The Washington Post reports that Iran is expanding uranium enrichment at its Fordow nuclear facility:
Fordow had ceased making enriched uranium entirely under the terms of the landmark 2015 Iran nuclear agreement. Iran resumed making the nuclear fuel there shortly after the Trump administration unilaterally withdrew from the accord in 2018.
Is anyone ever going to hold Trump to account over this? Trump canceled the nuclear deal for no better reason than his juvenile desire to undo anything that Obama had put in place. The result was a resumption of Iran's uranium processing and its probable ability to build a nuclear weapon in a few months.
The danger here is more proximate than a lot of people realize. Think about the array of forces at work. What happens if Israel is really and truly faced with an existential crisis involving, say, Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah all striking at once? If Israel were genuinely on the verge of losing, they'd hit back with nuclear weapons. And if they did that, Iran would probably retaliate.
I don't think this is likely. But it's certainly possible, and it's one reason that Hamas and its allies—both in Gaza and the West—are playing a stupid and dangerous game. It doesn't matter if they like it or not. It doesn't matter if they believe Israel is running an apartheid state. It doesn't matter if they have a good moral case or if the world is on their side. None of that matters. They know they can't win. Period. Even if they somehow put together the conventional forces needed to overrun Israel, they seem to have memory holed the fact that their enemy is a nuclear power. So all they can do is play ridiculous games based on hurting Israel but never hurting it quite enough to provoke a nuclear response. Victory is literally impossible.
Joe Biden said that the US would prevent Iran from getting a nuke.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-62155165
I gather that's as dead as Corn Pop and eaten by the Papua New Guinea cannibals together with Biden's Uncle Ambrose?
You do realize corn pop was a real person, and 50 years after joe's story Corn Pop's obituary still called him corn pop.
Please don't feed the troll. It only leaves its droppings to get attention. Starve the troll.
The game may be dangerous but not stupid. Israel is far to useful as a release valve to oppressive regimes and hurting Israel is better than not in their eyes.
Mmmh, the Middle East is already Nuclear, unless you think Israel is not part of the Middle East.
I know Pakistan is not one of the "Middle East" but they are only one country away from Iran.
Tom Friedman has a provocative take on things at the NY Times.
“Friedman, you would let Hamas’s leader, Yahya Sinwar, come out of his tunnel and declare victory?” Yes, I would.
I guess he thinks no one wins. Nukes are kind of irrelevant in this sort of thing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/18/opinion/netanyahu-gaza-congress.html
Since there are no good guys in the middle east and Sudan is similarly war torn...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/06/19/world/africa/sudan-darfur-siege.html
And since absolutely no one cares about the death and destruction there, the whole exercise is kind of silly. These people hate each other. They always will. With or without nukes, nothing good happens in or comes from the middle east. Not even the oil!
Every government leader involved is pretty much nuts as far as I'm concerned. They love war and have their various gods on their various sides. It's all nuts.
It takes two, and by this logic, Israel feels invincible because they have nukes and their enemies don't, so can get away with anything (which is not true).
South Africa was a nuclear power but the ANC still won. So to say that the Palestinians can't win because Israel in a nuclear power is refuted by history.
You don't think "things" are a little different when it is a war/struggle/whatnot within a single country?
Israel/Palestine is a single country in fact, just as SA and the bantustans were
Why bother living if death is always going to win? This is obviously a faulty frame, because life is not about winning, but living, and loving, and enjoying, and caring, and suffering, and pain, and hurt, and joy, and everything else, and at the least we hope to live with freedom and dignity just as the people in the Middle East do (hope).
Respect and dignity is what can be achieved, and what shouldn't have to be achieved by violent or nonviolent resistance (or vindictive righteousness/justice), if we actually believed in and stood behind our principles equally and without prejudice (which we don't and never have).
Selfishness is the root cause in all of this, and remains undefeated against whatever lofty aspirations of freedom, dignity, liberty, equality under law, non-aggression, and mutual respect that are the charters of the UN/ICC and the inspiration of philosophers and humanitarians past and present (along with really the gist of what Jesus was about).
But observationally Israel, even with nuclear weapons, can't win either.
And in aggregate the Arab community has more. people and more resources than Israel. They can win a game of attrition.
If Israel went nuclear, the Arabs states, Iran, and Turkey would very suddenly put all their differences aside to wipe it out. It is not a winning move.
Israel has more than one nuke and I doubt any of those countries would engage in an existential war with Israel if their cities could be the target of a second Israelis nuclear strike. A nuclear strike by Israel would garner lots of outrage by these countries and a return to a more active support for anti Israel non state actors but I strongly doubt they would risk a nuclear strike on their state to avenge one on Lebanon or Gaza.
“Estimates of Israel's stockpile range between 90 and 400 nuclear warheads, and the country is believed to possess the ability to deliver them in several methods, including by aircraft, as submarine-launched cruise missiles, and via the Jericho series of intermediate to intercontinental range ballistic missiles.”
