Hezbollah's Mushroom Cloud (Hezbollah threatening nuclear war against Israel?)

Christopher Hitchens recently went to a rally in the suburbs south of Beirut and found Hezbollah ratcheting up its belligerence. “A huge poster of a nuclear mushroom cloud surmounts the scene,” he wrote in the May issue of Vanity Fair, “with the inscription OH ZIONISTS, IF YOU WANT THIS TYPE OF WAR THEN SO BE IT!”

Last week James Kirchick reported seeing the same thing at the same rally in City Journal. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time Hezbollah has threatened nuclear war.

Hezbollah isn’t broadcasting this to the world. If Hitchens and Kirchick hadn’t written about it, few would know the mushroom-cloud banner even exists.

It’s not so much a threat as it is a revelation of Hezbollah’s dark psyche. But perhaps Hezbollah’s not shouting “nuclear war” for all to hear means its threats are more dangerous than public taunts from the Iranian government.

Empty threats and hyperbole are rife in the Middle East. Death threats are rarely carried out anywhere. Most assassins don’t announce their intentions.

They kill their victims without warning. Whatever Hezbollah’s mushroom-cloud banner means, we know this much: intimations of nuclear war with Israel are now coming from Lebanon as well as Iran.

The worst case scenario — a mushroom cloud over Tel Aviv — might be slightly more likely than some of us thought.

Every foreign policy-maker and analyst must be wondering whether Israel will bomb Iranian nuclear facilities this year or next. Most don’t know the answer.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself might not know the answer. It’s risky. Hezbollah didn’t open a second front against Israel during the Gaza war a few months ago, but it’s unlikely they’ll sit still in South Lebanon if their patron and armorer in Tehran is attacked.

Samson Option: Israel’s Plan to Prevent Mass Destruction Attacks

David Eberhart
Tuesday, Oct. 16, 2001

With American bombing raids into Afghanistan and a tough President Bush intimating more of the same for other terrorist-harboring nations, experts and armchair war-watchers are inserting nuclear powerhouse Israel into the calculus of potential Armageddon in the Middle East.

Adding yet other variables, a defiant Saddam Hussein issued an ominous warning in late August, just weeks before the terror attacks on New York City and the Pentagon: “The battle [against the U.S.] continues on the economic, political and military fields. We are convinced we will be victorious.”

All that the saber-rattling Iraqi dictator left out of this latest diatribe was a bold repeat of his 1991 pre-Desert Storm boast that if America attacked, the first to feel his wrath in the “mother of all battles” would be Israel.

http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2001/10/15/112430.shtml

Yes, there are some crazy fundamentalists that want to attack Israel with WMD.

There are some with these ideas among the Iranian leadership and probably Ahmadinejad have this view as well. But, they are a small minority in the Iranian elite.

Read this article about North Korea: http://www.rfa.org/english/commentaries/lankov-nk-02202009171534.html There is a similarity with what Andrei Lankov describes about North Korea and Iran.

It is about the urge for stability. Read the article and replace North Korea => Iran (and China => EU)

“I would say the ideal outcome would be stability and gradual reforms. But is this achievable or not? Honestly, I don’t think it is, but China (=> EU) still hope to encourage the North Korean (=>Iranian) leadership to reform the country. I don’t think they will succeed. The North Korean (=>Iranian) leaders believe that reforms are inherently dangerous, very dangerous.”

My bet is that both North Korea and Iran will try to reach out to the West as the financial meltdown continues this year. The present elite in both countries will try to preserve their wealth, and as Lankov says:

“Their belief in the system is gone, but God knows how long this will continue. In the long term, the system is not sustainable. Everybody knows it, and maybe the leaders of the system understand it, but their major goal is to die peacefully in their own beds. Therefore, every year of their high life-style sipping Hennessy cognac is a small victory. They feel that the longer they stay, the better—even if they understand that in the long run they will be out of power. And many of them hope that the system will outlast their own life spans.”

Comment: Iran has around 25.4 percent inflation and is expected to be hit with a deficit of $44 billion through March 2010, according to a recent parliamentary research center report. The Iranian parliament has approved an annual budget of $298 billion based on $37.5 per barrel oil. The central government says it plans to cover the deficit with overdue taxes, dividend income from state-owned firms and $11 billion drawn from the oil stabilization fund (OSF). However, it is unclear whether enough funds remain. The new Iranian president (to be elected June 12) will have serious problems.

The only way Tehran will be able to get its economy in order is through a dramatic shift in its foreign policy that will provide the political opening for foreign investment in Iran. Can we expect that at the end of June, and an Iranian diplomatic mission in Washington 4th of July this year? It is possible, but is it probable?

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