Tuesday, October 15, 2024
Iran's very limited options
Iran has been on the brink of possessing nukes for years now. How come that they have failed to take the final step? Easy. There is no way they could use them. They know very well that Iran would be obliterated if it fired nukes at Israel. Safest not to have them
A year after the Hamas atrocities, put to one side the street theatre of protests and Labor’s confused talking points and ask: what really is happening in the Middle East?
On October 7 last year Israel suffered the worst intelligence and defence failure since the country was founded. But now it has overcome internal political divisions to re-emerge as the strongest military power in the region.
Jerusalem has re-established deterrence dominance because of intelligence, targeting and force projection capabilities that its enemies can’t match. Now it is pushing hard to deliver a victory over Iran and its proxies that no one expected. The country has rallied because Israelis know their survival is at risk. The louder the “progressive” assault against Israel in Western democracies, the harder Israel will fight for its security.
By contrast, Iran is failing. Hezbollah, the jewel in the crown of Tehran’s foreign policy, has been blinded, its leadership killed or, literally, crippled. Israel may have started with the aim of pushing terrorist rocket launchers away from its northern border, now Benjamin Netanyahu has a shot to help the Lebanese rise up against the Iranian forces ruining the once-prosperous country.
Hamas and much of Gaza is destroyed. What emerges from the rubble will never commit atrocities again on their Jewish neighbours. War is cruel, but it is better to win than lose.
Tehran’s mullahs know many, probably most, of their people hate them. They rule by fear alone. They see the hollowness of their goosestepping military and dread Mossad’s proven ability to hit them any time they choose.
The Arab countries – Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and others – have never had less interest in supporting the fiction of a Palestinian state. They all hope Israel dismantles Iran’s proxies because these groups destabilise Arab governments.
President Joe Biden’s Middle East policy is in tatters. In October 2022, the centrepiece of his national security strategy was to “pursue diplomacy to ensure that Iran can never acquire a nuclear weapon”.
Last week CIA head Bill Burns said of Iran that “now it’s probably more like a week or a little more to produce one bomb’s worth of weapons-grade material”. Burns claimed: “I think we are reasonably confident that – working with our friends and allies – we will be able to see it relatively early on.”
So the CIA may know on Tuesday that Iran will have a nuclear weapon by Friday. If Iran is allowed to reach that point it will have more than one bomb. The Iranians must refine a large stockpile of enriched uranium to weapons-grade capability. There is enough for a dozen or more nuclear weapons.
This is as devastating an American intelligence failure as Israel missing the October 7 attacks – classic examples of not seeing the obvious while obsessing about details. Biden urged Netanyahu to “take the win” last April – meaning Israel shouldn’t retaliate against Iran’s first direct missile strikes.
Thankfully, Israel ignored the advice. Hitting back, the Israel Defence Forces showed they could disable Iranian air defence to hit any targets they wanted. That gave Tehran pause, but too late to wind back its support for Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis and other proxies. Tehran’s mistake – obvious in hindsight – is that it is one thing to train, fund, equip and motivate jihadist extremists obsessed with the “end of days” and wiping Israel off the map. It’s much harder to keep the crazies on a leash.
What happens next?
A compelling strategic logic drives Israel’s choice: it can do its best (which will be pretty good) to destroy Iran’s nuclear infrastructure or wait for Tehran to declare it has working bombs by Christmas.
Given that choice, what would you advise Netanyahu to do? Pause for a ceasefire maybe, so the proxies can rearm and start firing huge numbers of missiles at Jerusalem and Tel Aviv?
Or perhaps one would advise Israel to embrace a two-state solution, the effect of which would be to give Iran’s proxy Hamas or Fatah in the West Bank a seat in the UN. A pause gives Tehran time to reprocess the uranium it needs for nuclear weapons. No doubt the international community would firmly ask for inspectors to get access to the factories, allowing the CIA to shave a day or two off its week-long estimate for how long it takes to make a bomb.
This is the effect, if not the intent, of Albanese government policy. Australia lacks the courage, perhaps even the capability, to send a navy ship to the Red Sea to protect ships bringing goods and oil to Asia. But with no real stake in the outcome, we are urging Israel to halt combat operations so Iran has more time to build nuclear weapons.
Israel’s choice is clear – of course it will go after Iran nuclear weapons-building capabilities.
The plants reprocessing uranium into weapons-grade material aren’t mobile like the bombs will be. These targets can be “hardened” only to some extent and Israel has shown it has weapons that will dig deep into fortified underground spaces. Once the plan is made, the target set defines itself. Beyond the nuclear facilities, Israel must go after Iran’s air, missile and submarine capabilities, things that deliver nuclear warheads.
Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant has said a strike will be “lethal, precise and especially surprising”, which indicates more things will be in the air than bunker-busting bombs. No one in Tehran will be answering their phones right now.
We will owe Israel a debt if it destroys Iran’s nuclear potential. If Tehran gets nuclear weapons, Saudi Arabia will do the same, followed quickly by Egypt and others. Fundamentally, we are all better off if Israel and the US dominate the Middle East military balance. The only thing that may prevent an Israeli strike is if Biden reverses course, pressuring Tehran into a backdown on attacking Israel, bringing the proxies to heel and walking away from nuclear weapons. I can’t see Biden, much less Kamala Harris, taking that tough course of action.
