Ahhhh - but America WAS generous and good to give nuclear weapons to Israel in the first place!

We will continue to keep this web site under surveillance - probably at work, while we should be doing other things.

Interesting. Translated Israeli memoirs of the YK War that I've read don't make much of the US resupply effort, and of course they don't say anything about how seriously they contemplated the nuclear option. In the first 48 hours of the war Moshe Dayan spread a wave of defeatism and depression within the cabinet that apparently hit Golda Meier pretty hard, but by October 10th or thereabouts -- before the impact of US support was felt -- the Israelis had recovered a good bit of their confidence. I've always thought that our airlift had mainly symbolic value.

America,

Actually, I don't think the U.S. had much to do with Israeli getting nuclear weapons beyond staying on the sidelines and not trying to prevent it. France was much more involved. Remember they were probably closer to Israel than we were up until the 1967 War.

Ralph,

Seymour Hersh says the nuclear decision was made on October 8th in a meeting with, among others, Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan, the army chief of staff David Elazar, and Yigal Allon:

...the Israeli leadership -- faced with its greatest crisis -- resolved to implement three critical decisions: it would rally its collapsing forces for a major counterattack; it would arm and target its nuclear arsenal in the event of total collapse and subsequent need for the Sampson Option; and, finally, it would inform Washington of its unprecedented nuclear action -- and unprecedented peril -- and demand that the United States begin an emergency airlift of replacement arms and ammunition needed to sustain an extended all-out war effort.

Hersh further says:

There is widespread knowledge among the Israeli defense and political leadership of what took place at the crucial meeting, but in subsequent years those who were there -- including stenographers and advisers -- have never talked publicly about it.

Hersh also notes that Elazar blacked out everything in his diary from the night of October 8 except for the words "Crucial meeting."

According to The Sampson Option, the threat to use nuclear weapons was delivered to Kissinger by Simcha Dinitz, the Israeli ambassador to the U.S., on October 9th. Kissinger didn't tell others what was going on at the time, but Hersh quotes James Schlesinger as saying after the meeting with Dinitz, Kissinger "just turned around totally. He got a little hysterical" about the airlift.
Long afterwards Kissinger told both Sadat and Herman Eilts, the U.S. ambassador to Egypt, what had happened.

My understanding about the importance of the airlift (beyond the psychological boost) has always been this:

Because it eliminated the need to husband ammunition and other consumable items, the continuous flood of US war materiel enabled Israeli forces to go on the offensive in the latter stages of the war.

As Tom Lehrer so eloquently put it,

"The Lord's our shepherd says the Psalm,
But just in case, We'd better get a bomb!"

One thing I've noticed in my limited experience here on planet Earth is that the lowliest peon on the totem pole in most any shithole anywhere in the world anyone'd care to name understands--and in rhetorical 'practice' is careful to distinguish between--America (or 'Americans') and their government.

The point here is: One needn't be a rocket scientist to understand this point.

So, that's why I'm skeptical of ALL 'rhetorticians', EVERYWHERE who (apparently) STILL don't 'get it'...

Although you write that Israel wanted the Soviet Union to "reign in" Egypt and Syria, you actually mean that they wanted the Soviet Union to "rein in" those two countries.

I changed my party registration in 2000 so I could vote for McCain against Bush in a primary in my state. After the selection by the Supreme Court I changed back. My regard for McCain has since gone down quite a bit.

Well, realpolitics or not - I have no doubt that this David guy could actually be a real person. He forgot to mention, however, that for each David having this 'generosity and the goodness' epiphany there were probably at least a hundred Mohameds getting the opposite one. So, what's the point?

I'll highlight the words you didn't.

He had believed America had made a tragic mistake by going to Vietnam, and he still did. He had seen what he believed were his country's faults, and he still saw them.

Yes the generosity was a fairy tail, but the fact is, "David" had not changed his mind. He still recognised it was wrong to fight there.

