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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Louis René Beres</title>
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		<title>Israel’s Fate?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/louis-ren-beres/israel%e2%80%99s-fate/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=israel%25e2%2580%2599s-fate</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 27 Jun 2011 04:25:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Louis René Beres]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=96680</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The eleventh-hour of danger is upon us. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/israel-soldiers-flag.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-96689" title="israel-soldiers-flag" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/israel-soldiers-flag.jpg" alt="" width="496" height="331" /></a></p>
<p>The central truth of being human is the constant love of being alive. We Jews, of course, both in our prayers, and in our sacred rituals, have always understood the unassailable difference between life and death, between the “blessing and the curse.” In consequence, all Jewish survival, individually and collectively, is now closely bound up with the survival of the Jewish State. Quite plainly, for both its too few friends and its too many enemies, Israel&#8217;s fate is now that of the individual Jew <em>writ large.</em></p>
<p>How, then, shall the State of Israel<em> survive</em>? From their very beginnings, and even long before the United Nations conferral of statehood in 1948, Jews in Israel have faced war, terror and extinction. Now, Israel faces existential destruction from two main and mutually reinforcing sources:  (1) the fully constituted state of Iran;  and (2) the still-aspiring state of &#8220;Palestine.&#8221; Together, largely in various unrecognized and unimagined synergies, the interactive effects of  these two mega-threats portend incontestable reason for concern.</p>
<p>The situation is made more worrisome by President Obama’s persistent support of a “Two-State Solution,” and by Prime Minister Netanyahu’s reciprocal acceptance of a Palestinian state that has allegedly been “demilitarized.” This is because the Palestinian side (Hamas, Fatah, it makes little difference) seeks only a One-State solution (on their maps, Israel is already drawn as a part of “Palestine”), and because a demilitarized Palestine would never actually “happen.” After all, any post-independence abrogation of earlier pre-state agreements to demilitarize by a now-sovereign Palestinian state could be permissible under international law.</p>
<p>Iran is an established state with an expanding near-term potential to inflict nuclear harms upon Israel. The so-called “international community” has effectively done nothing to stop Iranian nuclearization. Indisputably, the “sanctions” have represented little more than a mildly pestering fly on an elephant’s back.</p>
<p>The Palestinian Authority, with its Fatah “security forces” being expertly trained by the U.S. military in Jordan, under American Lt. General Keith Dayton, also has exterminatory plans for Israel. These plans are fully shared by the Hamas-led configuration of assorted terror groups that now collaborates regularly and systematically with both Iran and al-Qaeda. This summer, rapidly-developing Iranian-Syrian war plans against Israel from Lebanon that will involve Hezbollah proxies could add yet another decisive synergistic threat to the already-genocidal mix.</p>
<p>What shall Israel do in order to endure? If President Obama’s open wish for “a world free of nuclear weapons” were ever realized, the Jewish State wouldn’t stand a chance. Fortunately, of course, this presidential wish is not only foolish, but unrealistic, and Israel will likely retain the deterrence benefit of its “bomb in the basement.” The extent of this particular benefit, however, may vary, <em>inter alia</em>, according to a number of important factors.</p>
<p>One factor concerns Jerusalem’s observable willingness to make limited disclosures of the country’s usable and penetration-capable nuclear forces, and also the extent to which the Israeli government and military selectively reveal certain elements of Israel’s nuclear targeting doctrine. From the standpoint of successful deterrence, for example, it will make a major difference if Israel’s nuclear forces are recognizably counter value (targeted on enemy cities), or counterforce (targeted on enemy weapons and related infrastructures).</p>
<p>“For what can be done against force, without force?” inquired Cicero. The use of force in world politics is not inherently evil. On the contrary, in preventing nuclear and terrorist aggressions, force is almost always indispensable.</p>
<p>All states have a fundamental (“peremptory<em>,</em>” in the language of formal jurisprudence) right of self-defense. This right is explicit and unambiguous in both codified and customary international law. It can be found, in part, at Article 51 of the U.N. Charter<em>,</em> and also in multiple authoritative clarifications of anticipatory self-defense.</p>
<p>Israel  has every legal right to forcibly confront the expected harms of both Iranian nuclear missile strikes, and Palestinian terror.</p>
<p><em> </em></p>
