Excellent, thought-provoking post, Dafydd. I've done an excerpt and link at Old War Dogs, our two week old team blog. The first paragraph of my post:

Please think of this post as the third in a trilogy of sorts. You should really read Shane Briscoe's Current Events Present Opportunity for Victory in War on Terror, Russ Vaughn's Why not take it a step further? and this post in the order they were written.

Dafydd, os gwelwch yn dda, man! I would give you a D in writing 'to deal death and destruction to the dastards who did the dirt' but it appears that you have used them all up! Seriously, though, that was one of the best assessments of Israel's situation I have read.

Cachiad! Lembo ydw i! I really shoulda used the PREVIEW button.

'to deal death and destruction to the dastards who did the dirt'

an Ff for the teacher.

Jauhara Al-Kafirah:

I tried to learn Welsh once, but my tongue was all thumbs.

Dafydd

I only learned a bit because I was bored in Roanoke once. They have a liberry there. I just made use of it. You can see yourself why Welsh is an almost dying language.

Nope, this isn't going to happen.

Your premise is flawed is several spots.

1) You assume Israel will attack Syria, while both countries are bending over backwards to keep that from happening and keep this operation contained in Lebanon. While Israel wants to crush Hezbollah, if it can drive them out of Lebanon, it can still consider this a successful operation.

Driving Hezbollah into Syria changes the dynamics of the situation. While everyone "knows" Syria and Iran are supporting Hezbollah, Hezbollah is still operating under the guise of a proxy. If Hezbollah is driven in to Syria, and remain operational, then Hezbollah becomes Syria's problem.

Lebanon may not have the armed forces to easily deal with Hezbollah, but Syria does. They won't, but they're capable. Also, since it's a dictatorship, only one man need be pressured to confront them, not a voting body. Syria won't stand to have an "independent" operational armed force in their territory, like Lebanon had. Lebanon was much weaker in this area, and because of its government structure could more easily tolerate such body. Hard to get votes to move against Hezbollah when Hezbollah gets a vote.

Syrias dictatorship is not that forgiving.

2) If Israel attacks Syria, it simply won't have the resources to go after Iran. Again, Syria is far stronger, and much bigger, than Lebanon, and if Israel is going in, it's not going to be holding assets back. And neither is Syria. Maybe after Israel defeats Syria they can go after Iran, but that's going to hardly decisive, nor a quick or cheap victory. Israel has no eyes on Syrian territory. It's happy with the Golan Heights.

3) You assume that the US will give it free reign in Iraq. That isn't going to happen either.

The US isn't going to let Israel in to Iraq without some consent from the Iraqi government, and I don't see that coming any time soon. While Iraq, and Iraqi's and Israel are warming up too each other (ever so slowly), as you can imagine there would be ..umm.. "resistance" to allowing Israel to operate in Iraq.

Also, beyond monetary and political support (and perhaps some "advisors" as well as intelligence sharing), the US has so far managed to pretty much stay out of the the battles that Israel has fought, and by doing so maintains a veneer of neutrality. The US is a strong supporter, obviously, but I don't believe we've ever engaged (openly) in joint operations with Israel, and I don't see that happening now.

4) Finally, airstrikes in Iran simply won't do ANYTHING. Mess up their nuclear program. Big deal. Moderately expensive for the Iranians, but hardly decisive and it certainly won't "stop" the Iranians from shipping monies and supplies to Syria. It'll just make them even more upset to no gain. The best reaction would be to enrage the Iranians in to doing something REALLY stupid like lash out against the US, give them an excuse to enter the fray -- something the US does NOT want to do. Maybe the Iranians are that stupid, but I really don't think so.

Having the US in Iraq is a big buffer that will mostly keep Iran in check. Neither Iraq nor SA will give overflight permission to Iran to move supplies and troops en masse to Syria. If they try, the US may shoot a plane down and tell the others to go home. They can't move supplies on the ground, the Israelis can engage supplies by sea, though the can't do much against "civilian" air traffic into Syria. If Iran "UPSs" more supplies to Syria, then there's not much you can do about that at this stage -- however it's very inefficient way to move war material.

Simply put, Iran is too far away and cannot be engaged easily or decisively by Israel.

Will Hartung:

Your real name wouldn't happen to be Scowcroft, would it?

Dafydd

It's the vodka talkin' prolly...

But, if I were Israel, why wouldn't I declare a nice, fat, 'security zone' of a hundred miles or so. Sterlize it house-to-house using ground penetrating radar, destroying anything with a hidey-hole or weapons cache and then,

(...and this is the money-saving, tricky bit...)

Turn it over (measuredly) to the REAL Lebanese Army, (with supervisors, and such...advisors, as it were), at a rate that suited me.

Now I, (as Israel) would caveat: "One slip, one Katyusha into my towns, and you're gone Leb, ol' buddy, and we're back with tanks and flamethrowers for keeps, but if you can make it stick... Howzabout some trade and whatnot, eh? I gots me some serious connex with the good ol' US of A and "Peace and Coexistence" gives them a stone chubby! Wallets open fast and good stuff happens!"

