HOWARD EPSTEIN – THE WOOLLY MAMMOTH IN THE ROOM
Woolly mammoths lived in Siberia, Russia, (although perhaps they did not know their own postal address) until 1700 BC. It was thought that they then became extinct, but recent evidence points to the contrary. Rather larger than the proverbial elephant in the room, the woolly mammoth symbolises to perfection the specter hanging over Israel today: overpowering, aggressive, stubborn, unrelenting, impervious to any appeal to reasonableness, patently heavily-armed, and Russian – the woolly mammoth is a formidable foe and, if it is not exactly in our room, it is certainly in our back-yard. Forget the Russians are coming; they are already here in force, calling the shots and with no effective opposition. Pax Americana? No more! Say “Hi!” to Pax Mammuthus Primigenius.
The projection of soft power, Obama’s great foreign policy project, designed to make the USA loveable and beloved again (again?), has been an unmitigated disaster, and not just in the opinion of most Israelis and their prime minister. We find ourselves in the company of such luminary nations as Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and, for balance, Iran, all of whom have expressed their contempt for American foreign policy.
The Sunni states have complained bitterly about Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. The Shia Iranians have, somewhat indecorously in the circumstances, looked the thorough-bred Yankee stallion right in the mouth, and, despite the US-enabled bounteous release of long-embargoed funds (at a time when the rest of the world is clean out of liquidity) landed a kick in those sparkling Yankee equine teeth by switching their oil deals from the greenback to Euros. And that’s the least of their ingratitude as the continuation of their nuclear and missile programs reveal. (I made that up about the nuclear program. Many suspect that, in the absence of evidence, the Mullahs continue secretly with it and will wait a few months before going public.)
The Great Satan has plainly won few brownie points in Tehran for facilitating the release of (wait for it), a hundred billion US dollars, ie $100 000 000 000. That may look like a lot of noughts to you and me, but to Iran’s client, our hate-filled neighbour, Hezbollah, it’s just the first tranche of a whole set of bulls-eyes, scattered all over Israel, from the Azrieli Center to those large white spheres, whatever they may be, outside Dimona.
Given that Hezbollah is a proscribed entity in the US, this ranks as possibly the greatest foreign policy disaster since, well since Wendy Sherman last worked her magic, with North Korea – against whom the US has been scrambling this past week to dream up some fresh sanctions to punish a claimed thermo-nuclear test, and an ICBM test launch, both breaches of her earlier, 1996, magnum opus – reining in North Korea for a week or two. (These sanctions do not have to work – they assuredly will not. They merely have to resemble a fig leaf so the Administration can say it did something.)
Hard on the heels of her latest achievement, the US-Iran led JCPOA, the nadir of diplomatic gaucheness, is that, America having rendered itself impotent in the Middle East – not least by turning a blind eye to Assad’s crossing Obama’s red-line on the use of WMD on the Syrian people – the Russian mammoth (no longer merely the Russian bear, which could be controlled with some well-aimed cracks of the whip, like some abused ursine creature in a Victorian travelling circus – pace Reagan and Thatcher) came charging into the Levant, and installed on our front lawn not merely a few tanks but a whole formidable air force, complete with the s400 system, the world’s most effective air defense shield, which encompasses the beating heart of Israel, ie, everything south of Latakia down to the Sharon region and Ben Gurion airport.
Faced with this emasculating threat, whether as a PR exercise, or out of self-delusion, or to delude a hoped-for ingenuous Israeli public, who may want to accept it as true rather than contemplate teleological matters (the end of our days), the Israeli government claims to have “an understanding” with Putin’s Kremlin (for continued freedom of aerial activity over Syria).
There can almost be heard the Ukrainians, David Cameron and Angela Merkel squealing with incredulity: “Oh really?!” all the way to Mount Zion. “An understanding with Putin’s Kremlin? That’s as likely as finding the Holy Grail, the Golden Fleece and Higg’s Boson all in the same week”. (Good news. The Boson was found in September 2012, but of the other two, rather like an MOU signed: V V Putin, that’s worth the paper is printed on, there has been no sighting and none is expected. Pump John Kerry full of sodium pentothal (it’s the only way he may speak the truth on this subject) and listen up.)
Sad to say, Israeli freedom of the skies is not so much by virtue of an understanding with Putin as at his sufferance, which is as debilitating a turn of events as we have suffered since 1948. We need to hope that down at the Kyria there are policymakers who, noting what happened when Turkey downed a Russian fighter jet last November – nichego, nada, nix, zero, efes, ayn klum – appreciate that there are only two ways to deal with bullies: one is to hide from them, which appears to be the American approach, since they have (according to some reports) stopped provoking the Russian s400 air-defence shield in case the US aircraft are fired upon. The other is to stand up to him, Erdoghan style.
Great! You say. Israelseen now publishes the work of a lunatic (my Latin teacher’s usual critique of my work) but consider this: it was that same November that the Jerusalem Post reported from the IAF’s Tel Nof airbase about its massive strike capability, thus:-
“We can hit thousands of targets in a few days in a future war.” A senior source reportedly said: “No country can stand up to Israel Air Force’s firepower” and “In any conflict, the F-15 fighter jets that operate out of Tel Nof would seek to take off several times a day and shoulder their burden in the air force’s goal of firing thousands of precision- guided bombs at enemy targets a day, every day.”
