The Saudi-Israeli-French Axis of Anxiety Over US-Iran Rapprochement

As US-Iran rapprochement inches toward at least partial consummation in Geneva, I wish to offer a few observations:

1)       The Iran nuclear weapons threat has always been a McGuffin, an excuse for various powers to advance an anti-Iran agenda.

2)      Chief among the usual suspects is, of course, Israel under PM Netanyahu.  If the Israeli government is able to spin Iran as a nuclear (almost) capable existential threat to Israel, then Israel can make an absolute claim on US sympathy, support, and protection.  If Iran returns to good relations with the United States, the US will arguably become less willing to bear the sizable political, diplomatic, and economic cost of deferring to Israel’s priorities—on the Palestinian question, on regional security, and its obstinate refusal to acknowledge its nuclear arsenal and integrate it into the international arms control regime.

3)      The other regional power most interested in thumping the Iran-threat drum is Saudi Arabia.  However, I would argue that the high-profile anti-Iran stance of the Kingdom (probably symbolized but not necessarily created by the notorious Prince Bandar) has little to do with the threat of “Iran hegemonism” (a canard frequently retailed in the big-name press) and a lot to do with Saudi Arabia’s decision to go pro-active against the popular democratic agitation expressed by the Arab Spring uprisings by supporting conservative Sunni theology and governance, not just in Shi’ite inflected countries like Bahrain, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria, but also in nations like Libya (where Saudi Arabia and its creature, the Gulf Co-Operation Council were the primary motive force in demanding intervention against Gaddafi) and Egypt.  It’s easy for Saudi Arabia to piggyback on the anti-Iran campaign promoted by the US and Israel and cite Iranian subversion as a pretext for the campaign of conservative Sunni rollback; if Iran is removed from the league table of existential enemies subverting the Sunni heartland, Saudi Arabia is left in the exposed position of protecting Wahhabi obscurantism against liberal democracy.  That’s not a happy place to be.

4)      Western observers have been rather surprised by France’s unapologetic sabotage of the Iran nuclear negotiations in Geneva at Israel's behest.  I saw some left-of-center complaining that France’s motivation was the greedy desire to muscle in on the lucrative Saudi arms business.  Perhaps, but I think the strategic nature of French involvement should be emphasized.  Recall that France’s traditional sphere of influence in the Middle East has been the Levant—that chunk of coastline that includes southern Turkey, Syria, and Lebanon.  France claims a paternal interest in the bloody, fascistic and pro-Israeli antics of the Lebanese Maronite community, a Catholic grouping whose origins date back to the Crusades and is perhaps the most conspicuous legacy of the French enthusiasm for meddling in the Middle East.  Before Syria blew up, France was at the center of an initiative to install Bashar al-Assad in the affections of the West.  Also, recall that the Libyan adventure was a creature of French enthusiasm; that France was also easily the most eager advocate of a US military strike on Syria after somebody crossed President Obama’s gas warfare red line.  With the United States displaying a desire to tilt toward Iran, if only a little bit, the Middle East jigsaw puzzle has been shaken up and France has the best potential of any Western power to shape and profit from the new alignment.  We can justifiably bitch about France carrying Israel’s water, but if the US pivots toward Asia, as it has promised, there is a strong case for redefining the Arab Middle East as a Mediterranean construct, with France playing the role of keystone (and Iran scolder-in-chief).  If Iran wants a European ally, well, Germany is probably there for the asking.

For the edification of China Matters readers, I offer two pieces from the archives below the fold.

First, a piece on the longstanding Saudi eagerness to push dissent into the sectarian pigeonhole, not only in Bahrain but in the entire Persian Gulf region. Hopefully, this provides a corrective to the rather ludicrous assertions of Iranian subversion, typified by allegations that the minority Assad regime is suicidally promoting sectarianism in Syria. The truth is, the Sunni affiliation of the Syrian majority is considered to be a dragon to be awakened in the service of conservative Saudi rollback against non-sectarian democracy, both in the kingdom and in the region.