McCain's pretty little speech holds a nice message to the graduates which is seemingly don't think, just listen to your elders and follow the leader. He is clearly singling out bloggers with his tale of himself as an impetuous youth while mixing in a good dose of how good it is to discuss these things in order to illustrate what a fair minded person he actually is.

Since McCain is a possible candidate in the upcoming election what is his voting record?

S AMDT 244 to S Con Res 18: To expand access to preventive health care services that reduce unintended pregnancy (including teen pregnancy), reduce the number of abortions, and improve access to women's health care.

McCain voted no.

H J Res 47: Increasing the statutory limit on the public debt.

This bill increased congress' ability to borrow money and increase debt and...

McCain voted yes.

Official Title of Legislation:

S Amdt 3103 to S Con Res 83: To restore funding for the civil works programs of the Corps of Engineers, the Federal Water Pollution Control State Revolving Fund, the National Park Service, the Forest Service, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Federal conservation programs, and other natural resource needs, through an offset achieved by closing corporate tax loopholes.

McCain voted no.

Official Title of Legislation:

S Amdt 3071 to S Con Res 83: To increase funding for Title I grants and reduce debt by closing corporate tax loopholes.

Vote to adopt an amendment that adds $3 billion for education, training, employment, and social services programs for 2007 and increases federal revenues by $180 million.

McCain voted no. I guess he does not believe in jobs or increasing federal revenue to offset his increases in public debt.

Official Title of Legislation:

S Amdt 2612 to S 2020: To improve the Federal Trade Commission's ability to protect consumers from price-gouging during energy emergencies, and for other purposes.

Vote on a motion to waive the Budget Act in order to adopt an amendment that makes it illegal to sell crude oil, gasoline, or petroleum distillates at a price that is excessive or takes unfair advantage during a declared state of emergency.

McCain voted no. McCain seems to be a good friend to the oil companies.

Official Title of Legislation:

S Amdt 44 to S 256: To amend the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 to provide for an increase in the Federal minimum wage.

McCain voted no. Nice guy and a stout liberal.

Official Title of Legislation:

S AMDT 3263 to S 2260: To make it illegal, in most cases, to tape a phone conversation without the consent of all parties.

McCain voted no.

Official Title of Legislation:

S Amdt 2476 to S 1042: To establish a special committee of the Senate to investigate the awarding and carrying out of contracts to conduct activities in Afghanistan and Iraq and to fight the war on terrorism.

Vote to adopt an amendment that creates a special committee to investigate the awarding of contracts in Afghanistan and Iraq taking into consideration: bidding, methods of contracting, subcontracting, oversight procedures, allegations of wasteful practices, accountability and lessons learned in Afghanistan and Iraq.

McCain voted no. Don't question your elders!

These are just a few and you can read more at the Project Vote Smart website.

http://www.vote-smart.org/issue_keyvote_detail.php?vote_id=3689&can_id=S0061103

I guess McCain is not such a maverick after all, just another republican conservative tow the line for Bush asshole.

You're totally right about the Santa Claus aspect -- we didn't give them supplies for their beaux yeux. And you're totally right about Kissinger's strategy, and that it was abruptly and unexpectedly reversed.

But I don't actually think the nuclear story is true. Most every other historian disagrees with Hersh on this. And it's got two big holes. Besides the fact that the rest of his reporting on the history of Israel's nuclear program doesn't inspire confidence when compared with what are currently considered the gold standards, like Avi Cohen.

The first big hole is that there was an obvious explanation given at the time that everyone confirms in their memoirs and that's perfectly plausible. And that's that we sent the supplies to Israel right after satellites discovered that the Soviet Union was airlifting supplies to Syria. Because that made it a confrontation between the US and SU through proxies -- and then "our" side had to win. It changed everything.

That is completely plausible within the cold war framework of the time. That's exactly how people thought then, and especially how Nixon and Kissinger thought. There's no reason not to believe it. And it perfectly fits the facts.

The second problem is related. Once the US and SU were clearly on opposite sides, it became chillingly clear to both that the middle east had become a trapdoor into Armageddon. Here was a war out of nowhere -- neither the US nor the SU knew it was coming -- and within 2 weeks both of us were at Defcon 3. And these weren't even our favorite allies!

