In war with Iran, Israelis estimate 300 deaths as ‘worst-case scenario’

A quarter of the population don’t have access to bomb shelters, an estimated 100,000 rockets and missiles are pointing towards Israel, it’s missile defense shield is incomplete and yet, during a war anticipated to last three weeks during which thousands of missiles would be launched towards Israel, less than 300 Israelis would get killed. That’s the worst-case scenario, Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet has been told.

Gareth Porter reports that one of Israel’s leading experts on Iranian missiles and the head of its missile defence programme for nearly a decade, says Iranian missiles are capable of doing significant damage to Israeli targets.

Uzi Rubin, who was in charge of Israel’s missile defence from 1991 to 1999 and presided over the development of the Arrow anti- missile system, has a much more sombre view of Iran’s capabilities.

The “bad news” for Israel, Rubin told IPS in an interview, is that the primary factor affecting Iran’s capability to retaliate is the rapidly declining cost of increased precision in ballistic missiles. Within a very short time, Iran has already improved the accuracy of its missiles from a few kilometres from the target to just a few metres, according to Rubin.

That improvement would give Iran the ability to hit key Israeli economic infrastructure and administrative targets, he said. “I’m asking my military friends how they feel about waging war without electricity,” said Rubin.

The consequences of Iranian missile strikes on administrative targets could be even more serious, Rubin believes. “If the civilian government collapses,” he said, “the military will find it difficult to wage a war.”

Rubin is even worried that, if the accuracy of Iranian missiles improves further, which he believes is “bound to happen”, Iran will be able to carry out pinpoint attacks on Israel’s air bases, which are concentrated in just a few places.

Some Israeli analysts have suggested that Israel could hit Iranian missiles in a preemptive strike, but Rubin said Israel can no longer count on being able to hit Iranian missiles before they are launched.

Iran’s longer-range missiles have always been displayed on mobile transporter erector launchers (TELs), as Rubin pointed out in an article in Arms Control Today earlier this year. “The message was clear,” Rubin wrote. “Iran’s missile force is fully mobile, hence, not pre-emptable.”

Rubin, who has argued for more resources to be devoted to the Arrow anti-missile system, acknowledged that it can only limit the number of missiles that get through. In an e-mail to IPS, he cited the Arrow system’s record of more than 80 percent success in various tests over the years, but also noted that such a record “does not assure an identical success rate in real combat”.

Meanwhile, last month the New York Times reported that the Pentagon estimates that several hundred Americans could be killed in the event of an Israeli strike on Iran.

A classified war simulation held this month to assess the repercussions of an Israeli attack on Iran forecasts that the strike would lead to a wider regional war, which could draw in the United States and leave hundreds of Americans dead, according to American officials.

The officials said the so-called war game was not designed as a rehearsal for American military action — and they emphasized that the exercise’s results were not the only possible outcome of a real-world conflict.

But the game has raised fears among top American planners that it may be impossible to preclude American involvement in any escalating confrontation with Iran, the officials said. In the debate among policy makers over the consequences of any Israeli attack, that reaction may give stronger voice to those in the White House, Pentagon and intelligence community who have warned that a strike could prove perilous for the United States.

The results of the war game were particularly troubling to Gen. James N. Mattis, who commands all American forces in the Middle East, Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia, according to officials who either participated in the Central Command exercise or who were briefed on the results and spoke on condition of anonymity because of its classified nature. When the exercise had concluded earlier this month, according to the officials, General Mattis told aides that an Israeli first strike would be likely to have dire consequences across the region and for United States forces there.

The two-week war game, called Internal Look, played out a narrative in which the United States found it was pulled into the conflict after Iranian missiles struck a Navy warship in the Persian Gulf, killing about 200 Americans, according to officials with knowledge of the exercise. The United States then retaliated by carrying out its own strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.

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How Iran might benefit from an Israeli attack

Trita Parsi writes: The Chairman of Joints Chief of Staff Martin Dempsey serves “Iran’s interests.”

So says Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak. Dempsey’s public caution about an Israeli attack on Iran – “I don’t think a wise thing at this moment is for Israel to launch a military attack on Iran” – earned him this dubious honor.

For the Netanyahu government to level such serious accusations against America’s top military commander necessitates a revision of the meaning of chutzpah. We need a stronger term.

But those leveling such accusations—whether in the Likud-led government or their supporters in the US—are the ones that have the most to hide. If the same (flawed and anti-democratic) methodology of questioning the loyalty and patriotism of their domestic political opponents and implying that they are in cohoots with an enemy state were applied to them, a very disturbing picture would emerge.

Who would the true winners and losers of an Israeli attack on Iran be, for instance?

