Biden says "we're discussing it" in response to question on hitting Iranian oil facilities
Posted by RaskolnikovX on October 3, 2024, 5:19 pm
and oil prices go way up. To be fair, "We're discussing it..." doesn't give much context but the fact that it is being talked about indicates potential escalation.
...no amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party...So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.
Re: Biden says "we're discussing it" in response to question on hitting Iranian oil facilities
It's unlikely that Israel would attack Iranian oil facilities. Iran would have an option of shutting down the Straight of Hormuz. As MoA opined that this would lead to:
... a rapid increase in oil prices and a severe hit on the Democratic chances in the ongoing election campaign.
Forgot to link the article: MoA: Biden Is Pushing Israel Towards Larger War
After being hit by some 200 Iranian missiles Israel has not yet dared to response to to the strike. It instead has launched new air attacks into the center of Beirut and its southern area known as Dahiyeh (which simply means suburb) with its predominantly Shia population.
Israel seems to have forgotten what attacks on Dahiyeh mean:
Hizbullah asserts that it has established a new deterrence equation: an Israeli attack on the al-Dahieh neighborhood in Beirut will be met with a retaliatory strike on Tel Aviv. ... According to Hizbullah, the new equation established by Hassan Nasrallah is that any attack on Tel Aviv will be the response to Israeli actions taken in the al-Dahieh district in Beirut. Hizbullah's new leadership will certainly adhere to that doctrine.
That Hizbullah has not been degraded by Israel's strikes at is leadership could be seen by yesterday's incursion attempts by the Israeli army into south Lebanon. Its special forces was immediately ambushed by Hizbullah forces. Eight of its soldiers were killed and many more wounded. Additional casualties were reported today.
Israel is now tempted to risk an all out war with Iran. There is little chance that such a war would achieve anything but an all out war in the Middle East, a rapid increase in oil prices and a severe hit on the Democratic chances in the ongoing election campaign.
Iran, who's ballistic missiles had no problems in passing Israels air defenses, has threatened an all out attack on Israel's infrastructure - electricity and gas installations as well as harbors - should Israel attempt to take revenge against Iran.
U.S. media still spreading the myth that the Biden administration is trying to hold back Israel.
The Washington Post for example headlines:
Biden works to limit conflict as Mideast edges closer to all-out war
However the piece admits that some views disagree strongly with its headline:
American officials say they are encouraging Israel to respond in a measured way, but U.S. allies in Europe are concerned that Washington is not putting sufficient pressure on the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “Our understanding is the Americans are not holding them back,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive military matter. Further down it comes to the heart of the issue:
Biden has been unwilling to use the most significant source of U.S. leverage — conditioning or suspending military aid to Israel — to try to change the dynamics of the war, as Israel has repeatedly rebuffed U.S. advice and counsel. Not for one moment has Biden tried to limit Israel's ability to strike on its neighbors. A headline in the Times of Israel even proclaims that Biden is urging Israel to launch a new strike:
Biden: US opposes Israel hitting Iran nuclear sites, response should be ‘proportional’
Speaking to reporters in Washington, Biden urged Israel to respond “proportionally” to the attack. Asked whether he backs a strike on Iranian nuclear sites, Biden responded: “The answer is no.” Yves at Naked Capitalism correctly notes that:
Biden’s Israel Policy Has Led Us to the Brink of War on Iran
Yves shows that its was U.S. treachery that preceded the Israeli attack on Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah:
We now learn that Nasrallah had agreed to the ceasefire shortly before he was assassinated and Israel or the US was affirmatively duplicitous, as if that comes as a surprise. Antiwar summarizes a CNN interview with the Lebanese foreign minister:
Lebanese Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib has said that Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah agreed to a US and French-proposed 21-day ceasefire with Israel right before Israel killed him.
Habib said the US and France told Lebanon that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also agreed to the ceasefire proposal.
“They told us that Mr. Netanyahu agreed on this, and so we also got the agreement of Hezbollah on that. And, you know what happened since then,” Habib told CNN host Christiane Amanpour.
I would put my bet on the misrepresentation being US doing, to secure agreement from Hezbollah and then hope they could use that to browbeat Israel into what it would contend was a short pause. Recall that the US has presented ceasefire proposals as originating with Israel and later ‘fessed up that they came from Biden.
