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Jewish World Review Feb. 17, 2009 / 23 Shevat 5769 Israel's last ditch effort to destroy ... itself By Caroline B. Glick
An urgent memo to the next government
Once the deal goes through, Hamas will be able to quickly expand the threat
it poses to Israel. The jihadist group is already using the political
legitimacy Israel is conferring on it to reestablish its unity government
with Fatah. When that government is formed, the US and Europe will move
hastily to recognize the terror group.
Hamas will use its increased legitimacy as a screen behind which it will
expand its offensive capabilitiesThis is particularly true in the field of
ballistic weapons.
We know this will happen because we have already seen what happened with the
last Iranian proxy that Israel signed a ceasefire agreement with. Since
Israel agreed to UN Security Council Resolution 1701 and brought its war
with Hizbullah to an end in August 2006, Hizbullah has reasserted its
political and military control over south Lebanon and has taken over the
Lebanese government. Moreover, it has massively expanded its missile
capabilities not only by tripling the size of its arsenal, but by tripling
the range of its missiles.
In 2006, Hizbullah's most powerful missile was a Fajr rocket with a 100 km
range and a 50 kilogram warhead. Today, according to Avi Schnurr, executive
director of the Israel Missile Defense Association, Hizbullah has an arsenal
of Fatah-110 ballistic missiles with a range of 300 kilometers and a 600
kilogram payload.
While our media elites endlessly drone on about whether or not Likud is
sufficiently "pro-peace" to satisfy Meretz and Kadima, our national
discourse is ignoring the greatest threat this country faces: missiles.
Schnurr warns that today there are more missiles pointing at Israel in
absolute numbers than at any other country on earth. While Israelis are
properly concerned with suicide terrorism and Kassam rocket attacks, the
fastest escalating threat that Israel faces come from ballistic missiles.
In addition to Iran's Hamas and Hizbullah proxies, its client state Syria
has a massive missile arsenal housed in hardened silos. Syria's missiles are
capable of attacking every square centimeter of Israeli territory. And of
course, with its rapidly growing land and sea-based ballistic missile
arsenal, Iran itself is the fastest growing missile threat facing Israel.
IN RECENT YEARS, rather than taking any immediate action to meet the growing
threat, Israel has sufficed with launching long-term development programs
that promise to provide protection for current threats in four to eight
years. For instance, in response to Syria's medium-range missiles, Israel is
developing the David's Sling anti-missile system that should be ready in
eight years.
Israel could in the meantime upgrade its PAC-2 anti-missile batteries
responsible for contending with medium-range missiles, with US-made PAC-3s.
But the powers that be in the Ministry of Defense have decided that the
PAC-3's $100 million price tag is too high.
Indeed far from installing upgrades, Israel is downgrading its existing
anti-missile arsenals. According to Defense News, Israel is planning to
end its involvement in the Arrow anti-missile program because it feels the
maintenance costs of its Arrow batteries are too high. So as the number of
missiles arrayed against it rises, Israel has decided not to bother
increasing its anti-missile defenses.
Even more alarmingly, Israel has no medium-range or long-range conventional
missile arsenals. Although Israel has the domestic capacity to produce both
ballistic and cruise missiles, it has never bothered to build them.
Consequently, its options for contending with rapidly escalating long-range
threats from places like Iran are limited to manned aircraft and its
suspected nuclear arsenal.
As Schnurr relates, Israel's decision to contend with the spiraling missile
threat it faces by ignoring it extends to short-range missile threats as
well. Israel has rejected relatively inexpensive existing anti-rocket and
mortar systems that could provide immediate protection to Sderot among other
places. It has preferred to leave Sderot and the Western Negev unprotected
while awaiting the development of the Iron Dome system now being developed
by the Ministry of Defense.
Israel does field advanced radar systems. The Green Pine radar is one of the
best in the world and together with the X-Band radar system the US recently
deployed in the Negev, Israel's ability to detect incoming missiles is
significant. The problem is that all of Israel's radar systems are facing
east - towards Iran. Last December Iran signed a strategic alliance with
Eritrea that permits its Revolutionary Guards to set up bases in Eritrea,
strategically located to Israel's south at the mouth of the Red Sea. Israel
has no radars pointing to its south.
AFTER YEARS OF denial, today even US intelligence agencies acknowledge that
Iran's ballistic missile program is part and parcel of its nuclear program.
While most Israeli observers have devoted their energies to assessing the
destructive capacity of a direct nuclear attack against the tiny country,
and to the various delivery mechanisms - from the Shihab-3 missiles to
Syrian Scuds to Hizbullah or Hamas death squads - that Iran could field
against it in the event of a nuclear attack, the fact of the matter is that
Iran has an indirect option for using nuclear weapons to attack Israel that
would likely be more destructive than a direct nuclear attack. And it is an
option that Iran can wield not only against Israel, but against every
country in the world.
