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Post 14 Feb 2012, 7:33 am

It is depressing, but let's not lose our sense of proportion. The reality is that the Iranian regime has been a terrorist regime since its founding over 30 years ago. Going after diplomats at home and abroad is its stock in trade. For example, do you remember this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_attac ... enos_Aires

The attack on the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires was a bomb attack on building of the Israeli embassy of Argentina located in Buenos Aires which was carried out on March 17, 1992. 29 civilians were killed in the attack and 242 additional civilians were injured.

Messages intercepted by the American National Security Agency revealed Iranian knowledge of the impending attack, as well as the complicity of Hezbollah operative Imad Mugniyeh.[6]

In May 1998, Moshen Rabbani, (the Cultural Attaché in the Iranian Embassy in Argentina until December 1997) was detained in Germany, and the Argentine government expelled seven Iranian diplomats from the country, stating that it had "convincing proof" of Iranian involvement in the bombing.


or this

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMIA_Bombing

The AMIA bombing was an attack on the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA; Argentine Israelite Mutual Association) building in Buenos Aires on July 18, 1994, that killed 85 people and injured hundreds.

On October 25, 2006, Argentine prosecutors Alberto Nisman and Marcelo Martínez Burgos formally accused the government of Iran of directing the bombing, and the Hezbollah militia of carrying it out.[6][7] According to the prosecution's claims in 2006, Argentina had been targeted by Iran after Buenos Aires' decision to suspend a nuclear technology transfer contract to Tehran.


More recently there was the plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington while in a restaurant. Whereas the Israelis are targeting terrorists (which is fine in my book) or nuclear scientists (which I'm not fine with, although I recognize that in complex calculations that are beyond me, it may be a net good), the Iranians target clear innocents, whether Israeli, or Jewish, or just in the wrong place at the wrong time. They have no concern whatsoever about collateral damage. In fact, collateral damage is their goal.

Iran is an outlaw regime. This ends when the regime ends.
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Post 14 Feb 2012, 9:24 am

But is poking a hornets nest with a stick a good means to stop them stinging you?
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Post 15 Feb 2012, 5:05 pm

Not in the middle of the day when their metabolism is going, but at night poking them with a stick is perfect.
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Post 15 Feb 2012, 7:34 pm

Not to misunderstand your analogy, but who was the human, and who was the animal in your example?
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Post 16 Feb 2012, 1:06 am

Does it matter, Brad? The point is that provoking your enemy is not likely to result in them shrugging it off.
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Post 16 Feb 2012, 8:09 am

Just wanted to understand you. I know you use words carefully, as you critique others the same way. So which was which?
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Post 16 Feb 2012, 9:56 am

How about it being applicable to both 'sides' in either direction, and indeed to other situations. And I was not intending to dehumanise either side - analogies have their limits.

I still take issue with Ray Jay's rationalisation of the post-Munich assassinations. He seems to think they were justified because those killed were responsible for the murders at the Olympics. However, not all of the people who died at the hands of Mossad were directly responsible. The guy who was killed in Lillehammer had nothing to do with it. Others were loosely connected to the hostage-taking. There were also people who were killed or injured simply because they happened to be near a targeted Black September member. Collateral damage, which is apparently the 'difference' between what Mossad did and what terrorists do? Or is ok to hand-wring about such stuff and assune your enemies don't?

My position is that assassinations are murder. If they are on behalf of a State, even using a proxy organisation like the PMI or Hezbollah, it's just state-sponsored murder. What's more (and this is where my analogy comes in), acts of violence against your enemy are unlikely to make them hate you less. Both 'sides' in this will claim that they are just acting in response to the other. It becomes tit-for-tat, and no-one can really remember who started it or why, as old grievances and prejudices get dredged up as justification.

Retaliation, revenge, 'pre-emptive' strikes... Whatever. Do I want Iran to have nukes? No, let alone use them. Do I think their leaders are ideologically driven and willing to kill to get their way? Yes, although they are still humans with other, more prosaic concerns.
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Post 16 Feb 2012, 12:07 pm

