Article: MAD or NUTS Take Your Pick, It Might be IRRITATE

The opener is pretty much all you need to know in trading off the ‘fair and balanced’ position of this article co-authored by Israelist Louis Rene Beres and his warmongering buddy, Major General Paul (surgical and fast) Vallely, U.S. Army (retarded).

Vallely runs off at the mouth on his radio show, Stand Up America, a broad-shouldered, deep-chested version of Rush Limbaugh without the cigar.

Beres is a tenured professor of political science (an oxymoron) at Purdue University and seems unable to get over the rush of being included in Project Daniel, an Israeli think-tank reporting to ex-terrorist and one time Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon.

Anyway—the opener;

America Needs A Strategic Nuclear Doctrine – Now by Louis Rene Beres, Wednesday, Oct 31, 2007

My readers in The Jewish Press will already know that I write a great deal about Israeli nuclear issues. One of these inherently existential issues is the need for a coherent and codified Israeli nuclear doctrine. Moreover, this need was an integral part of Project Daniel – a private effort that reported to former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon (“Israel’s Strategic Future,” January 2003) and was most immediately concerned with Iranian nuclear weapons and the associated prospect of nuclear war in the Middle East.

Beres, who would suck his home country further into the evolving morass that is the Middle East, in order to support his surrogate country, Israel, continues;

Significantly, the absence of an adequate nuclear doctrine in Israel is paralleled by a comparable absence in our own country. With particular respect to terrorist groups armed with weapons of mass destruction – recall, especially, the growing alliance between Hamas and al-Qaeda – neither Jerusalem nor Washington has yet been willing to fashion a strategic policy framework from which specific operational plans can be drawn. Left uncorrected, this unwillingness could have the most serious security consequences.

I don’t know why Beres finds this significant. America has not, so far as I know, fashioned a strategic nuclear policy with Russia, Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea or Israel. The United States is (and ought to be) very careful of whom it chooses, if anyone, to share “a strategic policy framework from which specific operational plans can be drawn.”

I realize that Beres, AIPAC and (our current substitute for Dr. Strangelove’s General Jack D. Ripper) General Vallely are all thumping the desk for additional pre-emptive wars.

Iran currently has the market cornered on cheerleaders for war, while no one gives a damn as Pakistan falls into chaos. But I suspect Louis Beres feels Israel has a special hold on American nuclear pre-emption, no doubt because of the Holocaust—an entirely European affair.

There is no EURIPAC at the moment, only an AIPAC. There is no European thirst for amending past transgressions, even though they were European in origin. There is only America that Beres and Vallely assign to the holy duty of protecting Jews.

Jews who will not come to terms with the Palestinians they displaced. The “Never Again” that Jews so righteously proclaim is not for Palestinians or Sudanese, unavailable to Chadians or Liberians. Kurds and Chechnyans need not apply.

David Ben Gurion famously said,

“If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural—we have taken their country. We come from Israel, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault?

They only see one thing—we have come and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?”

Why indeed, Mr. Beres and General Vallely?

These two self-appointed Israel-avengers put forth the case that the old cold-war policy of "Mutual Assured Destruction” (MAD), was founded upon an assumption of rationality. MADness as rational is quite a stretch, but their point is that Russians didn’t want to get nuked and radical Islamists don’t give a sh*t.

Then of course, there is Nuclear Utilization Target Selection (NUTS), a strategy developed during the Cold War--to be a winner, the attacker had to destroy the target country's nuclear arsenal in a Jack D. Ripper-like massive first strike.

(Beres again) Today this absolutely key assumption can no longer be taken for granted. Confronted with Jihadist enemies, state and terrorist, we now understand that our core threats to retaliate for first-strike aggressions could sometimes fall on completely deaf ears. In such circumstances, where we would no longer be able to assume enemy rationality, the entire logic of deterrence could be immobilized. This holds true whether we would threaten massive retaliation (MAD) or the more graduated and measured forms of reprisal known professionally as “nuclear utilization theory” (NUT).

“Could sometimes fall on deaf ears” is good enough for me. However, MAD and NUTS are no longer good enough for Beres and Vallely.

What should we do? This is, in fact, the single most important question that needs to be asked, not only by the President of the United States and his senior advisors, but also by each and every thinking American who wants this nation to (literally) endure. In fact, unless we can answer this existential question satisfactorily, and soon, nothing else will matter at all.

Define ‘we.’ And while you’re at it, define ‘this nation.’ Are you seriously proposing that the future of America is somehow tied to Israel’s existential paranoia? Do you earnestly put forward the supposition that for 395 million non-Jewish Americans, nothing else will matter at all, should they fail to dial up the president and his senior advisors on behalf of a sum total 5 million American Jews?