More on that later. But the immediate problem is that Israel wasn't the only one with nuclear bombs. If they threatened to nuke Egypt, the Soviet Union, Egypt's ally, would immediately have threatened to nuke them. Who knows what people what people would have carried out if it had come to events. But threatened, no doubt. Because by then them and us were already implicitly threatening to nuke each other. Dropping one off for Israel would be like a footnote.

And with that, the entire Sampson option falls apart.

There interesting thing about all this is that it led Camp David. Both the US and the SU realized that this was the foremost strategic problem to solve in the world: how not have WWIII happen here. Détente clearly was not enough. And yet we didn't want to solve it through getting chummier. We wanted to solve it by increasing our influence in the middle east.

And then Sadat made it clear that he would be willing to switch allegiance for a price. In fact he was dying to switch allegiance and become our military ally. And that solved everything. All we had to do was give Egypt 2 billion a year and war with Israel was impossible. The other countries could fume all they wanted, but with Egypt out of the equation, all dreams of war were at an end. And our military hegemony over the military power of the Arab states was sealed.

But politically of course the only way to do that was to give 3 billion a year to Israel to balance it out. And that's what we did. And we've been doing it annually ever since.

But I want to repeat: your analysis of McCain is completely on target and wonderfully well put. This change in the bowels of the story doesn't change a thing at its knife point.

Michael,

You see, this is exactly the kind of thing I was concerned about with you. People who know what they're talking about can create all kinds of problems.

But seriously: thanks for pointing out that no matter what the truth of the nuclear issue is, McCain's story makes no sense.

Also, I can't say I know a gigantic amount about this, and I accept you may well be right. Hersh's evidence is suggestive but not conclusive, and he may be pushing it further than he should. But as far I'm aware (which again, is not far), his conclusions seem congruent with Cohen's. I haven't read Cohen's book, but this appears in a NY Times article he wrote in 2003:

It was in the early hours of Oct. 9 that senior Israeli military leaders brought up the idea of using Israel's doomsday weapons. By that time Israel had lost some 50 combat planes and more than 500 tanks -- 400 on the Egyptian battlefield alone. According to a new book by the Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman, when the prime minister's top military aide heard those ideas, he begged the army's deputy chief of staff, tears in his eyes, "You must save the people of Israel from these madmen."

Later that morning, at the end of a somber briefing before the war cabinet, Mr. Dayan raised the nuclear option with the prime minister. No detailed record has surfaced as to what exactly Mr. Dayan proposed, but we know he gave an overall assessment that Israel was fast approaching the point of "last resort." And certainly Mr. Dayan wanted the United States to take notice that things had reached such a point. That he meant using nuclear weapons (albeit in coded language, as at the time nobody dared call them by name) was confirmed in an interview last week by Naftali Lavie, who was Mr. Dayan's spokesman during the war.

This set the stage for a moment that defined Golda Meir's other legacy, her nuclear legacy. Supported by other members of her war cabinet -- notably the ministers Israel Galili and Yigal Allon -- she refused to concede to Mr. Dayan's gloom and doom rhetoric. Her idea, instead, was to fly secretly to Washington and, as Henry Kissinger later wrote, "for an hour plead with President Nixon."

Mr. Kissinger flatly rejected that idea, explaining such a rushed visit "could reflect only either hysteria or blackmail." By that time, American intelligence had signs that Israel had put its Jericho missiles, which could be fitted with nuclear warheads, on high alert (the Israelis had done so in an easily detectible way, probably to sway the Americans into preventive action).

Mr. Kissinger instead started to arrange air supply to Israel, and within three days a tremendous United States airlift to Israel was in action.

That's just about exactly what Hersh says. The only main other thing Hersh claims is that in their October 9th meeting, Dinitz delivered the nuclear threat directly. It's easy to imagine this fitting into what Cohen writes: "Okay, Henry, I can understand you don't want the president to meet with Golda. Fine. But let me tell you what she would have said, which is that the military guys are nuts. They've already armed the missiles. Golda is trying to hold them back, but she can't do it without help right now from your end. Also, she asked whether Milwaukee is as nice as she remembers."