If the sanctions are allowed to work....over time the economic pressure on Iranian citizens will make them choose between their support for the nuclear program (very high at the moment) and their standard of living..
At the moment the sabre rattling by Amdinajaad and others is in large part bluster. And even if they develop a crude bomb, its unlikely to have much use as a strategic weapon... It would be pretty clear that its use would cause the end of Iran.
Staying the course on sanctions, and allowing the Iranians to choose a path that serves their interests most is more likely to succeed then interventions like air strikes... That will only create sympathy for the leaders, and antipathy towards the Us and the West....
Patience and persistence are more likely to rewarded with an Iranian solution that ISrael and the rest of the World can live with than any amount of force will somehow change popular will.
The Green revolution can easily be repeated in Iran.... And I think the Mullahs as a group (individual opinions aside) understand that....And will eventually reel in the hot heads in order to keep the populace largely compliant.
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Post 16 Feb 2012, 12:24 pm

It does strike me that if anything is likely to help unite Iranians behind their flawed leaders, it's an external threat. Iranians have been concerned about such things for a long time, with the 'Great Game' of the 19th century, the 1950s western-backed coup, oil deals etc...

Which is why it seems incredibly stupid to kill nuclear scientists in a way that can be linked back to an external power (particularly if the power is one of the US, UK or Israel). Talk about setting up a common enemy.
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Post 19 Feb 2012, 8:04 pm

Hi everyone, on 2nd leg of vacation in Florida ... spent some time in Miami ... are you sure Sweden is this diverse? I've been hearing spanish (several different dialects, as my Argentinian cousin was able to point out), Hebrew, and Russian. Of course, there are tourists speaking French, Portuguese, Italian, and lovely British.

Danivon:
But is poking a hornets nest with a stick a good means to stop them stinging you?


I think this is not a good analogy. Presumably, the Iranian scientist had an important role in developing nukes. I possibly agree with you on the morality, but this analogy implies a random action with no positive end result, whereby the Israelis may have accomplished something, both my stopping this scientist, and scaring off anoyone else who works on this project, or is thinking about a career as an Iranian nuclear scientist.

Slightly changing topics, has anyone been struck by the feebleness of the Iranian response? Three terrorist attacks in 3 different non-Muslim countries. They've managed to alienate India who is their largest oil importer. Israel has been courting India for a long time and sells them many arms. These two ancient people whose countries are surrounded by hostile Muslim governments, and who can be very successful in the western capitalist world are natural allies. The iranians drove home the point. The same goes for Georgia. In addition to bad targets, the Iranians were not able to pull it off. It shows the weakness of the regime.

Here's the Wikipedia entry on Munich http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Wrath_of_God

I'd be cautious about believing everything in the recent movie.

Some bits that I find interesting:

Pressured by Israeli public opinion and top intelligence officials, Meir reluctantly authorized the beginning of the broad assassination campaign.[3] Yet when the three surviving perpetrators of the massacre were released just months later by West Germany in compliance with the demands of the hijackers of a Lufthansa aircraft, any remaining ambivalence she felt was removed.

... According to David Kimche, former deputy head of Mossad, "The aim was not so much revenge but mainly to make them [the militant Palestinians] frightened. We wanted to make them look over their shoulders and feel that we are upon them. And therefore we tried not to do things by just shooting a guy in the street – that’s easy … fairly."


...
An operation was planned by Black September when it learned that Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir would be travelling to Rome to meet with Pope Paul VI in January 1973. The planned visit was placed under a regime of strict secrecy in Israel, and news of the upcoming visit was probably leaked by a pro-Palestinian priest in the Vatican Secretariat of State. Black September commander Ali Hassan Salameh began planning a missile attack against Meir's plane as it arrived in Rome. Salameh's goal was to kill not only Meir, but also key cabinet ministers and senior Mossad officers accompanying her. At the time, Salameh was negotiating with the Soviet Union, asking for safe haven, and he hoped that by the time Israel recovered from this blow, he and his men would be in the Soviet Union and out of Israel's reach. Black September smuggled several shoulder-launched Strela 2 missiles to Bari, Italy, from Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia, by boat. The missiles were then smuggled to Rome and positioned around Fiumicino Airport shortly before Meir's arrival. To divert the Mossad's vigilance away from Rome in the run-up to the attack, Salameh planned an attack on the Israeli embassy in Bangkok, Thailand.[47]

On December 28, 1972, four Black September members took over the Israeli embassy in Bangkok, holding 12 hostages. The terrorists raised the PLO flag over the building, and threatened to kill the hostages unless 36 PLO prisoners were released. The building was surrounded by Thai troops and police. The option of a rescue operation was considered in Israel but ruled out. A rescue operation was considered a logistical impossibility, and it was also thought that as the embassy was in busy central Bangkok, the Thai government would never allow the possibility of a shootout to occur. Though their demands were not met, negotiations secured the release of all the hostages and the Black September militants were given safe passage to Cairo.[48]

