[1]
By John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with [2]
In investigating war and peace, life and death, truth and lies, innocence and guilt, there is hindsight bias and there is confirmation bias.
Hindsight bias occurs when, with the evidence of what has just happened, the investigator is sure he anticipated the outcome from the beginning and is convinced he knew it all along. Confirmation bias operates forward in time, and also retrospectively, as new evidence is searched for in an investigation, interpreted when found, even fabricated, to prove what the investigator already suspected or believed to be the truth.
These are the biases you the reader, and I the investigator, must beware of, especially now, if to believe the following reconstruction of the war which has just begun.
- Iran had agreed in the negotiations to the nuclear warhead and enrichment conditions, and probably also the agreement to stop backing Hezbollah, the Iraqis and the Houthis.
Evidence: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/17Bepid5iL/?sfnsn=mo [3]
- The sticking point was the Iranian missile programme — and plainly that was non-negotiable for the Iranians.
- Israel sees the missile threat from Iran as existential — it certainly is, according to the maps by Theodore Postol [4] of a 500-missile Iranian raid on Israel (lead image).
- Therefore, it doesn’t take Chabadniki like Benjamin Netanyahu and Jared Kushner reading their holy books to conclude that Iran must be destroyed before they destroy Israel, no matter what international law, the articles of the United Nations Charter, or the rest of the world thinks.
- General Daniel Caine and the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) told President Donald Trump that there was no certainty that a conventional attack on Iran would either achieve decapitation and regime change, or destroy the Iranian underground missile stocks and systems for overground retaliation against Israel. He advised a “balancing act [5]”.
- The Israelis have been emphatic in Netanyahu’s meetings with Trump in Miami and Washington that they have no choice but to attack and will go nuclear if they judge it necessary — with or without Trump’s say-so.
- The Americans replied that they would agree to attack and try to head off nuclear attack.
- The Russians and Chinese have known all of this. They have concluded that if they tried to deter militarily the US-Israeli attack, it would go ahead anyway, and with nuclear weapons. Whether that was a Netanyahu bluff or not, President Putin believed there was reason not to issue an advance warning. We don’t know what President Xi Jinping thought of the nuclear war risk and what he thought of the reason for not issuing an advance warning. We know he didn’t [6].
We also know that the Russians and Chinese have been at loggerheads over something so strategic and important that they have been repeatedly hinting at it without disclosing the details since last December [7].
So here we are on the evidence, on the brink, and Trump has said [8] so. The US and Israel will press their attack until they are confident that the Iranian missile defences are totally destroyed – “until all of our objectives are achieved”, Trump has said. Military sources say that the Iranians have been hitting targets in Haifa, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and will be aiming at refineries and electricity power generating power plants. If the Iranians can, they will launch the attack on Israel which Postol has mapped as near-total destruction of the Israeli cities. If they do, or if they are about to do, Israel will launch preemptive nuclear attack.