Wow! I think they call that hyperbole, although hubris would also be a good description. “No country”? We could flatten Russia? Lebanon would be eezy-peezy – apart from one mammoth-sized problem: the s400, Russian radar system that Putin installed at Latakia after Turkey’s impudence.
Here is what fightersweep.com said about the s400 system:-
“Simply stated, of all the surface-to-air threats being faced by coalition airpower over Syria, the Russian S-400 SAM, known as the “Triumf” at home and better known to NATO as the SA-21 “Growler,” is the most capable and lethal long-range air defense missile system on the planet.”
So that is “the best defence system on the planet” versus “No country can stand up to Israel Air Force’s firepower”.
Now for balance, I have also to report that fightersweep.com continued:
“While other news outlets have reported no US warplanes have flown since the SA-21s have been deployed, we know this simply is not the case. ‘SA-21’s haven’t changed our fly rates or the areas we operate in,’ says one American pilot. “We’ve been flying in SA-5 MEZs for a year now and they have known we have been there the entire time.’”
which is fine if true. Perhaps, the Russians turned a blind-eye. Perhaps they need to continue to do so, and not only for the USAF.
Faced with the possibility that the s400 system could be deployed against the IAF, what Israel has to consider is nothing less than the arrival of the post-MAD era.
You remember good old MAD, don’t you? Mutual Assured Destruction. You would have to be mad to launch a first-strike nuclear attack at a country with second-strike capability – as Iran is well-aware, having seen us take delivery of our fifth Unterseeboot in the last few weeks, all five representing pay-back should the Mullocracy fancy its chances with hastening the return of the Twelfth Imam. (Was it the twelfth? I have lost count what with 72 virgins and millions of Palestinians claimed to be living here before there never was, no, never ever was, a Temple – let alone a Palestine.)
There is no doubt that MAD can work for keeping the peace between nuclear powers. It has done so for over sixty years. But what about where one side is not a nuclear power yet has deployed over 100,000 missiles that could flatten Israel, wipe it off the map for all practical purposes, and kill and maim more Israelis than one wants to try to calculate (and a fair few Palestinians, too)? Israel would use its fearsome air force to stop the slaughter within a couple of days, nachon? It now has thousands of target and can turn the aircraft around at a rate never before contemplated (so we have been told and is indeed credible). But that was before the deployment of the s400 by none other than the patrons of Hezbollah, the very force (“militants” as the BBC refer to them, but blood-soaked terrorists in the real world) who have all those missiles. It is not only Hezbollah are who allies of Putin’s strategy for filling the vacuum left by the withdrawal of the Americans from the region, but their other patrons, the Iranians, are Russian allies, too. Would Russia abandon them? Ask only whether it is in Russia’s interests to do so.
What all this means is that, in circumstances in which one side may be utterly destroyed by conventional means, it needs to be prepared to neutralise the threat by the use of its nuclear weapons.
Many years ago, as those of a certain age will remember, Golda Meir – somewhat on the back foot after allowing Israeli forces on the Suez Canal and the Golan heights to remain at idle as the Egyptian and Syrian threats, that had been well-observed, were being unleashed and threatening the very survival of Israel – was asked if Israel had a Masada Complex. Oh no, said the Israeli Iron Lady, we have a Samson Complex. If we go down, we take everyone else with us.
Well, the time may have come to wheel out the Golda Doctrine again, for Putin needs to believe that rather than lose the store and that’s it, we would only lose the store if we loosed our 200 or so (so the experts or pundits calculate) nuclear-tipped missiles at places as varied as Cairo, Damascus (what’s left of it), London, New York and, of course, Moscow, Leningrad and whatever it is they call Stalingrad these days, plus Omsk, Tomsk and Vladivostok.
Do you think I thought that one up in a moment of quivering fear. Not at all. How do you think the Kims, their acolytes and their slaves in North Korea have been able to survive (read: “eat”) these past twenty years, since they agreed with Wendy not to deploy nuclear weapons and have not stopped threatening the use of them ever since? Bread (and expensive toys for the leadership) for nuclear restraint. Nuclear blackmail was Wendy’s gift to North Korea.
Here is the Israeli version:-
Listen up, Putin. If the s400 system is deployed to protect Hezbollah and its 100,000 plus missiles, such that we can expect the Israeli miracle to go up in smoke, we shan’t be the only ones to be smouldering ash at the end of it. Rendering us impotent conventionally, makes us proactive atomically. If it’s the only way we can survive, then this is what we threaten: If we are placed into the position of having nothing to lose, we make sure many others, and especially you, have nothing left to lose either. We much prefer churning out life-enhancing developments for the good of mankind, saving lives after disasters, watching singing contests and months of Big Brother – all those offensive things that so enrage our enemies – but if we cannot continue, then nor will a large chunk of the world either. Perhaps you have to pretend to stop us to save face, but please be clear: IF we find we are going down, we shall drag you along with us.
Maybe the woolly mammoth knows this already. Let’s hope the Kyria does too. Let’s hope they both read Israelseen. After all, you do.
© HOWARD EPSTEIN 2016