<p>Albert Camus would have us all be &#8220;neither victims nor executioners,&#8221;  living not in a world in which killing has disappeared  (&#8220;we are not so crazy as that&#8221;), but one wherein killing has become illegitimate.  This is a fine expectation, yet the celebrated French philosopher did not anticipate another evil force for whom utter extermination of &#8220;The Jews&#8221; was actually its declared object.</p>
<p><em>Credo quia absurdum</em>….”I believe because it is absurd.” Not even in a still-crazy world living under the shadow of  Holocaust did Camus agree to consider such an utterly &#8220;absurd&#8221; possibility.</p>
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		<title>Mr. President, There Can Be No &#8216;Two-State Solution&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/louis-ren-beres/mr-president-there-can-be-no-two-state-solution/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=mr-president-there-can-be-no-two-state-solution</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 03 Jun 2011 04:00:34 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Louis René Beres]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=94807</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why the Palestinian road to peace is a fraud. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/ObamaNetanyahuAbbas2.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-95024" title="ObamaNetanyahuAbbas2" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/ObamaNetanyahuAbbas2.gif" alt="" width="375" height="267" /></a></p>
<p>Mr. President, the &#8220;two-state&#8221; approach to peace between Israel and “Palestine,” strongly reaffirmed in your recent meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, accepts the position of an Israeli “occupation.” Yet, even the most cursory look at pertinent world history would reveal several compelling reasons to reject any such position. Organized Arab terrorism against Israel began on the very first hour of Israel&#8217;s independence, in May 1948. Indeed, virulent anti-Jewish terrorism in the British Mandate period had even taken place many years before Israel&#8217;s statehood.</p>
<p>What about the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)?  It was founded in 1964, three years <em>before</em> Israel came to control the West Bank (Judea/Samaria) and Gaza. Mr. President, what was the PLO planning to “liberate” between 1964 and 1967? The answer, of course, must be all of Israel within the &#8220;green&#8221; armistice lines&#8221; of 1949. These are precisely the 1967-borders that you have recently identified as the appropriate starting point for current peace negotiations.</p>
<p>What should we now know about the PLO? Significantly, it was declared a &#8220;terrorist organization&#8221; in a number of U.S. federal court decisions, including <em>Tel-Oren v. Libyan Arab Republic</em> (1984).</p>
<p>More than five years ago, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, seeking peace with the always-recalcitrant Palestinians, forcibly expelled over 10,000 Jews from Gaza and northern Samaria. Immediately, these areas were transformed by Hamas from productive growing and living areas to terrorist rocket launching sites. Today, in obvious synergy with a new regime in Cairo &#8211; a military governing council soon to be intimate with powerful elements of the Muslim Brotherhood &#8211; Egypt&#8217;s newly reopened Rafah border is creating an unobstructed terrorist path directly into Israel.</p>
<p>Mr. President, why aren&#8217;t the Palestinians reasonably expected to cease deliberate and random violence against Israeli civilians before being admitted into the community of nations?  Isn&#8217;t it already clear that they seek something other than an “end to occupation.” Isn&#8217;t it already very likely that both <em>Fatah</em> and <em>Hamas </em>still regard <em>all of Israel</em> as “occupied” territory. After all, their official maps, long familiar in Washington, still include <em>all of Israel</em> as part of “Palestine.”</p>
<p>Mr. President, without an alleged “occupation,” there could remain no possible legal or moral justification for Palestinian policies of relentless terror.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, the fact that “occupation” is a contrived legal fiction has had little or no impact upon your own administration&#8217;s position on Palestinian statehood.</p>
<p>Nor, somehow, has it occurred to your administration that both <em>Hamas</em> and Fatah still find their common ideological mentors in Hitler and Goebbels, two figures for whom the prospective rulers of a nascent &#8220;Palestine&#8221; are ardent objects of <em>unhidden</em> admiration.</p>
<p>Mr. President, at its core, your policy toward Israel and &#8220;Palestine&#8221; reveals certain incremental bewitchments of language. Over the years, Arab patience in building an expanding Palestinian state upon mountains of Israeli corpses has been achieved systematically by linguistic victories.  However untrue, the ritualistic canard of an Israeli &#8220;occupation&#8221; has been repeated so often that it is now generally taken as irrefutable fact.</p>
<p>Mr. President, why is it simply disregarded that Israeli “occupation” followed the multistate Arab aggression of 1967. Egypt, Syria and Jordan (now in the throes of a so-called &#8220;Arab Spring&#8221;) have never even denied this aggression. And who bothers to recall that these very same Arab states were also the principal aggressors in the explicitly genocidal Arab attacks that began on May 15, 1948, literally moments after the new Jewish State’s UN-backed declaration of independent statehood.</p>