Second, a discussion of the perennial question of whether Israel can pose a credible unilateral threat to Iran’s nuclear program with a military strike. When I originally wrote the post, it was considered unlikely that Saudi Arabia would provide refueling facilities to Israeli fighter bombers, and plausible that the US occupying forces in Iraq might provide the service. How things have changed. Under the current circumstances, I would say that Saudi Arabia’s enthusiasm for fighting to the last American has simply been transferred to Israel. I think that neither Israel nor Saudi Arabia have the stomach to bomb Iran and, perhaps, start a regional war without strong US backing of the sort that the Obama administration appears loathe to provide; hope I’m right. In any case, the real game is in Syria and western Iraq, regions that if not for that exasperating problem of al Qaeda blowback, would be viewed with unalloyed joy as fertile fields for conservative Sunni rollback and continued bloodshed, no matter what happens with Iran.

Enter Realpolitik

Is the US Thinking About Backpedaling on North Korean Nukes?  Will the Pivot Go Wobbly?

Will President Obama become a late and unlikely convert to realpolitik and allow John Kerry to sacrifice America’s nuclear non-proliferation principles on the battered altar of North Korean diplomacy?

And will the fearsome pivot to Asia turn into a dainty pirouette, an American pas de deux with China as the two great powers search for a way to dance around the North Korean nuclear problem?

Potentially, the North Korean nuclear crisis is a good thing for the US and South Korea--and perhaps even for China!—if President Obama is ready to bend on some cherished non-proliferation beliefs.

That’s what the North Korean leadership is begging him to do, amid the nuclear uproar.

His Secretary of State, John Kerry, seems to be interested in getting, if not on the same page, in the same chapter with North Korea, and maybe pick up a geopolitical win (with Chinese acquiescence) similar to the successful effort to push Myanmar (Burma) out of its exclusive near-China orbit.

John Kerry is very much the pragmatist—normalization of US-Vietnam relations was his signature geostrategic success as US Senator—and apparently would enjoy negotiating with the North Koreans and weaning them away from the Chinese at the cost of finessing the nuclear weapons issue.

On the occasion of his press conference in Seoul on April 12, Secretary Kerry had some interesting things to say.

First, in a backhanded way, he repudiated the previous policy of non-engagement, saying [President Park] “wants to try to do to change a mold that obviously has not worked very effectively over the last years”.

Secondly, on the nuke issue he stated:

North Korea will not be accepted as a nuclear power.

Kerry made the remark in the context of opening the door a crack to discussions, not trying to rally an international coalition to remove an entrenched DPRK nuclear weapons program that otherwise is clearly not going anywhere.

I don’t think I’m reading too much into this statement to interpret it to mean “It will be unacceptably embarrassing to the United States if North Korea tries to compel formal US acceptance of North Korean nukes along the lines of the bullshit deal we did with India, so Pyongyang better be prepared to throw me a goddam bone like, hey, we are also committed to the eventual denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.”

Or, in Kerry-speak:

They simply have to be prepared to live up to the international obligations and standards which they have accepted, and make it clear they will move to denuclearization as part of the talks, and those talks could begin.

It also remains to be seen if President Obama will agree with Secretary Kerry (who, I believe, is not a member of the President’s true inner circle temperamentally or ideologically)  that some incremental and perhaps temporary improvement in the North Korean situation is adequate compensation for the muddying of the US pivot and non-proliferation messages.  

President Obama’s decision will probably hinge on whether he decides that recent leadership changes—and the potential for tectonic realignments in the region’s geopolitics—present an opportunity worth seizing.

To understand why, one has to look at the complicated geopolitical relations of the major players, the rivals, and the haters, especially South Korea.

All five of the nations directly involved in the current imbroglio on the Korean peninsula experienced leadership transitions over the last six months, either through election (US, Japan, and South Korea), selection (the People’s Republic of China), or demise (the DPRK-- Democratic People’s Republic of Korea—a.k.a. North Korea).

The most important change was the one least noticed in the West: the election of Mdme. Park Geun-hye as president of South Korea.

Mdme. Park succeeded Lee Myung-bak, whose intransigent “MB” policy toward North Korea had frozen Korean diplomacy for the last six years.  

