was just too mad, insane, suicidal, psychopathic, irrational and megalomaniac to deter - exactly how current Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad is described now.
Many observers have noted the similarities between the anti-Saddam public relations campaign of 2002-03 and the anti-Ahmadinejad campaign of the present; it too is said to be sowing the seeds for another attack, this one against Iran.
Can Ahmadinejad be deterred? I have no idea; I'm not an expert on the man, as, of course, are not all those who warn of his status as an implacable and eternal foe of the West. I do know that deterrence did work against Joseph Stalin in the 1950s, who was irrational enough to sacrifice about 50 million of his fellow citizens in the Soviet Union's agricultural collectivizations and political purges of the 1930s.
It worked against Mao Zedong, responsible for about 100 million of his fellow citizens' deaths in the Great Leap Forward of the 1950s and the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. Neither of these leaders, who possessed both the ideology and capacity to launch a nuclear strike against America, did so. Evidently, they were deterred by America's massive nuclear retaliatory power. Are we really saying that Ahmadinejad is more bloodthirsty and irrational than Stalin or Mao?
The success of deterrence is intimately related to the nature of politics and politicians. From their days in short pants, the world's leaders have dreamt of possessing power and dominion over millions of their fellow citizens; whether they do so through democratic or other means is only a question related to the random chance of what nation they were born in.
After they assume ultimate national power, after a lifetime of political striving and ambition, those who say that deterrence does not work are, in essence, saying that these leaders will put some abstract hatred or ideology above the lives and interests of their fellow citizens who put them into power.
The countering argument to this is that you can't rule a country if there's no country to rule.
This is the value of studies such as Cordesman's and their ultra-meticulous details of death. At the end of the study, Cordesman repeats the philosophy expounded by "Joshua", the inquisitive nuclear war-fighting computer of the 1983 movie War Games; "The only way to win is not to play." (The actual line from the movie is. "A strange game - the only way to win is not to play.")
By actually showing how devastating a retaliatory strike against Iran or Syria would be, by showing how the US and/or Israel does not need to launch a pre-emptive attack to be secure, perhaps Cordesman's opus will help the world turn away from the frightful momentum now building for an Iran strike.
There will be 77 days from the November 4 presidential election to the inauguration of a new American president on January 20, 2009. In my mind, that's when Bush has penciled in his final, glorious Gotterdammerung.
Besides not wanting to risk the slaughter of those who put the leader in power, perhaps deterrence works for another reason.
There's no such thing as a winnable warNote
It's a lie we don't believe anymore
Mr Reagan says we will protect you
I don't subscribe to this point of view
Believe me when I say to you
I hope the Russians love their children too
We share the same biology
Regardless of ideology
What might save us me and you
Is if the Russians love their children too.
1. To view the report "Iran, Israel and Nuclear War", click here.
Julian Delasantellis is a management consultant, private investor and educator in international business in the US state of Washington. He can be reached at juliandelasantellis@yahoo.com .
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