We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20253938 and marked it off-topic.

Israeli intelligence also provided us with evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that helped push a war. Turns out they got it wrong.

https://www.nti.org/gsn/article/israeli-intelligence-based-p...

The article does not say that they provided us with evidence of weapons of mass destruction at all. It says their internal assessment was based on speculation, not whatever you're trying to imply. Also:

"The committee also found that Israeli intelligence did not intentionally mislead Israeli officials about prewar Iraq’s WMD capabilities, nor was there an attempt to push the United States into invading Iraq, AP reported."

I really like this take on this whole thing:

https://medium.com/@thegrugq/death-by-powerpoint-53472da3cd5

You'd better come up with some pretty convincing evidence for such allegations. There's nothing even related to your assertion in your link, neither in the "source to link" (that does not support anything the link says, which in its turn does support anything you say).

"Israel’s intelligence assessments of Iraq’s prewar WMD capabilities were based mainly on speculation, an Israeli parliamentary committee said in a report released yesterday (see GSN, March 24)."

First paragraph clearly states that this was based on speculation.

“Why didn’t we succeed in laying down a broad and deep (intelligence) framework so we could rely on reports and not speculation and assumption? That is the central question,” said inquiry head Yuval Steinitz of the governing Likud Party.

Also included.

https://carnegieendowment.org/2003/12/11/israel-s-intelligen...

"The failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has led to a close scrutiny of the role of intelligence agencies in both the United States and Britain. As Brigadier General (ret.) Shlomo Brom, points out, Israeli intelligence, which was in full agreement with American and British intelligence estimates, has, however, remained "in the shadows." General Brom, a senior research associate at Tel Aviv University's Jaffe Center, calls for an inquiry into the performance of Israeli intelligence agencies. In an article titled "The War in Iraq: An Intelligence Failure," first published in "Strategic Assessment," General Brom makes three key points: (1) Israeli intelligence agencies failed because they did not realize that Saddam Hussein's main goal was survival; (2) Israeli intelligence tends to adopt the worst-case scenario; (3) Inflated threat assessments exact a heavy price."

I'm not sure if you are unaware or not but there were no WMD's in Iraq. These are facts not allegations. The US, Israel and Britain were primary nations selling the American people a war based on bad intelligence and it can happen just as easily today as it did then.

So in short, you are backing out from your claim that Israeli intelligence provided us with evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that helped push a war? Good, so there’s no argument.

Don't you think EVERYONE should provide independently verifiable evidence for their allegations.

In case you’re implying the parent should also provide evidence: it’s way harder to prove the non-existence of something than the existence. I’m not sure if that’s a universal rule (in math for instance) but it’s certainly in something like a magic teapot behind mars.

Not implying that at all.

I do think the strength of evidence should be somewhat correlated to the weight of claims, Maybe a sidenote to extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I've expressed similar sentiment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17738147

That’s pretty obvious no?

It's "their" enrichment limit because they agreed to an arbitrarily low one under JCPOA. If they leave the agreement after other parties did so as well, this is not evidence of a nuke program. It is merely evidence of them enriching, which you can do for non-military purposes.

The evidence from the nuclear archive, which remains unreleased, seems to at best prove that they had a nuke program in the past.

They denied they had it then, too. They deny it now. Seems like the "deal" was just to get their foreign accounts unblocked. I'm curious how you'll explain away their ballistic missile development and testing.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iran-security-missiles/ir...

> They denied they had it then, too. They deny it now.

There's no evidence they have nuclear weapons whatsoever. Israel on the other hand still denies the existence of nuclear weapons everyone knows they have.

If Israel is so hell bent on going to war with Iran, (perhaps because the current administration is so corrupt that doing so would be a nice distraction), they should do it on their own and bear the consequences. The US and the EU should not go to another devastating war in the Middle East on doctored Israeli intel.

There was an agreement the US pulled out of. Which part of that agreement talked about ballistic missiles?