Mdme. Park’s stated intention is to mix some carrot with the stick in what she calls “trust-politik” in a quest for reunification.  She has put engagement and discussions back on the proposed North-South agenda.

Since the ROK, as the frontline state with the most skin in the Korean game, holds a de facto veto over US North Korean policy, Mdme. Park’s shift means that the Obama administration has the option of transitioning from the policy of “strategic patience” a.k.a. malign neglect that prevailed during the Lee Myung-bak years, to consideration of some kind of engagement with Pyongyang in coordination with Seoul.

Unfortunately, what Pyongyang really needs is something that the United States is loath to grant: some kind of diplomatic and economic rapprochement that includes acceptance of the DPRK’s nuclear weapon and missile programs, which provide the best assurance of continued US forbearance, engagement, and, potentially, active and positive interest in the regime’s survival.

The administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama can shoulder much of the blame for North Korea’s unwillingness to abandon its nukes.  For North Korea, the Iraq invasion highlighted the dangers of being nuke-free in the face of US antipathy; the Libyan adventure (which occurred after Libya’s full denuclearization, return to the good graces of the IAEA, a multi-billion dollar financial settlement, the opening of Libya’s oil industry to Western exploitation, and a restoration of diplomatic relations and security exchanges with the United States) demonstrated that surrendering one’s nukes in return for rapprochement could quickly turn into a death sentence.

It is now generally accepted in the foreign policy establishment that the DPRK in its current configuration will never give up its nuclear weapons.  Indeed, as the current crisis demonstrates, North Korea is committed to testing and improving its arsenal as quickly as possible under the cover of the general uproar.

The nuclear embarrassment is compounded by the fact that North Korea is not content to wait passively for whatever policies that the US and ROK jointly decide, in the spirit of mercy or malice, to impose on the DPRK.

Although the ROK’s new interest in reducing tensions on the peninsula is a prerequisite for America taking another bite out of the rather gamey North Korean negotiating apple, the DPRK does not like to see the United States deferring to Seoul on North Korea issues and thereby letting the initiative pass to South Korea.  

It doesn’t want discussion to focus on the ROK’s priority—reunification-- which would give the whip hand to President Park and deprive Pyongyang of the opportunity to play divide and rule and lure the United States into a deal that might suit Washington’s geopolitical obsessions (like sticking a finger in China’s eye) while giving shorter shrift to awkward South Korean priorities (like reunification-related reforms, further economic and investment goodies for the ROK in the North or at the very least the promise of some better behavior from Pyongyang). 

In order to suit its US-centric negotiating strategy, the DPRK wishes the North Korean issue framed in the context of the US priority--nuclear security.

So the DPRK turns to its cherished geopolitical card, actually its only geopolitical card,  nuclear brinksmanship, in order to demand that the world negotiate with it on its terms—and the United States, as the self-professed guarantor of Asian security and godfather of the global nuclear weapons non-proliferation regime, negotiate directly with Pyongyang instead of huddling with Seoul.

This must be an extremely aggravating dilemma for the White House.

North Korea is, after all, a Burma en ovo—in other words, a socialist Asian regime eager to normalize relations with the United States and free itself of its utter dependence on the overbearing and exploitative mandarins of the PRC for access to Western trade, investment, technology, and diplomatic good offices.

And the DPRK is, through its nuclear posturing, is yelling It’s time for the DPRK and USA to get into a room alone, without the ROK and the PRC, and make a deal that suits us both!

Hwever, explicitly accepting North Korea’s nuclear weapons program is a tough sell for President Obama, for reasons that go beyond the danger of a nuclear DPRK, a stated adversary of the US and ROK (relations are still governed by the armistice that ended the Korean War, and no peace treaty has been signed), or the awkwardness of disappointing the Nobel Peace Prize committee (which awarded the coveted tin to President Obama in anticipation of his future contributions to nuclear non-proliferation, not what he had already done a.k.a. zip).

The key obstacle to adopting a live and let live attitude toward North Korea’s nukes is that neither South Korea nor Japan are interested in living as non-nuclear neighbors to a North Korea that is happily and aggressively developing its nuclear weapons and missile assets.

