Paul the Poke

Ezekiel 38:5 Persia, Cush, and Put are with them, all of them with shield and helmet…

Ezekiel’s Persia is modern day Iran…

The bottom line readout of the Biden trip to Israel points to the division in the administration on Near East policy. Two diverging paths thrown together into a foreign policy salad was pointed out to me in Hebrew. I waited a while to see if the Israelis and conservative American Jews could come to one mind on what the ‘upshot’ was. I needed an online translation but here it is, and it is brilliantly succinct:

“The problematic developments after Biden’s visit: The United States seeks to integrate the Palestinians into the forums of the Abraham Accords as well as Jordan. In addition, a number of Arab countries are on the way to normalization with Iran, including the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, and Egypt.”

Czekmate interpretation — the region is prepared to go it alone in such confusion out of America.

This is a few days old but was mostly underplayed in the press. That is likely owed to the Biden trip to Israel and the respect for the US from the government in Jerusalem. I will not speak to the veracity of the site, other than to say some Czekmate friends seem to think that the folks behind do have a pretty good grip on what they report on.

For the reach of the Israeli security services, what they lack in breadth they make up for in precision. In other words, they do not have massive amounts of agents to be able to put against a large problem in their far abroad. Accordingly, what resources they do have do exhaustive homework on the back end of their intelligence apparatus. From that homework they focus on very narrow efforts pointed at key nodes and critical paths of the problem set.

This is acutely the case in a culturally less accessible, place far from home such as Iran. The internal security conditions of a place like Iran makes it harder still. Thus the ability to place agents who blend in, leaves fewer personnel to be able to draw from. Frequently, assets recruited while abroad (regime traitors) alongside allied agents compose any operation personnel in such a place as Iran.

Making such operations harder still is that the secrecy surrounding a nuclear program is forbidding. Further, in order to gain the most amount of value per penetration/operation requires an agent to have a rare set of expertise usually gained over years of deep study. Hence the need to have a robust analytic structure in Israel itself that informs the operations to be undertaken. You can bet that individuals with such expertise and education would remain under a sharp eye in a paranoid regime like Iran.

Ah, but that paranoia is warranted in view of the number casualties the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corp have been absorbing in recent months on their own soil. It has undermined the IRGC standing within the regime itself, and has doubtless exacerbated any acrimony between the Iranian armed forces and the IRGC. Such would have been the intent behind any effort were it a part of an intelligence operational effort.

In short, create such a blow to the key personalities of the Iranian power projecting security establishment (Missiles, drones and nukes) that disproportional resources have to be expended at home, thus slowing the entire maturation to a militarily viable nuclear weapon.

Up to this point, the Israeli emphasis has been to slow/stop that process, and it has been the central point of the nuclear negotiations bandied about on TV and in print so frequently. This cycle is so that in order to build a working “nuclear bomb” the radioactive material must be very highly refined and in large quantities to achieve a nuclear blast. This article lays down an indication that the Israelis are now compelled to reorient this apparatus away from attempting to disrupt the nuclear fuel generation cycle. They must now focus this apparatus to the next phase in an Iranian bomb, the capability of Iran to use one (as a viable weapon of war) as the new priority.

This is consistent with the news (reported here) surrounding recent deaths of Iranian personnel in their weapons research infrastructure. This is the new emphasis on their delicate and precise operations behind the enemy lines of the Iranian homeland. The so-called “Break-out” time (The time it takes to have enough nuclear material for a viable working bomb) being at zero, suggests that disrupting the nuclear enrichment cycle is an exhausted option for stymieing the Iranian bomb.

It is also a major step closer to a military strike.