Wikipedia
If Israel “went nuclear” it could end up being the Armageddon the Christian Nationalists are hoping for.
Trump also assassinated Qasem Soleimani, who had much influence with Hamas and may have advised against the October 7th military action. Removing the defensive strategist of the downtrodden Palestinians and Shiites of Lebanon allowed for the unleashing of pent up hostility from decades of Likud terror.
Hamas thanks you for your comment.
Hamas would thank me for asserting Soleimani would have advised against the October 7th military action? They should thank President Trump for removing an obstacle to the plan.
"...None of that matters. They know they can't win. Period. Even if they somehow put together the conventional forces needed to overrun Israel, they seem to have memory holed the fact that their enemy is a nuclear power. So all they can do is play ridiculous games based on hurting Israel but never hurting it quite enough to provoke a nuclear response. Victory is literally impossible."
How is this different than Ukraine versus Russia?
Russia doesn’t face an existential threat from Ukraine - even if Ukraine achieves its military objectives in whole. So a nuclear strike by Russia would piss off every other country in Europe to a degree that isn’t worth the likely repercussions for the tactical advantage it would provide in what is a relatively limited conflict for Russia (all land conflict confined to Ukraine). If the Ukraine army was marching on Moscow that would be a different matter.
I am certain that when nucs are next used it will be by a country run by religious zealots or by a psychopath true believer—no difference. I hope I’m not around by that time.
Their use is an irrational act an those folks are.
Now Drum has sunk to the level of attacking the abused wife for fighting back. Doesn't the abused wife know that she will only get hurt more if she fights back. She should just lie back and take it. Now Drum is making the same argument that Palestinians and their supporters should accept that resisting Israeli abuse just leads to more abuse so they should close their eyes and take it.
Tying it to nuclear weapons is a particularly silly way to make the argument. Israel's advantage is in conventional weaponry. If Iran goes nuclear, the nuclear advantage goes to Iran, which is Rafsanjani noted sometime ago, could survive a nuclear attack while Israel has crowded half of the Jews in the world into a tiny territory making it very vulnerable to a nuclear attack.
The idea that people should let themselves be walked over by the nuclear powers has not held up well. Countries do not accept the abuse and the nuclear powers do not see an advantage in using those weapons against them.
I have thought for a while that Biden's biggest blunder in office was not getting back into the nuclear deal. It could have been done. He could have asked his people to check if Iran really violated the deal, discovered that it had not, and so gotten back in the deal and given Iran some period of time to get back into agreement with it. (Iran stopped following the deal after we broke it). Drum is right that Trump's action was stupid (although his action was supported by the whole of the Republican party and the Israeli government (although likely not the Israeli military and intelligence agencies). So it is not actually one of these cases of Trump only acting out of pique.
Unfortunately Biden put the idea of US consistency (to an inconsistent policy) over intelligent policy.
History is neither a romantic relationship nor a morality tale. The fact is, the Palestinians would be much better off right now if they had had a Gustav Stresemann or a Konrad Adenauer who accepted defeat and tried to move forward with some agenda other than military resistance. But they haven't had that kind of luck.
Of course, Germany had the bad luck that Stresemann died and they got a leader committed to resuming the military struggle. The arc of the moral universe is long and it bends toward justice on God's timetable, if at all.
You mean if they had a leader that was willing to accept that the Palestinians would get 22% of their historic homeland for its larger population, with all refugees from the Israeli 78% going to that 22% And they might further agree that that 22% would, at least initially, not have most of the features of an actual state, like control of its borders or a right to defend itself?
No I guess you can't mean that because Abbas offered that in 2008. So the Palestinians do have such a leader. Do you mean one that would accept that Palestinians should always live without basic rights in an Israeli apartheid? That is what Israel has been offering, so it seems that is what accepting defeat would have to mean.
We have watched since Abbas took over and provided full security cooperation in the West Bank what happens when the Palestinians shun military resistance and try to appeal to either the decency of the occupiers or international institutions. They have been pushed into smaller and smaller ghettos and some of their villages have been emptied via pograms, or at least things identical to pograms only with Jews as the attackers rather than the victims.
The evidence that the Palestinians would be better off if they had shunned violence is basically nonexistent. In fact there would probably still be settlements in Gaza as well.
Nobody will hold Trump to account for pulling out of the JCPOA because few people ever understood what it was, and Republicans convinced themselves it somehow allowed Iran to do the opposite of what it actually did.
I imagine Israel wouldn't hesitate to use nukes against an Islamic nation that looked like prevailing in a war against it. I can't see any circumstances in which it would use them inside its own occupied territories. Quite apart from the outcry from its own citizens at being in such close proximity to the blasts, what targets could conceivably warrant their use? The IDF's been very successful in turning Gaza into a wasteland with conventional weapons.