Thanks to some dubious decision-making by the United States, Japan is a de facto nuclear weapons power, already possessing the technology, space program, and plutonium metal needed to weaponize its nuclear industry.

The Republic of Korea would like to tread the same path as Japan, and is attempting to renegotiate its main nuclear disadvantage vis a vis Japan—the US refusal to let South Korea “close the fuel cycle”  i.e. perform the extraction and refining of plutonium from fuel rods on a variety of plausible pretexts, such as the ROK’s need to offer a full slate of nuclear fuel services as it competes with Japan to sell reactors to the Middle East, or in order to reduce the load of spent fuel rods in its overcrowded cooling ponds.

For its part, the United States is trying to keep the ROK/Japan nuclear weapons genies in the bottle (or, in the case of Japan, try to pretend that the stopper has not already been removed) since, in a region suddenly bristling with prosperous, nuke-wielding powers, the US would be well on the way to losing its self-claimed role as essential security guarantor, arms-race preventer, and beloved pivoteer in the West Pacific.

When Secretary Kerry touts “denuclearization of the Korean peninsula” he is also messaging to South Korea that the United States, for selfish as well as good reasons, would like to see the ROK to eschew its own nuclear weapons ambitions and find some other way to manage the unpleasantness of the DPRK’s program.

Ironically, this puts the US on the same page with China, albeit for different reasons (China has reason to worry about actually getting blown up by local nukes, not just suffering an embarrassing loss of regional stature).

However, it appears that the easy solution to the whole regional nuclear arms mess—denuclearizing the DPRK—is not feasible.

The difficult solution—finessing the DPRK nuclear program while managing the anxieties and opportunism of Japan and the ROK—is beyond the unaided efforts of the United States.

The combined, genuine, and active good offices of China, the ROK, and the US are probably required to reassure and reward the DPRK’s understandably paranoid leadership and perform the well-nigh impossible feat of transitioning North Korea from the scary and unacceptable “impoverished dangerous dingbat nuclear weapons dictatorship” category to the acceptable class of “rapidly developing junior partner in Asian prosperity that just happens to be a single-party authoritarian state with nuclear weapon and missile capabilities”, in other words a mini-China.

The United States continues to gag on the nuclear weapons issue, both for some very good reasons relating to the potential for a regional nuclear arms race and a subsequent decline in US clout, and the expectation born of rich experience that whatever deal is made with the DPRK will quickly turn to shit.

But, judging by Secretary Kerry’s remarks, Washington may be enticed by the idea that an incremental US geopolitical win on North Korea and a general easing of Asian tensions might be adequate compensation for the sacrifice of nuclear non-proliferation principles.

The Obama administration, whose first term China policy was characterized by the relentless (and to my mind, counterproductive) zero-sum tensions of the Asian pivot executed by Secretary of State Clinton, may be thinking about using the North Korean crisis as the opportunity for a reset of US-China relations through the incremental pursuit of win-win scenarios under Secretary Kerry.

In a hopeful sign, the discourse over North Korea has recently moved beyond simple-minded  and futile US chest-thumping military displays to some convoluted US messaging apparently inviting China to participate in the North Korean slicing and dicing with the prospect that, in return, the China-containment element of the Asian pivot might be soft-pedaled.

China, intent on sustaining the viability of its North Korean buffer/de facto economic subsidiary, has not yet responded in any meaningful way to Secretary Kerry’s blandishments.

Beijing will probably wait and see if the US can find its own way out of the denuclearization cul-de-sac and offer the plausible prospect of a viable North Korean state that has not become a US/South Korean proxy antagonistic to China (in other words, a socialist state that has partially reconciled with the West but somehow retained its nuclear and missile capabilities).

However, Beijing has already resigned itself, albeit grudgingly, to dilution of its once total domination of Myanmar/Burma, and, as tussles within the editorial suites of the official Chinese media reveal, is obviously debating the possibility that distancing itself from North Korea might be acceptable and even a good thing for China.

The flip side to Chinese equivocation over North Korea is the PRC’s determination to ingratiate itself with the Park administration, and wean the ROK (whose economic importance to China vastly outweighs that of the DPRK) away from the US/Japan security axis into a closer diplomatic and economic relationship with China.  It would be logical, therefore, to expect that the PRC will cautiously partner with the ROK—and through it, the US-- on its North Korean initiatives, if only to smooth the PRC-ROK relationship.

