Experts: Israel’s New Bunker-Busters Can Take Out Iran’s Nuke Plants

Jewish Press

By: Jacob Edelist

Published: March 6th, 2012

In an article titled “Israel has the power to knock out Iran’s nuclear facilities” published in the NY York Daily News, Berlin-based reporter Benjamin Weinthal argues that Israel has the military capability to launch a successful attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Weinthal, who is a research fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and has reported on European-Iranian relations for The Wall Street Journal Europe, Slate, The New Republic, The Weekly Standard, National Review Online, Haaretz, The Jerusalem Post and Der Tagesspiegel, says Israel should be able to attack Iran’s facilities successfully on its own,  largely because President Barack Obama has made good on President GW Bush’s promise, and “delivered untold numbers of GBU-28 bunker busters, which can tunnel through concrete before exploding deep underground. President Bush is also rumored to have sold Israel several midair refueling aircraft.”
According to Weinthal, “the vast military complex at Parchin, where Iran denied access to International Atomic Energy Agency inspections last month, has more than 100 buildings, many of which lie deep underground. The uranium enrichment complex at Natanz consists of both buried and ground-level buildings.
“A second enrichment facility is buried deep into the side of a mountain at Fordo, near the holy city of Qom. Burrowed under 300 feet of rock, the Fordo facility is located in a hardened tunnel.”
This is where successive bunker-busting attacks will be required, using GBU-28 bunker busters to knock out Iran’s entire nuclear program.
According to the Military Analysis Network, the Guided Bomb Unit-28 (GBU-28) is a 5,000-pound laser-guided conventional munition that uses a 4,400-pound penetrating warhead. The bombs are modified Army artillery tubes, weigh 4,637 pounds, and contain 630 pounds of high explosives. The operator illuminates a target with a laser designator and then the missile is guided to a spot of laser energy reflected from the target.
“Writing in last month’s daily Die Welt, Hans Rühle, who directed the planning department of the German Defense Ministry from 1982 to 1988, expressed almost supreme confidence that Israel’s Air Force could obliterate Iran’s main nuclear sites,” reports Weinthal. “He believes that with 25 of its 87 F-15 fighter planes and a smaller deployment of F-16 jets, the Israelis could destroy all six of Iran’s key sites.”
When asked by the Jewish Press whether he shared Rühle’s assessment, in light of the military hardware required for the mission and the logistical difficulties that can befall such a complicated operation, Weinthal said:  ”I would not describe [Rühle's] views as excessively optimistic.  He clearly identifies the herculean task of destroying the Fordo plant, an enrichment facility that is buried deep into the side of a mountain … Israel’s Air Force has had a singleness of purpose over a period of almost four years in terms of confronting Iran’s nuclear weapons facilities. And, contrary to the efforts by the U.S. Administration last month to undermine Israel’s military capacity to perform complex, long-range strikes, Israel’s pilots have the technology and firepower to obliterate Iran’s key facilities, with a view toward significantly setting  back Tehran’s nuclear program.”
“The one-two punch of surgical military strikes targeting Iran’s primary nuclear sites — coupled with a new round of hard-hitting economic sanctions—might just topple the regime,” Weinthal added.
Ideally, he concluded, “the best of all possible remedies would be a combined military operation to decimate Iran’s 25 to 30 military and nuclear sites, launched by a coalition involving the U.S. , the EU, Israel and perhaps some of the panic-stricken Arab countries, like Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Iran’s nuclear program is, after all,  an intolerable threat to the EU and the Sunni countries in the region.  It seems to me a military strike ought to be merged with an economic regime-change strategy. Iran’s clerical rulers are wedded to their nuclear arms program. Israel and its Western allies can, in the final analysis, only solve the nuclear crisis through the replacement of Iran’s reactionary and jingoistic leadership with a democratic government.
“Unfortunately, the crucial need to support the pro-democracy movement in Iran is vanishing from the policy and military discussions about Iran’s atomic weapons systems .”

