Bill
12-02-2007, 04:05 AM
Interesting article, about the growing rhetoric of wwiii, paki bombs, and more and more nuclear news.
http://www.slate.com/id/2178792/pagenum/all/
Then, a few days after Bush's Oct. 17 shocker, I came upon a less widely noticed, perhaps even more ominous quote, originally published two weeks earlier in London's usually reliable Spectator, in a story about the Sept. 6 Israeli raid on that alleged Syrian nuclear facility. A quote from a "very senior British ministerial source" contending, "[I]f people had known how close we came to world war three that day there'd have been mass panic." Here, it wasn't Bush theorizing about the future; it was a responsible official saying we'd already come close to Armageddon.
If Pakistan is the most immediate threat, U.S., Israeli, and Iranian hostilities over Iranian bomb-making may be the most likely to go global. That may have been what the "very senior" British official was talking about when he said the Israeli raid on Syria brought us "close ... to a third world war." Iranian radar could easily have interpreted the Israeli planes as having its nuclear facilities as their target. On Nov. 21, Aviation Week reported online that the United States participated in some way in the Israeli raid by providing Israel information about Syrian air defenses. And Yossi Melman, the intelligence correspondent with Haaretz, reported a few days later that—according to an Israeli defense specialist—the raid wasn't about a nuclear reactor but something more "nasty and vicious," a plutonium assembly plant where plutonium, presumably from North Korea, was being processed into Syrian bombs.
http://www.slate.com/id/2178792/pagenum/all/
Then, a few days after Bush's Oct. 17 shocker, I came upon a less widely noticed, perhaps even more ominous quote, originally published two weeks earlier in London's usually reliable Spectator, in a story about the Sept. 6 Israeli raid on that alleged Syrian nuclear facility. A quote from a "very senior British ministerial source" contending, "[I]f people had known how close we came to world war three that day there'd have been mass panic." Here, it wasn't Bush theorizing about the future; it was a responsible official saying we'd already come close to Armageddon.
If Pakistan is the most immediate threat, U.S., Israeli, and Iranian hostilities over Iranian bomb-making may be the most likely to go global. That may have been what the "very senior" British official was talking about when he said the Israeli raid on Syria brought us "close ... to a third world war." Iranian radar could easily have interpreted the Israeli planes as having its nuclear facilities as their target. On Nov. 21, Aviation Week reported online that the United States participated in some way in the Israeli raid by providing Israel information about Syrian air defenses. And Yossi Melman, the intelligence correspondent with Haaretz, reported a few days later that—according to an Israeli defense specialist—the raid wasn't about a nuclear reactor but something more "nasty and vicious," a plutonium assembly plant where plutonium, presumably from North Korea, was being processed into Syrian bombs.