So the stars may be aligning for something sensible to happen on North Korea.

Maybe.

Photo credits:   

Nutcracker image from www.oktoberfesthaus.com

Jonathan Jordan and Maki Onuki of The Washington Ballet in George Balanchine’s ‘Stars and Stripes.’ Photo by Brianne Bland, courtesy of The Washington Ballet.

News Flash: GI Joe Discovers Nuclear Weapons in Israel

The movie GI Joe: Retaliation is crap.

To call it a video game movie is an insult to good video games.  It is a bad video game movie.

The expository scenes—where the characters move their mouths and words come out—are treated as cut scenes i.e. brief pauses to reward players with a bathroom break after they have completed a previous level, and provide the arbitrary framing that enables another session of witless, button-mashing mayhem on the next level.

Fans of common sense, physics, and conservation of momentum will be amused and/or appalled by the revelation—spoiler alert!—that Cobra’s super weapon is a gravity bomb…released from an orbiting satellite.

The audience’s primary diversion during and after the film is ridiculing the logical inconsistencies and plot holes in the movie—and noting the numerous missed opportunities for comic relief (obviously, the dubious determination was made that action, no matter how absurd, sells and character and comedy do not play in the critical foreign markets).  The possibilities are virtually limitless.

However, GI Joe: Retaliation does perform one remarkable geopolitical service.  It treats the existence of Israel’s undeclared nuclear weapons arsenal as a matter of fact.

When the world’s nuclear weapons powers are gathered for an asinine episode of Armageddon brinksmanship orchestrated by Cobra, the attendees are: USA, France, Great Britain, Russia, China, India, North Korea…and Israel (in the first act of the movie, Pakistan was deemed unworthy of retaining its nuclear weapons and was summarily disarmed by the GI Joe team, thereby forfeiting its place at the atomic roundtable).

I wonder how this plot point snuck into the movie.  Perhaps the producers believe they will lock in the lucrative Iranian market with the admission that Israel is, indeed, a covert nuclear weapons power.

In any case, it was interesting to see.  Pretty much the only interesting thing in GI Joe: Retaliation.

Israel Attack on Iran: Same BS Different Day

“Israel to attack Iran” is a hardy if never-blooming perennial.  I rerun this post (originally written on the occasion of Israel’s bombing of an alleged nuclear facility in Syria in 2007) every year as a reminder of the rather daunting technical issues involved in flying from Israel to Iran and blowing things up in a truly convincing fashion, even as the same threats are put forward again and again.

Blowing things up in a truly convincing fashion involves a) flying there b) getting refueled in mid-air c) getting rearmed d) going back and do it again and again against Iran’s dispersed and hardened nuclear facilities.

So it won’t be an orgasmic one-off like the Osiraq reactor strike against Iraq, a nice quasi-surgical demonstration of civilized Israeli warfare.  It would be a grinding, prolonged assault, presumably with plenty of Iranian casualties, and with the unmistakable, sustained assistance of a local ally to keep the planes in the air.

Iran’s nuclear facilities are beyond the combat range of Israel’s fighter bombers.  So Israeli planes would not only need to overfly Iraq or Saudi Arabia and/or Turkey with or without permission; they would have need to get refueled over Iraq or Saudi Arabia as well on the return trip.

It doesn’t look like the US is going to provide refueling facilities, leaving it up to local partners (unlikely/infeasible) or Israel itself.

This year, the presence of a pro-Iranian government in Iraq would make it necessary for Israel to cross Iraqi airspace without permission, and defy the Iraqi government in prolonged fashion by having Israel’s tankers hovering over Iraq for multiple bouts of mid-air refueling.

And I don’t think Turkey’s going to be keen about permitting overflight, since they aren’t even signing on to the proposed bilateral sanctions against Iran.

That leaves the Saudis.  Saudi Arabia is in the midst of an aggressive rollback against Iran in particular and Shi’ites in general, and the London Times quoted an anonymous Saudi source as saying Israeli jets attacking Iran would be waved through Saudi airspace.