The Obama administration and the US military strongly oppose an Israeli preventive strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Their opposition, of course, is not rooted in any sympathy with the repressive regime in Tehran. Nor is it necessarily rooted in America’s already compromised military position in the region. It is because a strike would not destroy Iran’s nuclear program. It would intsead increase the likelihood of a nuclear armed Iran down the road. It would unravel the international consensus against Iran. It would undermine the Iranian pro-democracy movement and fortify the regime’s grip on power. And, perhaps most importantly, it would eliminate the current insight we have into the Iranian nuclear program and provide the Iranians with a dash-out capability.

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Israel unveils tenders for 1,121 new settler homes

AFP reports: Israel’s construction and housing ministry on Wednesday published tenders for 1,121 settler homes, most of them them in annexed east Jerusalem, with others in the West Bank and the Golan Heights.

Of that number, 872 are to be built in Har Homa, a contentious settlement neighbourhood in the southern part of Arab east Jerusalem, according to documents published on the ministry website.

Another 180 are to be built in Givat Zeev, just to the north of Jerusalem, while the remaining 69 are to be built in Katzrin in the occupied Golan Heights, the documents showed.

Contacted by AFP, a ministry spokesman dismissed the tenders as “nothing new,” but settlement activists said it was the first time the offers had been made public.

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France arrests the usual Islamist suspects

Christopher Dickey writes: You remember the scene at the end of the movie Casablanca, of course, when Claude Rains, playing the French police chief, wants to cover up his complicity in the crime just committed by his friend Humphrey Bogart. As more cops arrive on the scene Rains, completely at ease with his own cynicism, orders them to “round up the usual suspects.”

That is what the French government has been doing since the tragic, horrifying, and embarrassing murders of three French soldiers, a rabbi, and three Jewish children in and around Toulouse last month. But as it tries to obscure its past mistakes, it may well be complicating future investigations.

The latest arrests came in the early hours of Wednesday morning, when ten radical Islamists suspected of alleged terrorist ties or sympathies were picked up in just about every corner of the country, from Roubaix in the north to Marseille in the south. Five others were thrown out of France in recent days, and another 13 were charged with participation in a “terrorist enterprise.” Not one of those is alleged to have had any connection at all with Mohamed Merah, the 23-year-old Toulouse shooter.

“The government shows its firmness against radical Islam,” headlined the left-leaning daily Le Monde last night. “Sarkozy’s warning to Islamist associations in France,” proclaimed the front page of Le Figaro this morning. Earlier, Sarkozy vowed that people who visit jihadist Web sites would be liable to arrest. His blunt message: zero tolerance for radical Islam. And as the hard-fought presidential campaign against challengers on the right and left enters its final weeks before voting starts on April 22, that seems to be working. Ever since the Toulouse killings, Sarkozy has been climbing in the polls.
French Islamist arrests

Yet while these arrests and proclamations may be good politics—may even help to obscure the phenomenal intelligence failure that allowed the Toulouse shooter to carry out his nine-day killing spree in the first place—the headline-grabbing measures of today may weaken defenses against terrorist attacks in the future, and not only in France.

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The U.S. is still as out of touch as ever

Michael Moran writes: Through the patriotic haze of an American political campaign year, it is tempting to believe our own hooey.

America is exceptional and not in decline, Barack Obama insisted in his most recent State of the Union address. Mitt Romney, his leading GOP rival, insists against the opinion of most economists that the US economy can achieve average annual growth of 4 percent a year and anyone who says otherwise is a defeatist.

In fact, both are dead wrong. Gravity does affect the US just like any other nation, and 4 percent average annual growth for a mature economy is a pipedream.

US power — measured in terms of its relative economic importance and its diplomatic influence — is slipping all over the planet. US influence was written off as irrelevant in Europe’s debt crisis, and is being chased out of the Middle East by popular consent and unhappy results on the Iraqi and Afghan battlefields. In Latin America, America’s “backyard,” Washington’s writ increasingly is displaced by Brazil, just as it has been checked by Russia in the post-Soviet “near abroad.”

The US is slipping in Asia, too, losing its position as the most important trading partner with Asian nations (we lost Australia, Japan, India and South Korea to China in that category since the Great Recession).

Yet, for all this, we insist on our exceptionally delusional self-image. With minor tweaks, the US continues to approach the world with the same basic assumption under Obama that it did under his notoriously blinkered predecessor: the belief that, in the end, Washington’s rule is law, and that a world ordered to benefit the United States will, by definition, benefit humanity. It is downright anti-American to think otherwise.