An electromagnetic pulse or EMP attack is an indirect nuclear attack. It has
the capacity to destroy a target country's electricity grids and so revert a
post-industrial, technology-based country such as Israel or the US to a
pre-industrial condition. If an aggressor launches a nuclear device of
whatever size and detonates it above the atmosphere and in the line of site
of its target country, the x-rays and gamma rays emitted by the blast will
cause an electromagnetic pulse, or wave a million times stronger than the
strongest radio wave. That wave, which comes in three successive stages,
will destroy a country's electrical grids and through them, its ability to
function.
In 2000, concern about the EMP threat in the US caused Congress to mandate
the formation of a commission comprised of the leading US experts on the
issue to study it. The EMP Threat Commission's 2004 report warned that the
effect an EMP attack would have on the US's national infrastructures "could
be sufficient to qualify as catastrophic to the nation."
As JWR contributor Frank Gaffney, President of the Washington-based Center for Security
Policy, explained in his 2006 book War Footing, by destroying a country's
electrical power systems, an EMP will destroy its economy since it will wipe
out its banking system. All vehicles that operate with electronic systems -
that is all vehicles made since the mid-1970s - would be rendered
inoperable. Telecommunications would end. A country's ability to store food
through refrigeration would end. Its ability to transport water and pump
gasoline would also end.
Since almost no one would be killed in the immediate aftermath of an EMP
attack, a threat of retaliation against the aggressor country would lack
credibility because such an option would be politically unpalatable. But
while an EMP attack would not kill many people directly, it would kill
millions of people indirectly. As Gaffney notes, by wiping out a country's
ability to support itself, an EMP attack would cause mass starvation and
disease.
The threat of an EMP attack was not taken seriously by US military planners
during the Cold War because they were concerned with the primary Soviet
threat to annihilate the US and its allies by launching several thousand
nuclear warheads against them. But as nuclear and missile technology has
proliferated in the post-Cold War period, and more technologically primitive
countries get their hands on missiles and limited nuclear capabilities, the
threat of an EMP attack as become far more acute.
In Iran's case, the mullahs have signaled clearly through both word and deed
that they find the option of attacking their enemies with an EMP attack
attractive. An article published in Iran's security journal Nashriyeh-e
Siasi Nezami in 1999 identified an EMP attack as a way to defeat the US as
a military power and as a state. Then too, as William Graham, who headed the
US's EMP commission explained in an interview with World Net Daily last
year, Iran is openly building the capacity to carry out such an attack. Last
year, Iran described a ship-launched test of its Shihab-3 missile in the
Caspian Sea as "successful" in spite of the fact that like an EMP, the
missile detonated in mid-launch.
More disturbingly, Iran's successful satellite launch earlier this month
makes clear that the mullahs now have the technological capacity to
effectively wipe out Western civilization. Three to five nuclear bombs of
any size, launched into space on satellites and detonated above the US,
Europe and Asia would send Western civilization back to the 19th century.
Last week Iran announced it is building seven more satellites. Yet rather
than recognize that once its nuclear arsenal is online Iran will represents
a threat to all nations, the West ignored the significance of the satellite
launch.
The US's EMP commission's report explained that to defend against such an
attack, it is necessary to build redundant electrical systems and have
difficult-to-build replacement parts like turbines on hand to replace ones
destroyed by such an attack. Since the report was published, the US has made
some modest progress in that direction.
THIS IS NOT the case, unfortunately in Israel. Although as a small country,
Israel has the capacity to replicate its systems relatively cheaply and
quickly, the outgoing government has paid no attention whatsoever to the
growing threat. As a consequence, were Iran to attack Israel with an EMP
attack, Israel would be rendered defenseless and at the mercy of Iran and
the Arab world. For their part, they would undoubtedly be tempted to invade
the Jewish state to finish what the Iranians started.
Through IMDA, Schnurr is trying to raise awareness of the growing missile
threat and recommend ways to contend with it in the Defense Ministry as well
as in ministries that control critical infrastructures. He has had some
modest success, but to date, no one has taken any action.
With coalition negotiations only now beginning, it is hard to believe that
soon we will be led by leaders more interested in contending with the
threats we face as a country. But such a government is apparently on its
way. In light of the growing conventional and unconventional missile threats
facing us, one of the Netanyahu government's first actions in office must be
to review and rapidly expand Israel's offensive and defensive missile
systems, and quickly move to replicate critical national infrastructures to
defend against EMP attack.
Comment by clicking here.
JWR contributor Caroline B. Glick is the senior Middle East Fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC and the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post.
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