The Mossad found out about the plan to assassinate Golda Meir on January 14, 1973, when a sayan, or local volunteer, informed the Mossad that he had handled two telephone calls from a payphone in an apartment block where PLO members sometimes stayed. The calls were in Arabic, which the sayan spoke. Speaking in code, the caller stated that it was "time to deliver the birthday candles for the celebration". Mossad Director-General Zvi Zamir was convinced that this was a coded order connected to an upcoming attack. Zamir had been convinced that the Bangkok embassy raid was a diversion for a larger attack, due to the participants in the raid having so easily given up, something he did not expect from a group as well-trained, financed, strategically cunning, and motivated as Black September. Zamir further interpreted that "birthday candles" could refer to weapons, and the most likely one with a candle connonation was rocket. Zamir linked the possible upcoming missile attack with Meir's upcoming arrival, and guessed that Black September was planning to shoot down Meir's plane. Zamir then sent a Mossad katsa, or field intelligence officer, to Rome, and travelled to the city with a team of Mossad officers. Zamir met with the head of DIGOS, the Italian anti-terrorism unit, and laid out his concerns. DIGOS officers raided the apartment blocks from where the calls had been made, and found a Russian instruction manual for launching missiles. Throughout the night, DIGOS teams, each accompanied by a Mossad katsa, raided known PLO apartments, but found no evidence of any plot to kill Meir. In the morning, a few hours before Meir's plane arrived, Mossad agents and Italian police surrounded Fiumicino Airport.

A Mossad katsa spotted a Fiat van parked in a field close to the flight path. The agent ordered the driver to step out. The back door then flew open, and two militants opened fire. The agent returned fire, severely wounding both of them. The van was found to contain six missiles. The driver escaped on foot, and was pursued by the agent. He was captured as he tried to hijack a car driven by another patrolling Mossad operative. The driver was bundled into the car and taken to the truck that served as the Mossad's mobile command post, where he revealed the whereabouts of the second missile team after being severely beaten. The truck then sped off, heading north. A cafe-van with three missile launchers protruding from the roof was spotted. The truck then rammed the van, turning it over, trapping the launch team inside and half-crushing them beneath the weight of the missiles, and turning the van's fixed launchers away from the sky. The unconscious driver was pulled from the van and tossed to the side of the road, and DIGOS was alerted that there had been "an interesting accident they should look into". Zamir briefly considered killing the terrorists, but felt that their deaths would serve as an embarrassment to Golda Meir's audience with the pope. The Black September operatives, who had participated in the Munich massacre, were taken to hospital and eventually allowed to fly to Libya, but within months, all were killed by the Mossad.[49][50][page needed


...

While the first wave of assassinations from October 1972 to early 1973 caused greater consternation among Palestinian officials, it was the raid on Lebanon – Operation Spring of Youth in April 1973 – that truly shocked the Arab world.[56] The audacity of the mission, plus the fact that senior leaders such as Yasser Arafat, Abu Iyad and Ali Hassan Salameh were only yards away from the fighting, contributed to the creation of the belief that Israel was capable of striking anywhere, anytime.


...

Black September conducted several other attacks only indirectly against Israel, including the seizure of Western diplomats in the Saudi embassy in Khartoum (see: 1973 Khartoum diplomatic assassinations), but the group was officially dissolved by al-Fatah in December 1974


That's one less hornet's nest.
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Post 20 Feb 2012, 3:19 am

Hmmm. I've not seen the movie. Apparently the movie doesn't show what happened in Lillehammer, which is what led to the end of the policy.

And if it got rid of a hornet's nest, how come the last 38 years hasn't been peaceful? Anyone would think that some Palestinians took up arms in response or something...
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Post 20 Feb 2012, 7:42 pm

In terms of peace in the middle east, yes, the policy is not successful. In terms of getting Black September and many other Palestinians to stop practicing terrorism outside the middle east, yes, they were very successful.
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Post 21 Feb 2012, 12:33 am

Hmmm. And the 'collateral damage'?
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Post 21 Feb 2012, 7:29 am

Innocent people died. It's awful.
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Post 21 Feb 2012, 10:18 am

Awful enough to stop the policy of assassinating Black September members being given as a can example of how a State can act and be morally justified?

I'm concerned that the Ends might be justifying the Means here.