I honestly believe that Lebanon (the real Lebanon) wants to take on Israel about as much as I want Popov in my next martini. It's time to separate the terrorists from the citizens...

And kill the terrorists. Hard.

I think I need help with diplomatic language, though. Plainspeak isn't fashionable.

Nuts! The main point of the article "The Bombing of Syria"! I forgot!

It's that Tito's vodka. Made in Austin, it is da bomb!

No Air. Israel has nuke capable subs! Oh, yes they do! German-built boots that are nuke-capable. It would be a 'use-once scenario... but that should be suffish.

Dolphin-class... Sexy. Diesel-electric, I'll grant, but we're not talking about spanning the globe here.

Just one bang, thanks.

Get 'em, Menachem!

Monkeyboy:

Fortunately, wars are not auctions.

Cf. 1948, 1967, 1973, 1982. Cf. Red China vs. Taiwan, Wehrmacht vs. RAF.

Dafydd

Daffyd, I suspect that the most prescient part of your analysis was... almost a throwaway line, when you wrote of Israeli planes being painted to look American.

I just don't see that happening, if for no other reason than that the US does not want to risk having any wreckage on Iranian soil that has a US marking on it. (And no one planning this operation should assume it goes down without casualties. A special blessing if it does, but irresponsible to assume it will.)

However, operational deceptions take many forms.

The NY Times does not have AWACS capacity. The only way anyone outside Iran is going to know which way the Israelis came is if someone tells them so.

Israeli strike fighters, refueled as needed by US Air Force tankers, flying over countries as needed... and those countries, trusting to a private US guarantee that they are not targets, look the other way.

Afterwards? Everybody can blame somebody else for letting those evil Israelis fly their super-secret hyper-range stealth strike planes over their territory... and multiple military targets in Iran will lie smoking while the arguments are going on.

Nothing like 30,000 feet of airspace to provide plausible deniability. And since there are no private AWACS systems out there... who's going to be able to prove what?

Hi,

Israel has military equipment and capabilities that a far superior to those of Iran. The people of Israel are very serious about the need to prepare and be ready for combat. Iran and Syria are no match for Israel.

If you want a shot of optimism, check out my latest post"

Dutch Swarthout, alias JP Phish

We already know that Russia fed info to Saddam ahead of Shock & Awe.

And we know Russia has AWACS. So does Saudi Arabia, we sold them theirs in -I think- 1981 or 1982.

SA is outwardly condemning Hezbollah currently. Behind the scenes, who knows. They're certainly not going to feel constrained, that's for sure.

Russia might not mind seeing their Iranian neighbor's nuclear ambitions quashed, so they might remain mum in this instance. But that's a call they'll have to make in comparison to helping our Israeli allies -and us- stymied.

In either case, Iran would definitely know after the fact that they weren't alerted, and they'll know who could have alerted them and didn't

In short, there is no such thing as Israeli fighter jets moving one square inch under any cover that would assure an element of surprise.

So long as Syria's radar is incapacitated, Israel might as well fly in broad daylight. The deciding factor at that point is whether Russian and SA keep their mouths shut.

De Doc:

I just don't see that happening, if for no other reason than that the US does not want to risk having any wreckage on Iranian soil that has a US marking on it.

You missed a line:

The Israelis would remove the temporary US marking from their planes and make no bones about where they're from.

The markings are only to get them across Syria and Iraq; they wouldn't carry them into combat in Iran.

Dafydd

Monkeyboy:

I'll grant that a small, tenacious country can defend itself against a more powerful aggressor (I notice ytou left Vietnam off your list)...

Because the North Vietnamese forces and the Viet Cong lost and lost badly in the field.

-- but a tiny country like Israel couldn't invade a country the size of Iran.

"Invade?" Dude, I'm talking about a bombing campaign, not turning Iran into an Israeli kibbutz!

Dafydd

Monkeyboy:

You had started to grow beyond the caricature you were earlier, the Monkeyboy of smirking one-liners and insults; and I was starting to respect you more. Don't revert to the earlier you, please.

The claim is that we won militarily in Vietnam, but the Democrats in D.C. forced Nixon to withdraw from Vietnam... and then they prevented President Ford from even supplying air support or resupply to the valiant South Vietnamese forces; because of that, Saigon fell on April 30th, 1975... two years and eight months after the last US combat troops left in August of 1972.

That's a pretty clear sign the North was beaten until we unilaterally withdrew, then refused even to honor our commitment of air power to the ARVN.

If you want to argue this, you'll have to channel yesterday's Monkeyboy and actually show some evidence that we had lost militarily as of 1972.

The U.S. lost over 5000 aircraft in Vietnam...how many planes does Israel have, 200-300 maybe?

They'd last less than a day...hardly a campaign.

This comes perilously close to gloating over the deaths of our allies... and imaginary deaths, to boot.

The citation of US planes splashed during our decade-long involvement in Vietnam is a non-sequitur. Even if the Israelis suffered the same rate of attrition of aircraft as we did in Vietnam, then by your own figures, after one day, they would have lost a single plane.