It was this ceasefire lie by the Biden administration that enabled the Israeli strike which then prompted the moderate Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian to change his course. As I noted yesterday:
Pezeshkian noted rather bitterly that the order by the Israeli Prime Minister Natanyahoo to kill Nasrallah had been given from New York:
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian says the international community will not forget that the order for Israel’s terrorist act to assassinate Secretary General of the Lebanese Hezbollah resistance movement Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah was issued from New York. ... In a message of condolences on Saturday, Pezeshkian said the United States cannot absolve itself of complicity with the Zionists in the terror attack against the Hezbollah chief. The assassination of Nasrallah demonstrated that Pezeshkian's politics of moderation had failed.
After arriving back in Tehran Pezeshkian's tone had changed: ...
In a second point Yves presents evidence that the Iranian attack on Israel has caused significant damage and likely disabled significant parts of Israel's F-35 fighter forces.
She then quotes a Code Pink piece which concludes:
Biden has been out of his depth throughout this crisis, relying on political instincts from an era when acting tough and blindly supporting Israel were politically safe positions for American politicians. Secretary of State Antony Blinken rose to power through the National Security Council and as a Senate staffer, not as a diplomat, riding Biden’s coat-tails into a senior position where he is as out of his depth as his boss.
Meanwhile, pro-Iran militia groups in Iraq warn that, if the U.S. joins in strikes on Iran, they will target U.S. bases in Iraq and the region.
So we are careening toward a catastrophic war with Iran, with no U.S. diplomatic leadership and only Trump and Harris waiting in the wings. As Trita Parsi wrote in Responsible Statecraft, “If U.S. service members find themselves in the line of fire in an expanding Iran-Israel conflict, it will be a direct result of this administration’s failure to use U.S. leverage to pursue America’s most core security interest here — avoiding war.”
The U.S. has many indefensible assets in the Middle East. Its troops in Iraq and Syria are few and in precarious positions. Its bases in the Gulf states have no defense against attacks from Iran and its navel forces in the Middle East lack the ability to refuel the fleet.
Should Israel be allowed to strike Iran the security of all U.S. forces in the Middle East, the energy infrastructure of the whole region and the global oil supplies will be in danger of imminent destruction.
It is hight time for someone to wake the White House up to those facts.
Posted by b on October 3, 2024 at 13:20 UTC
Re: Forgot to link the article: MoA: Biden Is Pushing Israel Towards Larger War
I'm sure when it comes to oil, the red line really will be a line.
That's a second source talking about F35s being destroyed in the counter-attack. No wonder they don't want it reported.
I wonder what effect the clear failure of the Tofu Dome will have domestically? Might add pressure on the nutbag.
...no amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party...So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.
Re: Forgot to link the article: MoA: Biden Is Pushing Israel Towards Larger War
What part of that looks like "nothing getting through"? They are such liars....no amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party...So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.
Re: Forgot to link the article: MoA: Biden Is Pushing Israel Towards Larger War
I saw that clip where Satanyahoo was reading his script and his hands were trembling. He is cracking up like H : ) - No, not Houtie, or Hezbollah etc ...
https://x.com/KitKlarenberg/status/1841887833339879484...no amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party...So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.
Barak seems to be someone who is seen as apart from the Nuttyyahoo clique but is still very much a factor in the spook world there and what he predicts tends to happen more or less. So this is not good news.
Even more worrying are his comments on the nuclear situation. We can't set them back now, they will have a bomb in a year, etc. Same old stuff that Nutty says with his cartoons at the UN but Barak is usually seen as a more rational voice so this could be some early justification for some kind of tactical nuke use.
Israel may launch ‘symbolic’ attack on Iran nuclear facilities, says Ehud Barak
Israeli former prime minister says in interview it is too late to significantly set back Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, and that a ‘massive’ attack on Iran’s oil facilities is likely
Israel is likely to mount a large-scale airstrike against Iran’s oil industry and possibly a symbolic attack on a military target related to its nuclear programme, former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak has predicted.