Doesn’t quite pass the smell test for me, though.  I don’t think the Saudi government is happy to harass the Iranians, but I don’t think they have the stomach for taking the Israeli side in a full-blown war.

On the record comments in December from Turki al-Faisal, Saudi Arabia’s top security honcho, will undoubtedly be dismissed as disinformation by Western observers because he’s calling for a nuclear-free Middle East (a slap at Israel!), but I think his statement more closely reflect Saudi reality:

Replying to a question about the possibility of an attack on Iran to force it to roll back its nuclear program and the impact of such an action, Prince Turki reiterated that the impact will be “calamitous … cataclysmic, not just catastrophic.”

He said that Iranian actions have provoked worldwide opposition but at the same time suggests that Iran's nuclear program is being singled out, while Israel is being given a clean chit. Any unilateral decision to launch a military attack aimed at halting the nuclear program of Iran could have huge consequences, he warned.

As to the technical issues of refueling, the IDF has made a big deal of demonstrating that it does not need US refueling services, as this report indicates:

In the last days of May and first week of June, 2008, Israel staged an impressive and well-reported exercise over Crete with the participation of the Greek air force. More than 100 Israeli F-16 and F-15 fighter jets, as well as Israeli rescue helicopters and mid-air refueling planes flew a massive number of mock strikes. Israeli planes reportedly never landed but were continuously refueled from airborne platforms. Israel demonstrated that a 1400 km distance could be negotiated with Israeli aircraft remaining aloft and effective. Iran’s Natanz nuclear enrichment facility is 1400 km from Israel.

Early in 2011, the Jersusalem Post reported Israel took delivery of a 707 for conversion into a tanker for refueling its F15-I fighter bombers coming back for Iran.  How many additional tankers Israel has is “classified”, but an unsourced thread puts the total number of converted 707s to eight.

The JPost article went on to say:

The air force has conducted a major upgrade of its tanker fleet in recent years and now plans to wait for the US Air Force to choose its future tanker before buying additional aircraft.

Reading between the lines, maybe the United States is not particularly keen on delivering tankers and enhancing Israel’s capability to conduct unilateral air operations against Iran.

Accordingto Karl Vick at Time magazine, Israel doesn’t have the tanker capacity or, for that matter the ordnance, to devastate Iran for weeks:

What everyone agrees, however, is that as formidable as the Israeli Air Force is, it simply lacks the capacity to mount the kind of sustained, weeks-long aerial bombardment required to knock down Iran’s nuclear program, with the requisite pauses for damage assessments followed by fresh waves of bombing.  Without forward platforms like air craft carriers, Israel’s air armada must rely on mid-air refueling to reach targets more than 1,000 miles away, and anyone who reads Israel’s order of battle sees it simply doesn’t have but a half dozen or so.  Another drawback noted by analysts is Israel’s inventory of bunker-busting bombs, the sort that penetrate deep into concrete or rock that shield the centrifuge arrays at Natanz and now Fordow, near Qum.  Israel has loads of GBU-28s, which might penetrate Natanz. But only the U.S. Air Force has the 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrator that could take on Fordow, the mountainside redoubt where critics suspect Iran would enrich uranium to military levels.

So, why do we keep talking about Israel’s threats to attack Iran?

I’ve frequently commented that the main purpose of the attack-Iran threat is to yank America’s chain, and forestall possible rapprochement between the United States and Iran.

The Obama administration knows this, I think, and I find its politically-motivated willingness to continue with the sanctions charade, and the low level but cruel and destabilizing program of assassination, sabotage, and economic warfare against Iran rather shameful.

Friday, October 05, 2007

 

The Mystery of the Dropped Fuel Tanks

An e-mail from a reader concerning the Israeli raid on a purported North-Korea-linked military facility in Syria stated:

FYI, the combat radius of an F-15 in deep strike mode is 1800km
The distance to the Syrian target is ~ 700 km.

No need for drop tanks........

Hmmm. Too interesting to pass up.