<p>Mr. President, please recall that a sovereign state of Palestine did not exist before 1967, or before 1948.  Nor did UN Security Council Resolution 242 ever promise a state of Palestine. A state of Palestine has <em>never</em> existed. <em>Never</em>.</p>
<p>Even as a non-state legal entity, &#8220;Palestine&#8221; ceased to exist in 1948, when Great Britain relinquished its League of Nations mandate.  During the 1948-49 Israeli War of Independence, West Bank and Gaza came under incontestably illegal control of Jordan and Egypt respectively. These Arab conquests did not put an end to an already-existing state or to an ongoing trust territory.  What these aggressions did accomplish was the intentional prevention of any Arab state of Palestine.</p>
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		<title>International Law, Palestinian Statehood and Israeli Security</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/louis-ren-beres/international-law-palestinian-statehood-and-israeli-security/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=international-law-palestinian-statehood-and-israeli-security</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 18 May 2011 04:42:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Louis René Beres]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=93444</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why a Palestinian state represents a mortal danger to Israel.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div>
<p><strong><em> </em></strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/palnaz.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-93552" title="Palestinians hold a sign depicting a swastika during clashes at Qalandiya checkpoint" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/palnaz.jpg" alt="" width="488" height="326" /></a></p>
<p>From the beginning, when that primal swerve toward human fragmentation in world politics first became apparent, states and empires have negotiated treaties to provide security. Strictly speaking, these formal agreements, in written form, are always fashioned and tested according to pertinent international law. Oftentimes, of course, disputes will arise whenever particular signatories should decide that continued compliance is simply no longer in their own &#8220;national  interest.&#8221;</p>
</div>
<p>For the moment, Israel&#8217;s 1979 Peace Treaty with Egypt still remains in place. Still, any continuing regime change in Cairo could spell the &#8220;sudden death&#8221; of this agreement. The same risks apply even to the extent that the military governing council’s leaders could decide that the treaty with Israel should be terminated.</p>
<div>
<p><em> </em></p>
<p><em>Any</em> post-Mubarak regime that would extend some governing authority to the Muslim Brotherhood, or to its proxies, could result in a prompt Egyptian abrogation. Although any such willful cessation of treaty obligations by the Egyptian side would almost certainly be in violation of <em>The Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties</em>, the governing &#8220;treaty on treaties,&#8221; there is also very little that either Israel or the &#8220;international community&#8221; would be able to do in response.</p>
<p>For Israel, this should bring to mind the particular dangers of Palestinian statehood. In June 2009, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu first officially agreed to the creation of a Palestinian state.  But, with an apparent nod to prudence, he conditioned this acceptance upon Palestinian &#8220;demilitarization.&#8221; More precisely, said the Prime Minister: “<em>In any peace agreement, the territory under Palestinian control must be disarmed, with solid security guarantees for Israel</em>.”</p>
<p>This agreement seemingly represented a &#8220;smart&#8221; concession, but only if there can ever be any reasonable expectations of corollary Palestinian compliance. In fact, such expectations are entirely implausible. This is the case not only because all treaties and treaty-like agreements can be broken, but because, in this specific case, any post-independence Palestinian insistence upon militarization would likely be <em>lawful</em>.Neither <em>Hamas</em> nor <em>Fatah</em>, now bonded together in a new unity pact, would ever negotiate for anything less than full sovereignty.</p>
<p>International lawyers seeking to discover any &#8220;Palestine-friendly&#8221; sources of legal confirmation could conveniently cherry-pick pertinent provisions of the 1934 <em>Convention on the Rights and Duties of States</em>, the treaty on statehood, sometimes called the <em>Montevideo Convention</em>. They could apply the very same strategy of selection to the 1969 <em>Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties</em>.</p>
<p><em>International law is not a suicide pact.</em> Israel has a &#8220;peremptory&#8221; right to remain &#8220;alive.&#8221; It was proper for Mr. Netanyahu to have previously opposed a Palestinian state in any form. After all, both <em>Fatah </em>and <em>Hamas </em>still see <em>all of Israel </em>as part of &#8220;Palestine.&#8221;</p>