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As Trump closes on victory, Harris Dems will take desperate measures
Assuming he doesn’t get assassinated before election day, it’s looking likely that Donald Trump will be the next US president. That leads me to believe Democrats will spring both an October surprise and an election day surprise in desperate last-minute efforts to keep Trump out of office.
Vice-President Kamala Harris got a very small polling bump after her TV debate with Trump. The election is so close even a small bump is important. The vice-presidential debate, where Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, clearly beat Democrat Tim Walz, stopped the Harris momentum. Vance put the case about the Biden-Harris policy failures much more strongly and clearly than Trump himself had done.
The next momentum definer was Harris finally doing a series of unscripted interviews with 60 Minutes, The View, Howard Stern and others.
The incident comes on the heels of two assassination attempts - one in Pennsylvania in which a bullet grazed Trump’s ear, and a second, aborted attempt at his Florida golf course.
These were all favourable, pro-Harris settings. Yet she was woeful. Even the friendliest question seemed to produce a stammering, hesitant, agonised retreat to her few rote phrases: “I come from a middle-class background, I’ve been a prosecutor, I’ve locked up people traffickers …”
Some of these interviews she didn’t even do live. They were meant to be “as live”. But in some cases her answers were so awful and the media outlet so sympathetic that when it finally broadcast the interview it cut out all the stammering, incoherent stuttering at the start of answers.
On The View she was asked what she would have done differently to Joe Biden. This presents a very minor challenge for a politician who doesn’t want to appear disloyal to the President but who is marketing herself as the change candidate. The obvious reply is: Biden has been a great president but one area where I think we could have done even better was … Then put in anything you like on the border, inner-city crime, etc. Instead Harris said she couldn’t think of a single thing.
All these Harris moments have become internet memes. Now, you might rightly say that 20 per cent of everything Trump says continues to be offensive, wrong or slightly nuts. That’s true. But Trump is on the media every day, doing countless interviews, speaking at countless rallies. So is Vance. Their views on key policy and values issues are pretty clear.
It may be that neither the debates nor the interviews are having a big effect, but marginal differences are crucial. The RealClearPolitics poll average now has Harris leading by 1.7 per cent nationally. That’s a narrower lead than she had a couple of weeks ago. At this stage in 2020 Biden was ahead of Trump by 10 per cent in the polls. At this point in 2016 Hillary Clinton was leading Trump by 7 per cent.
In both elections the polls seriously underestimated Trump’s vote and both results finally were extremely tight in the battleground states. If the polls are underestimating Trump by anything like those margins this time, the election is already effectively over and Trump’s a handsome winner.
But, and this is a huge but, politics is not the common law. It’s not bound by precedent. Given that there are only seven battleground states where this election will be decided, the state-based polls are particularly important. And the state-based polls have a poor record of reliability. But they all will try to correct for their anti-Trump bias last time.
However, even on the published polls, Trump, right now, is leading in the battleground states. This lead overall is tiny, just 0.4 per cent. RCP’s poll average at this stage gives Trump six of the battleground states – Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Michigan, Arizona and Nevada. And it gives only one to Harris, Wisconsin.
So, with no toss-up states, that gives Trump what his former aide, Kellyanne Conway, describes as a “narrow landslide” in the electoral college, where he wins 302 to 236. However the RCP no toss-up map has changed back and forth between Trump winning and Harris winning several times.
The Economist magazine this week reports that its model gives Harris a 51 per cent chance of victory, which means essentially it’s even. The betting markets, which have a pretty good record, now substantially favour Trump.
Harris is doing better in the polls than Biden did with one important demographic, white college graduates. But she is doing substantially worse than Biden did with working-class voters, with Hispanics, with blacks, with men and with Catholics. Some of those constituencies she will still win, but she’ll win them by smaller margins than Biden did. That hurts her chances overall.
Hispanics are now supporting Trump at about 40 per cent, more in battleground states. That suggests they’ve become a wholly competitive demographic, which is good for American democracy. The Democrats’ woke cultural hostility to religion is hurting them with Hispanics, and with Catholics, whom Harris will lose.
Nonetheless, Trump could still lose the election. A New York Times/Siena College poll of Pennsylvania, with a respectable sample size and solid methodology, puts Harris ahead in Pennsylvania. Assuming Harris wins one electoral college vote from Nebraska – which, with Maine, is one of only two states to allocate electoral college votes by congressional districts – then Trump must win one of Wisconsin, Michigan or Pennsylvania.
Harris will win if she holds on to the three rust-belt states. No polls really give Wisconsin to Trump, he has been mostly behind in Michigan, so just as the 2000 election between George W. Bush and Al Gore came down to Florida, this election may come down to Pennsylvania.
Democrats are desperate to stop Trump, so I expect from them an October surprise, possibly some extravagant legal move against Trump, and an election day surprise, some new alleged revelation about him that he has no time to counter. These tactics haven’t worked well for Democrats so far, but if the election is indeed tight, and such “surprises” could scare off even 100,000 Trump voters out of perhaps 160 million votes overall, they just may make the difference.
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