The Internet is a treasure trove for armchair commanders and aviation and weapons enthusiasts. Industrious googling yielded the following information:

During the raid, some Israeli aircraft jettisoned two external fuel tanks up by the Turkish border.

The tanks were from an F-15I fighter bomber , called the “Ra’am” or “Thunder”, itself the Israeli variant of the F-15E Strike Eagle.

In agreement with my correspondent, the Observer states the Ra’am is:

...the newest generation of Israeli long-range bomber, which has a combat range of over 2,000km when equipped with the drop tanks.

But I think the Observer (and perhaps *gasp* a loyal reader) got it wrong. Either they confused cruising range with combat range, or confused the current F15I with its previous incarnations (for instance the F15C does have a combat radius of 2000 km).

The F-15E is a completely different animal from previous F-15s, which were sleek interceptors, designed “without a pound for the ground” i.e. no air to ground armament, for those days of air-to-air combat with the parfait knights of the Soviet bloc.

The F-15E is a big, fat hog of a plane, sometimes nicknamed the Flying Tennis Court, or Rodan for its resemblance to the ungainly but murderous superpterodactyl featured in the Godzilla movies.

It’s meant to carry big bombs and missiles to blow up stuff on the ground and the people standing in it or next to it, and fight its way out if necessary.

So it’s got bigger engines and less range than previous F15s.

According to the data I dug up, the F-15E has a combat radius—the distance it can be expected to fly for a mission assuming high speed, fuel-consuming maneuvers--of 790 miles (see here and here ).

To achieve this radius, it needs its internal fuel plus external fuel.

Internal fuel capacity is 5,952 kg.

External fuel consists of two components:

Conforming fuel tanks or CFTs with a total capacity of 4500 kg. They are integral parts of the plane—one report I read said the plane isn’t really designed to fly without them—and can’t be jettisoned.

Then there’s another 5500 kg in conventional external fuel tanks—the kind that were dropped during the mission.

With a fistful of caveats, the combat radius for an F-15I without the external fuel tanks would be around 500+ miles.

Distance from the Hatzerim airbase (home of the F-15I-equipped 69th Squadron) near Beersheba to Dayr az Zawr: 420 miles.

So you might think that the conventional external fuel tanks weren’t needed for this particular mission, and the only reason to carry them was for road-testing prior to some Iran-related hanky-panky.

Maybe yes, maybe no.

If the Israelis really did bomb Dayr az Zawr, it’s unclear why they went barnstorming up to the Turkish border a hundred miles away.

But they certainly did go, and to fly that kind of mission including a flyby of the Turkish border, I think they would need the external fuel tanks.

Maybe the Turkey excursion was to test some fancy new electronic countermeasures equipment mounted on another plane, called “Suter”, to disrupt Russian air defense hardware recently supplied to Syria—and Iran, for Israel’s benefit and our own.

Aviation Week put out the story courtesy of “U.S. officials”:

A Kuwaiti newspaper wrote that "Russian experts are studying why the two state-of-the art Russian-built radar systems in Syria did not detect the Israeli jets entering Syrian territory. Iran reportedly has asked the same question, since it is buying the same systems and might have paid for the Syrian acquisitions."


We got a certain amount of military chest-thumping about how cool this new gear is, but these planes only jettison their fuel tanks if they’ve been engaged and need extra speed and mobility, which leads one to believe it couldn’t have worked too great.

As to Israeli insistence that they’ll take out Iran if we can’t get off our collective rears, I found this analysis interesting and persuasive.

It argues that the Israeli air force simply doesn’t have the horses to haul the armament needed to make a terminal dent in the hardened and dispersed Iranian facilities on a 1200-mile mission—remember, more fuel means fewer weapons carried--unless the U.S. either assists in the refueling of the Israeli planes or allows them to stage the assault U.S. from bases in Iraq.

And maybe not even then.

Bottom line:

Theoretically, the Israelis could do this, but at great risk of failure. If they decide to attack Natanz, they will have to inflict sufficient damage the first time - they probably will not be able to mount follow-on strikes at other facilities.

When all the analyses are done, there is only one military capable of the sustained widespread air operations required to eliminate Iran's nuclear weapons research program - the United States.

