Thursday, March 1, 2012

Israel, Iran and the Poor Man's Cruise Missile

It's hard not to spend time thinking about Iran and Israel given all of the current build up on this. Here's another installment:

One of the Stratfor research "findings" (culled from the Wikileaks stockpile) is that Israel claimed its upcoming strike on Iran would be "catastrophic enough" to cause a regime change. This claim was made both to dissuade Iran from going forward with its program, physically eliminating their ability to move forward with the program, and persuade the US to act instead of Israel.

Running through all of the potential scenarios, only one emerges that makes sense.

A strike on Iranian oil facilities. A strike so devastating that it disrupts all of its oil production, currently at 4 million barrels a day.

The logic of this is pretty clear: any strike on facilities wouldn't have a high likelihood of failure. At most, it would only delay the program by months. Further, politically, there may not be a possibility for the second, third and fourth strikes necessary to keep kicking the ball down the road.

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