<p>International law need not expect Palestinian compliance with any pre-state agreements concerning armed force<em>. </em> This is true even if these agreements were to include certain explicit U.S. security guarantees to Israel.  Also, because authentic treaties can be binding only upon <em>states</em>, a non-treaty agreement between the Palestinians and Israel could quickly prove to be of little or no real authority, or effectiveness. This is to say nothing of the byzantine connections between <em>Fatah,</em> <em>Hamas,</em> the <em>Islamic Resistance Movement</em>, and the Egyptian <em>Muslim Brotherhood</em>.</p>
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		<title>Slouching Toward &#8220;Palestine&#8221;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/louis-ren-beres/slouching-toward-palestine/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=slouching-toward-palestine</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 11 May 2011 04:38:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Louis René Beres]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Conventions]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[enemy]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=92914</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Hezbollah, Hamas and "moderate" Fatah prepare for the next war.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/al-aqsa_martyrs_brigade.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-92921" title="al-aqsa_martyrs_brigade" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/al-aqsa_martyrs_brigade.jpg" alt="" width="450" height="295" /></a></p>
<p>Intra-Palestinian politics remain on a steady course.  Following a  carefully-choreographed rapprochement with Hamas, the more “moderate”  Fatah forces, still trained and funded by millions of U.S. tax dollars, will resume their ritualized terror attacks against Israel. More or  less simultaneously, Hamas will do the same. In Lebanon, Shiite  Hezbollah, steadily mentored by Iran, and, oddly allied with Sunni  Hamas, has already begun active operational preparations, with Syrian  collaboration, for the next war.</p>
<p>Ironically, however, Israel’s  required efforts to defend its citizens will predictably be met with a  sanctimonious barrage of assorted criticisms. Although international law  allows any such imperiled state to use necessary force preemptively, Israel’s indispensable efforts to stave off existential harms will be  harshly condemned throughout the “international community.”</p>
<p>Humanitarian international law, or the law of war,  requires that every  use of force by an army or by an insurgent group meet the test of  “proportionality.” Drawn from the core legal principle that “the means  that can be used to injure an enemy are not unlimited,” proportionality  stipulates, among other things, that every resort to armed force be  limited to what is necessary for meeting military objectives. This   principle of both codified and customary international law applies to  all judgments of military advantage, and also to all planned reprisals.</p>
<p>Proper determinations of proportionality need not be made in a  geopolitical vacuum. Instead, these legal decisions may always take into  consideration the extent to which an  adversary has committed prior or  ongoing violations of the law of war. In the frequently interrelated  examples of Hamas/Islamic Jihad/Fatah terrorists in Gaza, and the  Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon, there is ample evidence that all of  these belligerents have been guilty of repeated “perfidy.”</p>
<p>In  law, deception can be acceptable in armed conflict, but the Hague  Regulations expressly disallow the placement of military assets or  military personnel in any heavily populated civilian areas. Further  prohibition of perfidy can be found at Protocol I of 1977, additional to  the Geneva Conventions of 1949. These rules are also binding on the  basis of an equally authoritative customary international law.</p>
<p>Perfidy represents a very serious violation of the law of war, one that  is even identified as a “grave breach” at Article 147 of Geneva  Convention No. IV. The legal effect of perfidy committed by Palestinian  or Hezbollah terrorists, especially their recurrent resort to “human  shields,” is to immunize Israel from legal responsibility for any  inadvertent counter-terrorist harms done to Arab civilians. But even if  Hamas and Islamic Jihad and Fatah and Hezbollah have not always engaged  in altogether deliberate violations, any terrorist-created links between  civilians and insurgent warfare still bestowed upon Israel a fully  legal justification for military self-defense.</p>
<p>This is not to  suggest that Israel should now have a jurisprudential<em> carte blanche</em> in  its necessary applications of armed force, but only that the  reasonableness of these applications always be appraised in the context  of  identifiable enemy perfidy.</p>
<p>Viewed against the historical  background of extensive and unapologetic terrorist perfidy in both Gaza  and Lebanon, Israel has been innocent of any prior “disproportionality.”   All combatants, including all insurgents in Gaza and Lebanon, are  bound to comply with the law of war of international law. This important  requirement derives not only from what is known as the “Martens  Clause,” a binding paragraph which makes its first appearance in the  Preamble to the 1899 Hague Convention No. II on land warfare, but  additionally from Article 3, common to the four Geneva Conventions of  August 12,1949.   It is also found at the two Protocols to these  Conventions.</p>