So it looks like the Israelis could start something—but it would be up to Uncle Sam to finish the job.

I take this as support for my thesis that a key data point for Israel from the Syria raid was the nature of the U.S. support it did—or did not—elicit, and what that would mean for Israel if it conducted a dramatic but less than conclusive raid on Natanz with the hope that the U.S. could be dragged into the campaign.

So: War with Iran—it’s up to us. Don’t know whether that’s reassuring or disturbing.

Outta Control!

The World Doesn’t Have a Pakistan Nukes Problem…It Has a David Albright Problem

As AFP tells us, the Institute for Science and International Security just published a report on Pakistan’s nuclear program that seems designed to pour gasoline on the “the Pakistani nuclear program is outta control” story.

And, when you look at the story, there isn’t a whole lot of there there.

The commercial [satellite] images reveal a major expansion of a chemical plant complex near Dera Ghazi Kahn that produces uranium hexalfuoride and uranium metal, materials used to produce nuclear weapons.

Big whoop, I must say. The Pakistanis love their nuclear weapons, and it’s not surprising—as a sovereign state outside the NPT—they might decide to make some more.

The only conceivable takeaway from this report is muddled alarmism, which ISIS obligingly provides.

Given turmoil in Pakistan with the army waging war against Taliban militants in the northwest, the ISIS said the "security of its nuclear assets remains in question."

"An expansion in nuclear weapons production capabilities needlessly complicates efforts to improve the security of Pakistan’s nuclear assets," it said.

I don’t get it. How are things suddenly more complicated by an expansion in capacity?

Washington, apparently believing that it doesn’t have enough on its plate with al Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban and the Pakistan Taliban, is suddenly awash with dramatic plans to add a self-created problem to the mix: a quixotic effort to wrest Pakistan’s nuclear weapons out of the hands of the Army if the situation deteriorates.

And selling that idea seems to require fomenting an irrational panic concerning Pakistan’s nuclear program, as a metastasizing cancerous problem that’s getting BIGGER and BIGGER if we don’t DO SOMETHING.

You know what it smells like to me?

It smells like an effort by some to put a radical U.S. nuclear counterproliferation doctrine on the table now, so when it’s the end of the year and it’s time to deal with that other Muslim country with the destabilizing nuclear capability—you know, the one on the other side of Afghanistan, the one that the Israelis are so upset about—public opinion has been primed to accept the idea that some combination of air strikes, special ops, and insertion of U.S. forces is needed to save the world from an Islamic nuclear program that’s…outta control!

A crisis in Pakistan—and high-profile U.S. handwringing over those dangerous Muslim nukes—might be the best thing that happens to Benjamin Netanyahu this year.

We’ll see.

Anyway, I don’t think we have a Pakistan nukes problem.

We have a reckless and cynical fearmongering problem that should ring alarm bells for anybody who remembers the Iraq war.

In a small way, I think we also have a David Albright problem.

ISIS is run by David Albright.

Scott Ritter delivered a devastating rip job on Albright in Truthdig last year, entitled The Nuclear Expert Who Never Was.

He characterized Albright as a dilettante wannabe nuclear weapons guy, who has self-promoted himself, his honorary doctorate, and his institute using the flimsiest of pretexts.

More importantly, Ritter identifies Albright’s key credential as a willingness to offer up uninformed and tendentious alarmism when the situation demands it.

Ritter’s conclusion sums up his feelings about Albright’s role in the nuclear non-proliferation debate:

Albright, operating under the guise of his creation, ISIS, has a track record of inserting hype and speculation about matters of great sensitivity in a manner which skews the debate toward the worst-case scenario. Over time Albright often moderates his position, but the original sensationalism still remains, serving the purpose of imprinting a negative image in the psyche of public opinion. This must stop. It is high time the mainstream media began dealing with David Albright for what he is (a third-rate reporter and analyst), and what he isn’t (a former U.N. weapons inspector, doctor, nuclear physicist or nuclear expert). It is time for David Albright, the accidental inspector, to exit stage right. Issues pertaining to nuclear weapons and their potential proliferation are simply too serious to be handled by amateurs and dilettantes.

Amen to that.