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Iran proposes Baghdad as nuclear talks venue

Reuters reports: Iran has approached Baghdad to host forthcoming talks with six world powers over its disputed nuclear program, Iraq said on Wednesday, apparently departing from plans for an Istanbul meeting following Iranian frictions with Turkey.

Iranian media quoted Iranian foreign minister Ali Akbar Salehi as saying the talks could take place in Baghdad or China. He gave no further details.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the April 13-14 negotiations would take place in Istanbul, the first such meeting since January 2011 when the sides did not even manage to agree on an agenda.

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari told Reuters an Iranian delegation proposed Baghdad for the talks during a visit to Iraq on Tuesday.

“The proposal came from them. We received a delegation from Iran … Today we are inviting G5 plus one ambassadors to hand over a letter about the proposal,” Zebari said.

A Western diplomat in Baghdad confirmed envoys had been called to Iraq’s foreign ministry for a meeting on Wednesday.

There was no immediate reaction from the six powers – the United States, Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany – to the proposal to hold talks in Iraq.

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What did J.D. Salinger, Leo Tolstoy, and Sarah Bernhardt have in common?

A L Bardach writes: By the late 1960s, the most famous writer in America had become a recluse, having forsaken his dazzling career. Nevertheless, J.D. Salinger often came to Manhattan, staying at his parents’ sprawling apartment on Park Avenue and 91st Street. While he no longer visited with his editors at “The New Yorker,” he was keen to spend time with his spiritual teacher, Swami Nikhilananda, the founder of the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, located, then as now, in a townhouse just three blocks away, at 17 East 94th Street.

Though the iconic author of “The Catcher in the Rye” and “Franny and Zooey” published his last story in 1965, he did not stop writing. From the early 1950s onward, he maintained a lively correspondence with several Vedanta monks and fellow devotees.

After all, the central, guiding light of Salinger’s spiritual quest was the teachings of Vivekananda, the Calcutta-born monk who popularized Vedanta and yoga in the West at the end of the 19th century.

These days yoga is offered up in classes and studios that have become as ubiquitous as Starbucks. Vivekananda would have been puzzled, if not somewhat alarmed. “As soon as I think of myself as a little body,” he warned, “I want to preserve it, protect it, to keep it nice, at the expense of other bodies. Then you and I become separate.” For Vivekananda, who established the first ever Vedanta Center, in Manhattan in 1896, yoga meant just one thing: “the realization of God.”

After an initial dalliance in the late 1940s with Zen—a spiritual path without a God—Salinger discovered Vedanta, which he found infinitely more consoling. “Unlike Zen,” Salinger’s biographer, Kenneth Slawenski, points out, “Vedanta offered a path to a personal relationship with God…[and] a promise that he could obtain a cure for his depression….and find God, and through God, peace.”

Finding peace would, however, be a lifelong battle. In 1975, Salinger wrote to another monk at the New York City center about his own daily struggle, citing a text of the eighth-century Indian mystic Shankara as a cautionary tale: “In the forest-tract of sense pleasures there prowls a huge tiger called the mind. Let good people who have a longing for Liberation never go there.” Salinger wrote, “I suspect that nothing is truer than that,” confessing despondently, “and yet I allow myself to be mauled by that old tiger almost every wakeful minute of my life.”

It was his daily mauling by the “huge tiger” and his dreaded depressions that led Salinger to abandon his literary ambitions in favor of spiritual ones. Salinger—who appears to have had a nervous breakdown of sorts upon his return from the gruesome front lines of World War II—subscribed to Vivekananda’s view of the mind as a drunken monkey who is stung by a scorpion and then consumed by a demon. At the same time, Vivekananda promised hope and solace—writing that the “same mind, when subdued and controlled, becomes a most trusted friend and helper, guaranteeing peace and happiness.” It was precisely the consolation that Salinger so desperately sought. And by 1965 he was ready to renounce his once gritty pursuit of literary celebrity.

Although all but forgotten by America’s 20 million would-be yoginis, clad in their finest Lululemon, Vivekananda was the Bengali monk who introduced the word “yoga” into the national conversation. In 1893, outfitted in a red, flowing turban and yellow robes belted by a scarlet sash, he had delivered a show-stopping speech in Chicago. The event was the tony Parliament of Religions, which had been convened as a spiritual complement to the World’s Fair, showcasing the industrial and technological achievements of the age.