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		<title>A Nuclear Iran and the Futility of Sanctions</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/louis-ren-beres/a-nuclear-iran-and-the-futility-of-sanctions/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-nuclear-iran-and-the-futility-of-sanctions</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 07 Apr 2010 04:03:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Louis René Beres]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=57498</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The tough choices Israel now has no choice but to make. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/ahmadinejad.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-57508" title="ahmadinejad" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/ahmadinejad.jpg" alt="" width="375" height="251" /></a></p>
<p>In the matter of Iranian nuclearization, U.S. President Barack Obama still doesn&#8217;t get it. Economic sanctions will never work. In Tehran&#8217;s national decision-making circles, absolutely nothing can compare to the immense power and status that would come with membership in the Nuclear Club. Indeed, if President Ahmadinejad and his clerical masters truly believe in the Shiite apocalypse, the inevitable final battle against &#8220;unbelievers,&#8221; they would be most willing to accept even corollary military sanctions.</p>
<p>From the standpoint of the United States, a nuclear Iran would pose an unprecedented risk of mass-destruction terrorism. For much smaller Israel, of course, the security risk would be existential.</p>
<p>Legal issues are linked here to various strategic considerations. Supported by international law, specifically by the incontestable right of anticipatory self-defense, Prime Minister Netanyahu understands that any preemptive destruction of Iran’s nuclear infrastructures would involve enormous operational and political difficulties. True, Israel has deployed elements of the “Arrow” system of ballistic missile defense, but even the Arrow could not achieve a sufficiently high probability of intercept to protect civilian populations. Further, now that Obama has backed away from America&#8217;s previously-planned missile shield deployment in Poland and the Czech Republic, Israel has no good reason to place its security hopes in any combined systems of active defense.</p>
<p>Even a single incoming nuclear missile that would manage to penetrate Arrow defenses could kill very large numbers of Israelis. Iran, moreover, could decide to share its developing nuclear assets with assorted terror groups, sworn enemies of Israel that would launch using automobiles and ships rather than missiles. These very same groups might seek “soft” targets in selected American or European cities – schools, universities, hospitals, hotels, sports stadiums, subways, etc.</p>
<p>While Obama and the &#8220;international community&#8221; still fiddles, Iran is plainly augmenting its incendiary intent toward Israel with a corresponding military capacity. Left to violate non-proliferation treaty (NPT) rules with impunity, Iran&#8217;s leaders might ultimately be undeterred by any threats of an Israeli and/or American retaliation. Such a possible failure of nuclear deterrence could be the result of a presumed lack of threat credibility, or even of a genuine Iranian disregard for expected harms. In the worst-case scenario, Iran, animated by certain Shiite visions of inevitable conflict, could become the individual suicide bomber writ large. Such a dire prospect is improbable, but it is not unimaginable.</p>
<p>Iran’s illegal nuclearization has already started a perilous domino effect, especially among certain Sunni Arab states in the region. Not long ago, both Saudi   Arabia and Egypt revealed possible plans to develop their own respective nuclear capabilities. But strategic stability in a proliferating Middle East could never resemble US-USSR deterrence during the Cold War. Here, the critical assumption of rationality, which always makes national survival the very highest decisional preference, simply might not hold.</p>
<p>If, somehow, Iran does become fully nuclear, Israel will have to promptly reassess its core policy of nuclear ambiguity, and also certain related questions of targeting. These urgent issues were discussed candidly in my own “Project Daniel” final report, first delivered by hand to then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on January 16, 2003.</p>
<p>Israel&#8217;s security from mass-destruction attacks will depend in part upon its intended targets in Iran, and on the precise extent to which these targets have been expressly identified. For Israel&#8217;s survival, it is not enough to merely have The Bomb. Rather, the adequacy of Israel&#8217;s nuclear deterrence and preemption policies will depend largely upon:</p>
<p>(1) The presumed destructiveness of these nuclear weapons.</p>
<p>And</p>
<p>(2) On where these weapons are thought to be targeted.</p>