Barak said there was no doubt there would be an Israeli military response to Iran’s assault on Tuesday with over 180 ballistic missiles, most of which were intercepted, but some landed on and around densely populated areas and Israeli military bases.
“Israel has a compelling need, even an imperative, to respond. I think that no sovereign nation on Earth could fail to respond,” Barak said in an interview.
The former prime minister, who also served as defence minister, foreign minister and army chief of staff, said the model for the Israeli response could be seen in Sunday’s reprisal airstrikes against Houthi-controlled oil facilities, power plants and docks in the Yemeni port of Hodeidah, a day after Houthi fired missiles aimed at Israel’s international airport outside Tel Aviv.
“I think we might see something like that. It might be a massive attack, and it could be repeated more than once,” he told the Guardian. Joe Biden said on Thursday there had been discussions in Washington about a possible Israeli attack on Iran’s oil sector, but it not give any details or make clear whether the US would support such an assault.
Barak, now aged 82, said there had also been suggestions in Israel that it should make use of this opportunity, in reprisal for the Iranian attack, to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, but he argued it would not significantly set back the Iranian programme.
When Barak served as defence minister from 2007 to 2013, under both Ehud Olmert and Benjamin Netanyahu, he was among Israel’s most vociferous advocates for bombing the Iranian nuclear facilities, trying and failing to convince presidents George Bush and then Barack Obama, to contribute US military might to the campaign. Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak speaks during a rally in Tel Aviv.
On Wednesday, Biden followed Obama in voicing his opposition to any Israeli strikes against Iranian nuclear sites. And Barak himself now accepts the Iran nuclear programme is too far advanced for any bombing campaign to set it back significantly.
“There are some commentators and even some people within the defence establishment who raised the question: Why the hell not hit the nuclear military programme?” Barak said. “A little bit more than a decade ago, I was probably the most hawkish person in Israeli leadership arguing that it was worth considering very seriously, because there was an actual capability to delay them by several years.
“That’s not the case right now, because Iran is a de facto threshold country,” he argued. “They do not have yet a weapon – it may take them a year to have one, and even half a decade to have a small arsenal. Practically speaking, you cannot easily delay them in any significant manner.”
Under a 2015 multilateral nuclear agreement, Tehran accepted tight restrictions on its uranium enrichment and other elements of its programme in exchange for sanctions relief, but that agreement has steadily fallen apart since the US withdrawal under Donald Trump in 2018.
Iran now has a stockpile of enriched uranium that is 30 times higher than the agreed 2015 limit, and it is enriching uranium to up to 60% purity, which in terms of the additional processing required, is very close to 90% weapons grade fissile material. Under the 2015 agreement, Iran’s “breakout time” – the period it would need to produce a nuclear bomb – was at least a year. Now it is a few weeks.
Barak believes there is pressure within the Netanyahu government for at least some symbolic strike against the Iranian programme, even though the former prime minister sees such a gesture as futile.
“You can cause certain damage, but even this might be perceived by some of the planners as worth the risk because the alternative is to sit idly by and do nothing,” Barak said. “So probably there will be even an attempt to hit certain nuclear-related targets.”
While Barak believes that a significant Israeli military response to Tuesday night’s Iranian military attack is now unavoidable and justifiable, he argues the drift to a regional war could have been averted much earlier, if Netanyahu had been open to a US-promoted plan to rally Arab support for a postwar Palestinian government in Gaza to replace Hamas. Instead, Israel’s incumbent prime minister opposed any political “day after” solution that recognised Palestinian sovereignty.
“I think that a strong response is inevitable. That doesn’t mean it was written in heaven a year ago that it’s going to happen,” Barak said. “There were probably several opportunities to limit this conflict before it turned into something like a full-scale Middle East clash. For reasons that cannot be explained under any strategic thought, Netanyahu rejected any kind of discussion of what we call ‘the day after’.
“I do not put the blame for the whole event on Netanyahu. This is basically the fault of Hamas and Hezbollah and Iran behind them,” Barak said. “But having said that, we have a responsibility to take action under a certain innate logic that understands the situation, the opportunity, and the constraints. There is an old Roman saying: ‘If you don’t know which port you want to reach, no wind will take you there.’”...no amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party...So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.
on October 3, 2024, 5:19 pm