On its opening day, September 11, Vivekananda, who appeared to be meditating onstage, was summoned to speak and did so without notes. “Sisters and Brothers of America,” he began, in a sonorous voice tinged with “a delightful slight Irish brogue,” according to one listener, attributable to his Trinity College–educated professor in India. “It fills my heart with joy unspeakable…”

Then something unprecedented happened, presaging the phenomenon decades later that greeted the Beatles (one of whom, George Harrison, would become a lifelong Vivekananda devotee). The previously sedate crowd of 4,000-plus attendees rose to their feet and wildly cheered the visiting monk, who, having never before addressed a large gathering, was as shocked as his audience. “I thank you in the name of the most ancient order of monks in the world,” he responded, flushed with emotion. “I thank you in the name of the mother of religions, and I thank you in the name of millions and millions of Hindu people of all classes and sects.”

Annie Besant, a British Theosophist and a conference delegate, described Vivekananda’s impact, writing that he was “a striking figure, clad in yellow and orange, shining like the sun of India in the midst of the heavy atmosphere of Chicago…a lion head, piercing eyes, mobile lips, movements swift and abrupt.” The Parliament, she said, was “enraptured; the huge multitude hung upon his words.” When he was done, the convocation rose again and cheered him even more thunderously. Another delegate described “scores of women walking over the benches to get near to him,” prompting one wag to crack wise that if the 30-year-old Vivekananda “can resist that onslaught, [he is] indeed a god.”

“No doubt the vast majority of those present hardly knew why they had been so powerfully moved,” Christopher Isherwood wrote a half century later, surmising that a “strange kind of subconscious telepathy” had infected the hall, beginning with Vivekananda’s first words, which have resonated, for some, long after. Asked about the origins of “My Sweet Lord,” George Harrison replied that “the song really came from Swami Vivekananda, who said, ‘If there is a God, we must see him. And if there is a soul, we must perceive it.’ ”

The teachings of Vedanta are rooted in the Vedas, ancient scriptures going back several thousand years that also inform Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism. The Vedic texts of the Upanishads enshrine a core belief that God is within and without—that the divine is everywhere. The Bhagavad Gita (Song of God) is another sacred text or gospel, whereas Hinduism is actually a coinage popularized by Vivekananda to describe a faith of diverse and myriad beliefs.

Ramakrishna

Vivekananda’s genius was to simplify Vedantic thought to a few accessible teachings that Westerners found irresistible. God was not the capricious tyrant in the heavens avowed by Bible-thumpers, but rather a power that resided in the human heart. “Each soul is potentially divine,” he promised. “The goal is to manifest that divinity within by controlling nature, external and internal.” And to close the deal for the fence-sitters, he punched up Vedanta’s embrace of other faiths and their prophets. Christ and Buddha were incarnations of the divine, he said, no less than Krishna and his own teacher, Ramakrishna. [Continue reading…]

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Fears over justice for Gaza victims

A “dangerous” statement by the office of International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor that it cannot consider allegations of crimes committed during the 2008-9 Gaza conflict means Palestinian and Israeli victims seem likely to be denied justice, Amnesty International said.

The Office of the Prosecutor today said that it cannot consider allegations of crimes committed during the conflict unless the relevant UN bodies or ICC states parties determine that the Palestinian Authority is a state.

“This dangerous decision opens the ICC to accusations of political bias and is inconsistent with the independence of the ICC. It also breaches the Rome Statute which clearly states that such matters should be considered by the institution’s judges,” said Marek Marczyński, Head of Amnesty International’s International Justice campaign.

“For the past three years, the prosecutor has been considering the question of whether the Palestinian Authority is a “state” that comes under the jurisdiction of the ICC and whether the ICC can investigate crimes committed during the 2008-9 conflict in Gaza and southern Israel.”

“Now, despite Amnesty International’s calls and a very clear requirement in the ICC’s statute that the judges should decide on such matters, the Prosecutor has erroneously dodged the question, passing it to other political bodies.”

“Amnesty International once again calls on the Prosecutor to follow the procedures established by the Rome Statute by passing the matter to the judges, rather than frustrating efforts to bring justice to Palestinian and Israeli victims of the Gaza conflict.”

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Spain’s stolen babies

Lorna Scott Fox writes: On 20 March, a Spanish judge gave prosecutors leave to proceed with a case against an 80-year-old nun charged with kidnapping. According to lawyers for victim groups, as many as 350,000 babies were stolen from poor, single or left-wing mothers between 1938 and the late 1980s. Sister María Gómez Valbuena, who had links with a maternity clinic and put ads in the paper offering help to unmarried mothers, is the first person to be prosecuted for it.

Accused of selling a baby to an infertile couple in 1982, she allegedly first told the mother that the child had died; then that it was going to be adopted, and that if she made a fuss she’d be accused of adultery and lose her other child (never mind that adultery wasn’t a crime). When the child grew up and, with the help of her adoptive father, tracked Sor María down, the nun apparently told her that her mother had been a prostitute who didn’t want her. But after watching a TV programme about the daughter and her search, the mother came forward and DNA tests confirmed the relationship.