You know absolutely nothing about Iranian air defenses or the skill of the Iranian Air Force, so you have no reason to believe that the Israelis would "last less than a day"... other than the rampant antisemitism inherent in most Democratic denunciations of the Jewish state.

Dump the old Monkeyboy for good and bring back the Monkeyboy of two or three days ago. Then we can discuss this.

Dafydd

4: Bomb the targets in Iraq; the Israelis can take as long as they wish... no hurry to return to Israel.

I like the sub idea. But use cruise missiles from the sub, lying offshore in the Persian Gulf, hitting downtown Tehran, just for symbolic purposes, like Doolittle's raid on Tokyo. That will show the mullahs that a nuke can come at them anytime with no defense. The mullahs would freak. The Israelis would have to find some way of signalling to the mullahs that they were the ones responsible, not an American vessel. All the US would have to do would be to let the Israeli sub into the Gulf and shoo away any Iranian boats that tried to interfere.

The biggest problem I see with your analysis, Dafydd, is that BECAUSE of the extreme difficulties involved IMHO Israel would only attack Iran as a last resort to prevent them from finishing their quest for nuclear weapons, not for something as insignificant (and as unprovable) as Iranians pulling the trigger on Hezbollah missiles and only on the assumption that Bush WON'T.

But that assumption is WRONG, and the Israelis KNOW it. Though the Left (naturally) doesn't get it and some on the Right (like William Kristol who ALWAYS doubts Bush at the first sign of trouble) don't get it, Bush is carefully, patiently, and painstakingly laying the diplomatic predicate for a massive, sustained aerial assault on Iran's nuclear weapons research sites WHEN not IF diplomacy fails, which he will launch before leaving office. Of course there is no guarantee that this bombardment will finally topple the Iranian regime (the only way to completely end the threat) but it will set them back a number of years. Any Iranian "rally round the flag" effect by its increasingly pro-American population will only be temporary while the effects of the war will be more permanent: humiliating defeat, destruction of any modern military assets it doesn't successfully hide, no gasoline (Iran is swimming in oil but has little refining capacity and will have none after the war begins), ongoing US and Iraqi support for Iranian revolutionaries until the job is done, and a DOA economy.

Iran has only two slim hopes:

A. to develop nukes before we or the Israelis think they can.

B. the election of a Democrat President in 2008 to give them at least 4 years of breathing space.

Andycanuck:

Whoops, that was a tyop. Thanks, I corrected it.

Dafydd

Israel should declare Independent Kurdish Syria and suppor the Kurds in that area with weapons and air support. If somehow they can manage to help the Kurds take over Syria so much the better. If not Assad will have to try to restore such a large chunk of his territory and thus expose his military or look helpless.

Then Israel should create a flying-tigers style operation using Israeli pilots and planes with Kurdish markings and operating out of Kurdish airports. This would allow the 'Kurds' to defend their own territory and allow cover for an operation into Iran.

Yeah Turkey, America and Iraq may not like it but from Israel's point of view it's viable.

Monkeyboy:

Sending bombers over a heavily defended target without first taking out the target's air defenses is suicide these days.

Of course. The SAM sites would be first on Israel's target list, possibly with cruises before the planes even started flying; if not, then by the planes themselves. Just as it was when we entered both Afghanistan and Iraq.

They're always the first target. What's your point?

Nobody knows for sure what Iran has been buying these past few years, but it's a safe bet they have bought enough to stop an Israeli raid.

Would you have said the same about Syria a month ago? Yet they evidently didn't do a very good job of it -- because Israeli jets were able to buzz the house of that ophthalmologist.

Dafydd

You don't understand IFF. It is not just frequencies. It is codes.

M. Simon:

You don't understand IFF. It is not just frequencies. It is codes.

Heh, I think I can remember back to the dim mists of the mid-1980s how IFF works. I see I was unclear, writing too quickly; I meant that the US would collude with Israel to issue the F-16Is IFF codes that identified them as American planes. This would be to disguise the fact that a bunch of Israeli warplanes were headed to Iraq.

Dafydd

Monkeyboy:

Sorry, Monkeyboy, but you've backslid badly. You had actually dropped all the stupid tricks and deliberate offensiveness, and I had hope that you would evolve into a civilized human being, with whom pleasant conversation was possible.

But now you have degenerated into simple cheerleading for your pals, the Iranians, and dismissing the Israelis as amateur pudwackers and ham-fisted also-rans who have no idea what real war is like.

This conversation seems more and more like it serves no purpose.

Dafydd

The scenario is interesting, and does provide a "Israel could attack Iran" solution, but the biggest premise, attacking from Iraq, does leave me curious.

What kind of diplomatic relations does Israel have with the new govt. of Iraq? While I'm sure the US would be, at least somewhat, supportive of Israeli strikes from Iraq, how would the govt. react? If Iran had launched a devastating attack on Israel, would that be enough? I imagine it might require Iran threatening Iraq as well before hand.

I think Iraq's leaders might be concerned about civil unrest that would probably arise when it was discovered that Israel was launching attacks from Iraq.

But I'm just guessing here. My knowledge of the Middle East could fill a pamphlet.

Thanks for hissing in, . Now you can slither in with a comment, o wise. (sign out)