<p>Obama&#8217;s &#8220;Road Map&#8221; notwithstanding, a nuclear war in the Middle  East is not out of the question. Soon, Israel will need to choose prudently between &#8220;assured destruction&#8221; strategies, and &#8220;nuclear war-fighting&#8221; strategies. Assured destruction strategies are sometimes called &#8220;counter-value&#8221; strategies or &#8220;mutual assured destruction&#8221; (MAD). Drawn from the Cold War, these are strategies of deterrence in which a country primarily targets its strategic weapons on the other side&#8217;s civilian populations, and/or on its supporting civilian infrastructures.</p>
<p>Nuclear war-fighting measures, on the other hand, are called &#8220;counterforce&#8221; strategies. These are systems of deterrence wherein a country primarily targets its strategic nuclear weapons on the other side&#8217;s major weapon systems, and on that state&#8217;s supporting military assets.</p>
<p>There are distinctly serious survival consequences for choosing one strategy over the other. Israel could also opt for some sort of &#8220;mixed&#8221; strategy. Still, for Israel, any policy that might encourage nuclear war fighting should be rejected. This advice was an integral part of the once-confidential Project Daniel final report.</p>
<p>In choosing between the two basic strategic alternatives, Israel should always opt for nuclear deterrence based upon assured destruction. This seemingly insensitive recommendation might elicit opposition amid certain publics, but it is, in fact, more humane.  A counterforce targeting doctrine would be less persuasive as a nuclear deterrent, especially to states whose leaders could willingly sacrifice entire armies as &#8220;martyrs.&#8221;</p>
<p>If Israel were to opt for nuclear deterrence based upon counterforce capabilities, its enemies could also feel especially threatened. This condition could then enlarge the prospect of a nuclear aggression against Israel, and of a follow-on nuclear exchange.</p>
<p>Israel&#8217;s decisions on counter-value versus counterforce doctrines will depend, in part, on prior investigations of enemy country inclinations to strike first; and on enemy country inclinations to strike all-at-once, or in stages. Should Israeli strategic planners assume that an enemy state in process of &#8220;going nuclear&#8221; is apt to strike first, and to strike with all of its nuclear weapons right away, Israeli counterforce-targeted warheads &#8211; used in retaliation &#8211; would hit only empty launchers. In such circumstances, Israel&#8217;s only plausible application of counterforce doctrine would be to strike first itself, an option that Israel clearly and completely rejects. From the standpoint of intra-war deterrence, a counter-value strategy would prove vastly more appropriate to a fast peace.</p>
<p>Should Israeli planners assume that an enemy country &#8220;going nuclear&#8221; is apt to strike first, and to strike in a limited fashion, holding some measure of nuclear firepower in reserve, Israeli counterforce-targeted warheads could have some damage-limiting benefits. Here, counterforce operations could appear to serve both an Israeli non-nuclear preemption, or, should Israel decide not to preempt, an Israeli retaliatory strike. Nonetheless, the benefits to Israel of maintaining any counterforce targeting options are generally outweighed by the reasonably expected costs.</p>
<p>To protect itself against a relentlessly nuclearizing Iran, Israel&#8217;s best course may still be to seize the conventional preemption option as soon as possible. (After all, a fully nuclear Iran that would actually welcome apocalyptic endings could bring incomparably higher costs to Israel.) Together with such a permissible option, Israel would have to reject any hint of a counterforce targeting doctrine. But if, as now seems clear, Iran is allowed to continue with its illegal nuclear weapons development, Netanyahu&#8217;s  correct response should be to quickly end Israel&#8217;s historic policy of nuclear ambiguity.</p>
<p>Such a doctrinal termination could permit Israel to enhance its nuclear deterrence posture, but only in regard to a fully rational Iranian adversary. If, after all, Iran’s leaders were to resemble the suicide bomber in macrocosm, they might not be deterred by any expected level of Israeli retaliation.</p>
<p>No country can be required to participate in its own annihilation. Without a prompt and major change in President Obama&#8217;s persistently naive attitude toward Iran, a law-enforcing expression of anticipatory self-defense may still offer Israel its only remaining survival option. This will sound unconvincing to many, but rational decision-making &#8211; in all fields of human endeavor &#8211; is based upon informed comparisons of expected costs and expected benefits.</p>
<p>Does President Obama really believe that both Americans and the Israelis can somehow live with a nuclear Iran? If he does, he should be reminded that a nuclear balance-of-terror in the Middle  East could never replicate the earlier stability of U.S.-Soviet mutual deterrence.</p>
<p>This would not be your father&#8217;s Cold War.</p>
<p><em>Louis René Beres is Professor of Political Science at Purdue and the author of many books, monographs and articles dealing with international law, strategic theory, Israeli nuclear policy, and regional nuclear war.  In </em><em>Israel</em><em>, where he served as Chair of Project Daniel, his work is known to selected military and intelligence communities.</em></p>
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