 

Obama and Netanyahu Meet: Relationship and Differences Unchanged

By: Yori Yanover

Published: March 5th, 2012
Latest update: March 6th, 2012

 Jewish Press

 President Barack Obama on Monday asked Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to give the sanctions against Iran more time to force it into submission, until it announces – as North Korea has just done, reportedly – that it would halt its nuclear plans in exchange for food. But Netanyahu gave no sign that he was taking a military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities off the table.
It is a rare thing in such high level meetings that so much effort and energy would be spent only to produce a position that is an exact replica of both sides’ stand before the fuss.
Unless the fuss itself was the purpose of this high level meeting.
Take, for instance, the absence of heated disagreements, before or after the meeting. The same gulf that separated the two men yesterday was still there, but neither leader appeared particularly upset over what should have been a discussion of life and death for both of them. A nuclear Iran would surely be capable of delivering a stunning blow to Israel, God forbid, but it would also be able to seriously damage US interests, in the Middle East and elsewhere. Imagine the reaction of the Saudi Royal house to its loathsome Shi’ite neighbor, already an existential threat to the region’s oil producers, wielding a nuclear device. It is the stuff of American nightmares, too.
Unless the meeting today was not about Iran’s threat but about the stability of Netanyahu’s coalition government and Obama’s chances at the polls in November.
I spoke to an official of one of the right-wing factions in the Knesset who told me that all day long Leftist officials had been grabbing him by the collar and reading him the Democrats’ talking points: Obama protected Israel in the UN and in Durban; Obama is paying for Israel’s anti-missile project, and so on.
“I told them: can you imagine if he didn’t?” the official said. “How could he even think of getting re-elected if, say, the US didn’t reject the Goldstone report?”
In that vein, neither leader likes the other very much, and at least one has been caught saying as much in public. But today, more than ever, they need each other.
Both leaders have economic issues and social protests to deal with, and whether the answer is subjective, objective or politically prejudiced, both leaders stand a chance of failing the Ronald Reagan ultimate election question to the voter: Are you better off today than you were four years ago?
And so engaging Iran in an ongoing verbal duel would work well for both Obama and Netanyahu.
Strangely, the same duel appears to still be serving well their foe, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Mind you, this does not mean that the Iranian nuclear threat is not real. It only means that we who do not have access to secret intelligence (and I suspect even those who do) have no concrete idea about Iran’s progress in building a nuclear device, because Iran has been barring any and all inspection from those facilities. Ahmadinejad has played a brilliant game of Three Card Monte, and even seems to be having oodles of fun with it. Here you see it, here you don’t, we may have the bomb, we may not, who knows.
Obama sought to assure Netanyahu that the United States was keeping the military option against Iran open, and “has Israel’s back,” and at the same time urged Israel to wait patiently for the sanctions and, possibly, diplomacy, to do their job.
Netanyahu, for his part, concentrated on Israel’s undeniable right to defend itself against Iran, and reiterated that Israel sees Iran’s nuclear program as a threat to its existence.
The problem is, both leaders had held precisely the same positions before and after their meeting. So why meet?
Plausibly in order to meet. The show’s the thing.
Let’s face it, Israel is hesitant about striking Iran in the near future. It may not be able to do so overwhelmingly without the superior US air power. And the US cannot permit Iran to continue brandishing its nuclear swords, because it’s bad for business everywhere. Because it could end with a barrel of oil selling at $200, and this would surely mean a Mormon president in the White House come January.
There are only three directions this plot can go in the next six months, and all three are perfectly plausible:
Iran may capitulate under world pressure.
Israel may decide it can’t wait any longer and strike on its own.
The US and Israel may decide it’s time to take out Iran.
We knew all that on Sunday. We know nothing more today.
But consider this:
While no one in the West can say with certainty how real is Iran’s nuclear threat, they all appear to be ignoring a different threat which is frighteningly real and no one doubts that some day, God forbid, it would be in play.

 

 

 

My Mother is Horrified that I believe in G-d

It can be really, really hard, as a Reform Jew, to actually admit that religion involves…G-d.

I know that sounds silly, but I think there are a lot of us who want to live Jewish lives, but who grew up in an environment where religion was either an afterthought or very openly expressed as “something we do culturally and for the community, but not…you know…to believe in.” My parents are proud atheists, my mother’s a “cultural Jew,” and my grandfather warned us that he might seem to get more religious as he aged, but that would only be his fear of death, and we should remain rational.

