This item is available on the Militant Islam Monitor website, at http://www.militantislammonitor.org/article/id/5195

Rand Perspective On Iranian/Israeli Conflict Deeply Flawed

February 22, 2012

February 22, 2012 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - Iran's press TV [see, http://www.presstv.ir/detail/228042.html] today is touting a piece 'Long-term consequence of Iran war disastrous for Israel' which is based on the foreign policy perspective of RAND Corporation's Dalia Dassa Kaye who is identified on the organization's website as a senior political scientist.

The Press TV piece uses as its centerpiece an op-ed penned by Kaye for the LA Times, entitled "Israel's risky option on Iran" [see, http://articles.latimes.com/2012/feb/21/opinion/la-oe-0221-kaye-israel-20120221].

In that article Ms. Kaye claims, "While proponents may believe that Israel can endure the short-term military and diplomatic fallout of such action, the long-term consequences are likely to be disastrous for Israel's security..." Therefore she concludes that the downside of an Israeli strike against Iran's nuclear facilities make it, "too uncertain and potentially too costly to justify a strike," adding that, "the consensus among Western analysts is that a military attack against Iran would at best delay Iran's nuclear development, not stop it."

If Ms. Kaye really believes that her analysis reflects "the consensus among Western analysts," she should get out more often and stay away from the Obama's State Department's Middle East Desk and its "experts" who have led us to the current insane policy of throttling Israel in an attempt to draw Iran into a serious dialogue regarding its nuclear war making capacity.

On that point James Woolsey, former Dir. of Central Intelligence [whom we must assume had a higher security clearance than does Ms. Kaye] is in serious disagreement with Ms. Kaye and her imagined consensus of the "oh-so-bright." He believes that if negotiations and "sanctions," don't work that Iran must be prevented - militarily - from becoming a member of the nuke club.

In a piece carrying the headline, "Ex-CIA Chief: Bomb Iranian Revolutionary Guards" [see, WND, http://www.wnd.com/2012/01/ex-cia-chief-bomb-iranian-revolutionary-guards/print/] the former spook in chief likens present day Iran to Hitler's Nazi Germany and counsels the use of force against the renegade country should all else fail.

"...Woolsey said Obama should make clear to Iran through back channels that "if there is a closing of the Strait of Hormuz or if there is any other aggressive action by Iran," the U.S. will take immediate military action...One should let them know we could strike their nuclear installations," he said, "but that's not all we should go after if there is a necessity of using force."

Woolsey described a multi-pronged U.S. military campaign that would target the Iranian Revolutionary Guard infrastructure with the goal of annihilating the Guards as a political and military force inside Iran.

"[The Guards] run the nuclear programs; they run the space program; they run the ballistic missile program; they run the Al-Quds force that is killing Americans who were in Iraq and now in Afghanistan...They have substantial commercial interests...So anything that is related to the thugs that are oppressing the Iranian people, namely the Revolutionary Guard, should be fair game...There was a lot of opposition to Hitler...The German people and the German army were not at that point the problem. It was his domination of the state using his thugs. And the thugs here for Ahmadinejad and Khomeini in different ways are the Revolutionary Guard...If we let it be known that we are going to be able to do what unfortunately Britain and France couldn't do in 1936, '37, '38, which would be to take out Hitler's regime, if we let it be known that we can do that in Iran, I think we will be in a much stronger position."

Additionally, we find it intriguing that Islamic jihadism doesn't seem to figure at all in Kaye's equation. Such an abstemious approach certainly compromises her seeming conclusion that the Middle East is better off living with a nuclear Iran rather than attempting to prevent such an occurrence.

In short form, Kaye is dealing with Iran as if it's a rational player with only local hegemonic interests, an approach that will ensure calamity if, as the regime repeatedly assures the world, it is driven by the ideology of messianic Shia jihadism.

She makes the assumption that any effort to take out Iran's nukes would be incomplete and thus yield nothing but a short delay in weaponization while increasing Iran's purpose in pursuit of nuclear weapons and the delivery systems required to make good the Mullocracy's numerous threats to eliminate the Jewish state as well as America, the Great Satan.

In Kaye's naive reliance on playing the State Department's game of pretend negotiations and limited sanctions, she fails to identify a nuclear Iran as an existential threat to the world and therefore impermissible under any circumstances.

Moreover she ignores Iran's already substantial efforts to project power in countries as disparate as Chavez' Venezuela, the IRG's penetration of the Mexican drug cartels and the presence of IRG and/or Quds force cells already located in North America where at least one of them was involved in a plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador while on American soil just last October.

These are the actions of a hostile power, in this case one made even more dangerous in that it is driven by revolutionary Islamic ideology. At a certain point - which is rapidly approaching - the talking must stop and Iran's nuke facilities must be reduced [within our ability] to smoking, radioactive ruins. If this takes more than a single strike, so be it - surgeon's don't simply quit when a cancer recurs in one of their patients, why should we?

One Hitler and six million dead Jews should be enough of an example of evil run wild for all time and the fact that people like Ms. Kaye can't connect such obvious dots is reflective of her inability to grasp the true dimensions of this conflict.

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This item is available on the Militant Islam Monitor website, at http://www.militantislammonitor.org/article/id/5195