I think you are confusing two separate things. One is a nuclear capable Iran and the other is about the military projection of conventional weapons. Both are troubling but one is more acute than the other.

The monitoring of Iran's nuclear program was working.

Ballistic missiles are not "conventional weapons". And Iran is quite a large country, so I wouldn't be so sure that "monitoring" was working either. Putting two and two together, _if_ Iran is still developing nuclear weapons in secret (probability of which is far above zero), they're closer than ever to "projecting" those weapons in the general direction of Israel and other allies in the region, and eventually at the US. All they'd need to do is swap out a dummy warhead with a real one.

May I suggest a book called Countdown to Zero Day by Kim Zetter?

Its main focus is to talk about Stuxnet, but it goes into quite some details to put that attack into context. Under the deal that the US pulled out of, IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) had the authority to walk into any space in Iran under any suspicion that they might be building a nuclear bomb there, overwriting any local law that might prohibit them from doing so. That deal is still in place, because other seven signatories weren't stupid enough to pull out of that agreement (including Iran).

> _if_ Iran is still developing nuclear weapons in secret

You mean like Israel?

Pointing nuclear weapons at a nation that has had those nuclear weapons pointed at them for years seems only fair to me.

They aren’t, all their nuclear material is accounted for by monitoring.

> Ballistic missiles are not "conventional weapons".

whether they are conventional or not is determined by their payload; eg, scuds loaded with HE are conventional ballistic missiles

> they're closer than ever to "projecting" those weapons in the general direction of Israel

I wish they did. There is serious need for some MAD in the area, especially with regards to Israel, that is way too happy to project its own overwhelming power with complete disregard for the legitimate interests of its neighbors.

To be clear: I don't wish Israel harmed or victim of any attack. I wish it contained by a matching power. Which is exactly what Israel doesn't want, and the reason for its pressuring the US to attack Iran or strangle it with sanctions.

I don't understand why it's a problem. Several countries have nukes, including Israel which built 100s under the radar and doesn't admit to it.

Religious tomfoolery undermines the typical calculus of self-preservation and Mutually Assured Destruction.

Religious tomfoolery is also the root of why large swaths of the American public continue their unbridled uncritical support for the rogue nuclear nation of Israel. That Israel plays a key role in the nutty religious prophecies of various right wing doomsday evangelical cults around the US cannot be overlooked when considering the situation in the region.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Zionism#Biblical_int...

Border disputes does not a rogue nation make. Else Pakistan and Israel and Russia and China and USA are rogue nations, which rather dilutes the term.

Israel's non-signatory status in the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, combined with their refusal to admit the obvious truth of having nuclear weapons despite their not-so-coy threats of using nuclear weapons all combine to paint an unambiguous picture: Israel is a rogue state. They are dangerous; a threat to world peace.

To their credit, Russia, China and the USA are all signatories. Israel, North Korea, Pakistan and India are not (what wonderful company Israel finds itself in!); they are all rogue states. Of those all four have border disputes, all four have nuclear weapons, and all four have made themselves a threat to world peace. Of these four, Israel is the only one that continues to lie about having nuclear weapons.

If Israel does not qualify as a "rogue nuclear nation", then the term has certainly been diluted.

Because only we can vaporize entire cities full of civilians under shaky pretexts

Nobody has used a nuclear weapon against civilians in 75 years. You don't have to be a western apologist to be against nuclear proliferation.

However, this is not about nuclear proliferation, of course. Otherwise the US would impose tough sanctions on Israel and even threaten them with military strikes, because there is strong evidence that Israel has a secret nuclear weapons program. No more apologies!

We all know what the truth is. In reality the tough stance against Iran is and always has been all about access to oil, influencing the strategic balance in favour of the axis US-Saudi Arabia-Israel, and limiting Russian influence in the region. Everybody knows this and that's why nobody in his or her right mind buys the current sick Bolton nonsense.