There are so many instances where we can't possibly understand the full dynamics of the situation and this is one of them.
If Israel, as it were prior to the enrichment deal under Obama, felt threatened, why hasn't it already struck Iran's program? They surely had a chance when Iran fired off hundreds of missiles + drones at it and after the Hamas Oct. 7 attack that killed over a thousand Jews.
Likewise, if the enrichment deal was a great deal, why hadn't Biden pushed to reengage with Iran prior to Oct. 7? It leaves me to believe that Biden concluded the deal wasn't as great as it appeared and that Iran had been backsliding in other ways. But, we don't know all the dynamics of this situation.
Or it turned out to be such a political headache for Obama and it was very clear that Republicans are committed to rolling it back the first chance they get that it wasn’t worth the effort. Also why would Iran engage again if the next GOP admin was just going to roll it back again.
The Biden Administration tried repeatedly to revive the JCPOA. The Iranians basically responded "What's the point if the next president will just cancel it again?" Even the limited progress they made in improving relations caused shrieks of outrage from Republicans, which loves to claim now that unfreezing some of Iran's foreign reserves and loosening sanctions "funds Hamas". Iran's increasing economic and political closeness with Russia and China has made it less susceptible to the coercion which led to the JCPOA in the first place.
My recollection is that the US position was get back to the deal without reversing the new sanctions Trump had put in place. Iran wanted things back to what they were.
“Is anyone ever going to hold Trump to account over this?“
No. I mean Kevin sometimes asks the stupidest questions.
Beyond that, questioning why Hamas does anything can be answered by “when a man has nothing, he has nothing to lose.” If your whole life is going to be pointless anyway, why not destroy everything in sight? It’s not like it benefits Hamas in some way to play nice, anymore than it helped slaves to play nice with their masters. In the end, the master is still going to fuck up your life, your children’s lives and the lives of everyone you care about. “Fuck it, burn it all down” becomes your only reason for living.
“Fuck it, burn it all down”
Yes, when people get to this stage, then collective suicide begins to look like the best that can be achieved. Whether this is objectively true or not makes no difference. The anger emotion characteristic of the human species takes over, and makes it seem like the best, if not only, option.
I ask, why are people willing to become suicide bombers?
You are right. Even if am generous and do not accuse Kevin of asking stupid questions, his lack of insight into real human motivations is sometimes glaringly obvious and obtuse.
Going to war is often what leaders think - or know - they have to do to stay in power. Everybody knew what Hamas stands for and they were elected. Rather than even try to build up a peace economy in Gaza they built tunnels and brought in arms. Gazans presumably still want attacks against Israel (has anybody polled them for approval of the October attack?).
Likewise everybody knows what Netanyahu and his allies want and they keep getting elected. Israelis have had plenty of opportunity to pursue a non-agressive path and they keep rejecting it.
This kind of thing is rarely settled by leaders making the right decisions on their own. The peaceable decisions may get them thrown out of power.
That is an odd comment about Hamas. After all, by the time they took power Israel had instituted a blockade on Gaza. Given Israel's complete control over the legal flow of goods in and out of Gaza, a tunnel economy was a choice imposed on them. They certainly brought in arms, but to what degree did this get in the way of what limited "peace economy" was available to them? At an earlier stage of the blockade Gaza brought in a zoo through the tunnels. Israel's blockade is very effective at killing a peace economy, but it is not effective at stopping weapons from getting into Gaza. The difference is, of course, the scale of goods that have to get into the territory. There has to be a steady flow of goods across a border to have a peace economy, while a slow seeping of goods is enough to get the low level of weapons that Hamas employs.
Victory has never been the point of terrorism. Causing equivalent pain is.
I'm so glad Kevin brought up the abominable decision by trump to welch on the nuclear deal. It's unfortunate that so many of the comments here are totally ignoring that point. It's one of the most abysmally memory-holed things that trump did. I followed news about Iran closely during the Obama years. The nuclear deal, which was painstakingly negotiated across multiple countries, was finalized just at the time that Iran's more moderate political forces were starting to get traction, and there was a real opportunity for a rapprochement between Iran and U.S. that may have sidelined the radicals for good.
Think about the implications for today if that would have succeeded back then.
Then trump came along and, as Kevin states, simply walked away from the deal because of his burning hatred for Obama. But not only was this bad because it rehabilitated the power of the anti-U.S. extremists in Iran, but it told all the world that you CANNOT TRUST America! Their promises are meaningless. Remember, other countries don't look at us as a series of administrations -- they look at us as AMERICA. And when a deal is broken, it's not Trump who breaks it, it's AMERICA who breaks it.
This is one of the most underappreciated abominations of the Trump presidency, and I wish some media outlets would raise this context when talking about the current mayhem in the Middle East, where the failure of that deal looms over everything else going on.
And I bet 99 out of 100 American voters today would have no idea what I am talking about.
Agree 100%