As a result, my late awakening to the feeling that there is still a mysterious pull within all this rational, Woody-Allen-is-our-Elvis-type Judaism that can’t be explained away. I feel a thrill when I hear the prayers, I feel a connection to 5,000 years of history when I perform rituals, and I find comfort in the idea that there’s an amorphous, faceless energy to the universe that I don’t understand, and I call that feeling Gd. This is how I had to explain it to my parents over cocktails in the East Village one late afternoon, as they gazed at me, saucer-eyed with worry, when I mentioned in passing that I believed in G-d. You’d have thought I’d have admitted to believing in The Celestine Prophecy or chemtrails. (Amusing sidenote: my mom was equally scandalized to find that I considered the syrupy concoction in front of me, complete with floating lychee, a martini. “That is not a martini,” she insisted, in the same shocked tone she used to ask “What do you mean, you believe in G-d?”

With all this baggage, you can imagine how hard it is to talk to my kids about G-d. Which is precisely why I have such a fondness for “Goodnight Sh’ma,” the PJ Library book that explains the Sh’ma and how to use it, like a Yogic chant, to close out your day and relax, meditatively, for nighttime. (See? I have to invoke yoga and meditation so you don’t think I’m a weirdo. That is so San Francisco, I could plotz!) For one thing, since my kids can’t read yet, I can change the words so that I’m just explaining, “This boy thinks of all the things he did today, and all the things he wants to do tomorrow, and all the people he loves in the world, and all the people he loves inside his home, and he’s grateful and he’s hopeful. And that’s what prayer is.”

And then, completely separate from the explanation, there’s the reminder to sing the sh’ma each night, twice, as your child goes to sleep. Which my daughter absolutely loved from the night the book arrived. She was barely speaking at the time, and she referred to it as “waddy-wah,” because that’s how “adonai” sounded to her.

From there, it was a short hop to lighting Shabbat candles and saying the prayers over the light, the wine, and the bread each Friday, something we all three look forward to (Dad is rarely home that early on Friday, so it’s a female-only ritual much of the time — we love it when he’s there, but we also like having it to ourselves, too).

Yep, just as my parents might have feared — Goodnight Sh’ma was a gateway drug to the opiate of the masses.

ADL’s Foxman: Farrakhan Speech Dripping with Anti-Semitism

Stop the presses! The 78-year-old retired calypso singer and Nation of Islam leader accused Jews of controlling the government, the media, and finance and entertainment, and “repeated many of the past anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that have made him one of the nation’s foremost promoters of anti-Semitism to a legion of followers.” So says the Anti Defamation League press release following Minister Louis Farrakhan’s Sunday three-hour speech before his followers.
Give Farrakhan some credit for consistency. It’s not easy, holding an audience captive when all you’ve got are a bunch of age-old racist lies and a religion invented by some truly strange early-20th century folks.
Except this time around the master of racial hatred added a new gem to the collection: he warned that racial hatred would lead to attempts to assassinate President Barack Obama.
The Chicago Tribune said Farrakhan spent much of his speech decrying what he said was Satan’s influence over racist forces in politics and society, and then asking: “Do you think they’re wicked enough to be plotting our brother’s assassination as we speak?”
Who knows. Meanwhile, his speech was disturbing enough to elicit a reaction from Anti Defamation League National Director Abraham H. Foxman: “Farrakhan’s annual address to the Nation of Islam was dripping with anti-Semitism and hatred and should stand as a textbook example of the continuing potency in some circles of anti-Semitism in America.”
At one point, Farrakhan repeated the canard that the US is doing the bidding of the Jews in the Middle east. “I advise white and black America, Hispanic and Asian America, why would you send your children to die in a war engineered by Zionists who love Israel more than they love the United States of America… Don’t send these children to war for the sake of Israel.”
And there was this brilliant gem, which is a bit difficult to follow logically, and perhaps not entirely worth the effort: “Did you know that Israel provoked the war in the Sudan? For 20 years or more, the Sudan was in the civil war and it started because Israel wanted to create a war in southern and northern Sudan to divert Egypt to come to the defense of the Sudan to take pressure away from Egypt attacking Israel.”
Read it a couple of times and see if it makes any more sense. We gave up.
Foxman did, too, apparently, since he expressed his surprise that “rather than laugh him off the stage, tens of thousands of supporters cheered him on and encouraged his anti-Semitism and bigotry.”
“I’m not anti-Semitic, I’m just telling the truth,” Farrakhan said at the end of a diatribe on how the Jews were responsible for that great New Yorker cover with Obama and wife giving each other the “terrorist bump.”
Everybody’s a critic..