> In reality the tough stance against Iran is and always has been all about access to oil

Don’t the sanctions prevent access to Iranian oil?

Not success to Iranian oil, long-term access to oil from the region by gaining and maintaining the strategic upper hand.

If Iran blocked the Strait, it’s mostly Europe that would suffer at this point.

Personally I think it would be interesting to see EU have to defend its interests in the Middle East patrolling the Strait. There’s no need for the US to be doing it ourselves this time around.

But if you mean something other than Iran blocking free passage in international waters, you’ll have to clarify.

The Strait is one motivation, yes, but I was also talking more generally about the strategic balance in the region. Iran and Syria are the last countries in the region loosely aligned with Russia, and Iran is a major disruptive factor in the region. By destroying and occupying Iran like the US did with Iraq, in theory the majority of countries in the region would become subjugated by the US, hence long-term access to oil. Not that I think this strategy could ever work, but obviously similar thinking was also behind the Iraq invasion (in addition to the unfulfilled "promises" made by the CIA during the first Iraq war, which were a thorn in some of G.W.Bush's advisors).

It's a small price to pay for salvation.

Netanyahu's "evidence" from the very article you linked:

"Mr. Netanyahu did not provide any evidence that Iran had violated the nuclear agreement since it took effect in early 2016."

"Secretary of State Mike Pompeo" ... "conceded that the material dated to a project that had formally ended around 2003."

"“There is nothing new in Bibi’s presentation,” Rob Malley, a former senior official in Mr. Obama’s National Security Council" (...) "wrote" (...) "“All it does is vindicate need for the nuclear deal.”"

That's the same Netanyahu that campaigned for the Iraq invasion in 2003:

"Ehud Barak wrote a New York Times op-ed warning that "the greatest risk now lies in inaction". His predecessor as prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, published a similar piece in the Wall Street Journal, entitled: "The Case for Toppling Saddam". "Today nothing less than dismantling his regime will do"

https://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/mehdi-hasan/2010/02/iraq-...

And the same Israel that pressured the US into ant-Saddam intervention 13 years before, in 1990:

There are only two groups that are beating the drums of war in the Middle East,' wrote American columnist Patrick Buchanan, 'the Israeli defence ministry and their amen corner in the US."

http://users.ox.ac.uk/~ssfc0005/Israel%20and%20the%20Conflic...

It's disrespectful to deny the agency of the oil companies and military contractors who sat in the White House for many years.

Ask Egypt, or Saudi Arabia, or many other Middle Eastern states. They like ballistic missiles for some reason I don't understand.

Saudi Arabia is well known to have access to nukes but to keep them elsewhere...https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-24823846

No, Israel publicly shared a few new details about the program they stopped in ~2002.

Iran has so far been very restrictive in how they have reacted to the USA violating the JCPOA, which Trump broke essentially because he is an idiot the listens to assholes, and complaining that the cross a line in a treaty you’ve killed yourself is obviously not a very convincing accusation.

Lots of states in the Middle east have ballistic missiles, and they use them to shoot large conventional explosives at each other, like Iran and Irak did during their war.

Note that the JCPOA is not a treaty. The President cannot unilaterally withdraw from a treaty, subject to any withdrawal requirements of the treaty itself. Same goes for the Paris Climate Accord, which was never put forward as a treaty in the US.

Note that other countries and their citizens don't typically give a hoot about the internal affairs if it looks as though countries go back on their word and signatures. Internal ratification is simply used as a way to sign treaties with 'fingers crossed'.

Counterparties don't care if a treaty is withdrawn from or merely violated.

> which Trump broke essentially because he is an idiot the listens to assholes

And also because he's a reactionary, "let's do the opposite of what Obama did", no matter the policy.

I mean, he pursues a JCPOA-style deal with North Korea, (a good thing for once), but at the same time pulls out of the JCPOA?

Trump is all in on Obama's drone warfare policy