Beres and Vallely urge you to venture with them into the far reaches of immoral pre-emption with the semantically (and Semitically) advanced Israelis Regional Right to Initiate Terror Attacks Toward Everyone (IRRITATE). If you think George Bush and Dick Cheney smashed a hornet’s nest by attacking Iraq, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet as they prepare to IRRITATE Iran.

OK, I confess, that’s my own little acronym—but IRRITATE does have a nice ring to it.

Together with tiny Israel, we are an imperiled country in an imperiled world. This is undeniable. The only way we can begin to assure plausible survival for our whole world and hence ourselves is to approach strategic policy more systematically and expertly. This will never happen within the arenas of politics, especially in the hastily assembled campaign platforms of presidential aspirants. The job before us is a very difficult intellectual task. It will not submit to the humiliating banalities of candidate debates or to other distracting banter.

Undeniable to whom? Certainly not to me. Fortunately for us, Louis is a Purdue professor and difficult intellectual tasks are their meat and potatoes.

Intellectually tasking, Beres sees 'plausible survival ' (as opposed to implausible survival, which wouldn’t be any fun at all) dependent upon an American Project Daniel—where he will find a seat at the head of the table, possibly sliding over enough to make room for Vallely. Daniel is obviously too Jewish a name, they’ll have to name it Project Sports Fan.

Once convened, our best strategic thinkers (Beres, Perle, Feith, Wolfowitz, Podhoretz, Kristol ) will have to recognize critical connections between law and strategy.

My parenthetical, but the critical connection translates to “can we really get away with this sh*t?”

From the standpoint of international law, which is always part of our own law via Article VI of the Constitution and relevant Supreme Court decisions, certain expressions of preemption are known as anticipatory self-defense.

Nice touch, throwing in the Constitution and Supreme Court, but anticipatory self-defense is a modern confection and nowhere to be found in the Founders’ thinking. They wrote a lot about avoiding foreign entanglements and staying the hell out of other people’s business, but then they probably had their hands too full to anticipate a Jewish homeland.

Knowing about probable enemy irrationality, when would such military actions be required to protect the American homeland from all forms of WMD attack? And how would these defensive movements be compatible with conventional and customary rules?

All forms of WMD. Do killer-bees count? Is a defensive movement a pre-emptive attack? If an asp in the grass is a snake, then why is a grasp in the ass a goose? These things cry out to be known.

Our urgently required American strategic brain trust will also need to consider controversial matters of nuclear targeting.

Damned right and not a moment to be lost for you brain trusters. I live in the Czech Republic right now and I am appalled, appalled that Prague is no longer targeted by three nuclear missiles, as it was before the Velvet Revolution. Poof! No Vaclav Havel, no baroque buildings, no klobasa, no Japanese tourists to give the Golden City an oriental flavor—just a mushroom cloud.

The issues concern differences between the targeting of enemy civilians and cities (“countervalue” targeting) and targeting of enemy military assets and infrastructures (“counterforce” targeting). Most Americans don’t realize that the essence of “massive retaliation” and MAD was distinctly countervalue, nor would they likely feel comfortable with any open countervalue reaffirmations in the future. Yet, in those relatively promising circumstances where enemy rationality can still be assumed, credible deterrence might well require countercity targeting.

Well, I got kind of confused by all your ‘counter’ issues, but I assume they can all be separated and ironed out at some time or another by ‘Geiger counters.’ If I have this down right, if the enemy is rational all we’re going to do is eradicate, destroy and make nuclear rubble of his cities. I can see where there’s a big payback for rationality. No carrot, just a stick and a stick.

“General Ripper, do you have anything to add?”

To be sure, such doctrine may sound cruel and uncivilized, but if the only alternative were a distinctly less credible U.S. nuclear deterrent, explicit codifications might well be the best available way to prevent millions of American deaths from otherwise impending nuclear war or nuclear terrorism.

Well, god knows America wouldn’t want to lose any credibility. We've worked tirelessly on that issue for the past seven years. And sounding cruel and uncivilized is so much different than actually being cruel and uncivilized.

Of course, neither preemption nor countervalue targeting would necessarily provide adequate security for the United States and its allies, but it is now time to put serious thinkers to work on these and related questions. As in the case of Israel, which I have already examined so often in this column, we Americans need a coherent strategic nuclear doctrine, and we need it quickly.

So again—and forgive me if I’m a little slow on this issue--Beres' solution to the Holocaust is to engage in pre-emptive Holocausts against nations that worry him.

And at the end of his long, dreary dissertation he admits that even the most evil use of overwhelming force the planet has yet to witness leaves us in a situation where neither preemption nor countervalue targeting would necessarily provide adequate security for the United States and its allies. But in his warped view of saving us all, it’s now time to put serious thinkers to work on these and related questions.

LOUIS BERES AND GENERAL WHATSHISNAME--GET A LIFE—KICK SOME ISRAELI ASS AND SOLVE THE PALESTINIAN ISSUE.

Otherwise, we're left with no choices but MAD, NUTS or IRRITATE!
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