The case against Sor María is unusual only in that it has got so far. In the last few years, hundreds of cases have been dismissed for lack of evidence: systematically destroyed records make it hard to prove how this traffic persisted long after democracy was restored. The WHO seems never to have noticed the surprising levels of reported infant mortality in Spain. The San Ramón clinic in Madrid allegedly kept a baby in a freezer to show mothers as the ‘corpse’. A culture of female submissiveness and respect for the Church prevented poor and vulnerable women from acting on their suspicions.

What became a business began as a Fascist experiment in biopsychiatry. In 1938, Franco set up a Gabinete de Investigaciones Psicológicas to conduct Nazi-inspired experiments on prisoners (men from the International Brigades, Republican women) to try to identify a ‘red gene’ or the ‘psychophysical roots of Marxism’. The precise nature of the experiments remains obscure. In 1939 it was concluded that children would have to be taken away from their degenerate (or executed) parents, and re-educated in nice Catholic families.

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Bahrain’s government must stop killing its people, and listen to them

Ali Alaswad writes: When 100,000 or more people take to the streets in protest, governments in most parts of the world would see it as a sign that they need to change course – especially in a country with only about 600,000 citizens.

But Bahrain is no ordinary country. Its prime minister, Khalifa bin Salman Al Khalifa, has been in office for more than 40 years and his nephew, King Hamad, insists there is no opposition as such: “We only have people with different views… and now they are talking with their brothers.”

So far, though, there has been no move towards serious dialogue, instead just a campaign of repression that has claimed at least 80 lives and created hundreds of political prisoners.

We in the opposition have reiterated time and again our calls for “meaningful dialogue”, as President Obama put it. We stand ready to move the country forward towards a democratic future, but the only engagement from the authorities has been violence, not discussion.

Rather than address our demands, the government has resorted to peddling lies to discredit our movement internationally – a strategy it has used since day one of this crisis, which shows its complete refusal to reform. Last October we published The Manama Document to show our roadmap to reform. The government has ignored this and we have received no official response.

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Afghanistan falls apart

Karen Leigh writes: Near a busy intersection where burqa-clad women beg for spare change at car windows, Mahmoud Saikal, Afghanistan’s former deputy foreign minister, sat under a photo of this capital city’s crowded hillside neighborhoods in the stately living room of his compound.

“If you are from Kabul,” he says, “you can find your place of birth in this photo.”

It’s the only landscape not changing in Afghanistan.

A series of American blunders in the past few months has raised questions about whether the decade-long U.S. mission in Afghanistan is doomed to failure. In February, reports that copies of the Quran had been burnt at a NATO base sparked protests across the country that left dozens dead. And last month, Staff Sgt. Robert Bales murdered 17 Afghan civilians in cold blood — returning to his base in Kandahar province mid-massacre before going out to kill again. Meanwhile, the Afghan security forces are increasingly turning on their trainers: Three NATO soldiers were killed by Afghan police and military members on March 26 — the latest of more than 80 coalition troops who have lost their lives in this way since 2007.

The escalating string of disasters has led to an increasingly contentious debate within President Hamid Karzai’s inner circle between officials who say Afghanistan is better off without the United States and those who see the American presence as necessary for security. But even among America’s erstwhile allies, there is a profound disappointment at the gap between the grandiose U.S. pledges and the dismal reality on the ground in Afghanistan.

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Pakistani scoffs at new U.S. bounty on him

Robet Mackey reports: As my colleague Declan Walsh reports, the United States announced on Monday that it is offering a reward of up to $10 million for “information leading to the arrest and conviction of” Hafiz Saeed, a Pakistani militant leader accused of orchestrating the 2008 Mumbai attacks.

Theoretically, the American bounty should make information about Mr. Saeed’s whereabouts as potentially valuable as the home address of the Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar, who is rumored to live in Pakistan. Unlike the Taliban leader, though, Mr. Saeed lives openly in Lahore and even managed to attend a protest in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, last week, frustrating efforts by the police to keep him from attending.

A separate reward of up to $2 million was offered for information leading to the capture of Hafiz Abdul Rahman Makki, Mr. Saeed’s brother-in-law, which moved him in to 39th place on the American list of most valuable militants.

Within hours of the American announcement, Mr. Saeed mocked the idea that he and his relatives are in hiding by saying in a telephone interview with Al Jazeera: “We’re not hiding in caves for rewards to be set on finding us. We are addressing hundreds of thousands of people daily in Pakistan.”

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