As far as the Soviet airlift goes, I find this rationale less convincing than you. First, if there was a nuclear threat from Israel, it may have been only Kissinger who knew about it on the U.S. side. (As I say, Hersh quotes Schlesinger as thinking Kissinger "just turned around totally. He got a little hysterical.")

Also, the Soviets were trying to put together a ceasefire from the 10th onwards. Would Kissinger have spurned this and insisted on an airlift just for Cold War prestige reasons, when he knew it could have consequences like the oil boycott that indeed came to pass? Maybe, but maybe not.

And in terms of a Soviet threat if Israel threatened Egypt, I think that actually strengthens the case. Israel would have wanted the U.S. to think any use of nuclear weapons by Israel would lead to global war. And in fact the U.S. would have been right to think so.

Well, when you talk about Kissinger's (and, to a degree, any professional manager) thought process, it's simply absurd to bring up things like 'generosity' and 'goodness'; these concepts simply don't exist there.

It's all about a chess game, or rather a game of Go. Obviously it would be absurd to characterise a chess move as 'generous' or 'benevolent' - or 'evil' for that matter. These concepts are from another dimension.

Jonathan -- (Blog comments are for flogging dead horses, right?) Depleted ammunition stocks were a concern for the IDF early in the war and the American resupply effort was welcome, but judging from the considerable (albeit English-language) sources I've consulted about the YK War, I doubt if it figured significantly in the IDF's plans for a counteroffensive. And regardless of what Hersh and Cohen may have written, I'd need to see some solid evidence before believing that Israel used nuclear blackmail to persuade the US to begin this resupply effort. The situation was certainly serious, but so far as I can tell Dayan's extreme pessimism was not echoed by other members of Golda Meier's inner circle of military advisors -- Allon, Bar-Lev, and Galili along with Elazar. (As an aside, I think Cohen overstates the tank losses during the first two days of the war; by my count the IDF only had about 400 tanks available in the Sinai and maybe half that number on the Golan during that period of time, and while losses were heavy at least half remained operational at the end of the day on the 8th.)

Hersh -- well, he's Sy Hersh. Never leaked to him myself, but I've spoken with people (military, for the most part) who have talked with him on & off the record. In my opinion most of his sources are people with axes to grind, disgruntled, ignored by the "powers that be," seeing themselves as Cassandras, who are going to give Hersh the most extreme interpretation of whatever issue he's writing about. So while he's usually on target to some degree, it's wise to mentally scale back a good bit of what he's saying. Sort of like RAF Bomber Command in World War II.

I'm not saying there's nothing there. Historical truth is like civil trials -- it's the preponderance of the evidence, not beyond a shadow of a doubt. All we can say now about Hersh is (a) his position that this was the key element that swayed things is not the consensus position (b) there are good reasons to believe otherwise.

First off, let me say I don't doubt for a moment that nuclear weapons were mentioned at this time. That no one disputes. And if you think about it, it would shocking if they weren't. "What was the point of building them?" people must have said, if not to turn the tide of a war like this, where Israel was caught completely flat footed and where it looked at first like it might really lose? That is precisely the kind of existential threat the bombs were created to counter. So of course people brought them up.

And the second reason I'm sure they were brought up is because bombs always are. Whenever a country owns nukes, they are always discussed, somewhere by someone, whenever there's a war that looks like it might turn out disastrously. And out of that afterwards almost always comes an argument like Hersh's. It's almost in the nature of the case. All you have to do is say that a central figure mentioned nuclear bombs at a crucial time and The Secret History of that particular war almost writes itself. Those facts by themselves are so inherently shocking. There's a famous story like this about Vietnam at Dien Bien Phu and a several others later. There's one about Korea, there's three about China and a dozen about confrontations with the Soviet Union. And they are all pretty much the same shape: the consensus is that that was one element among many and not the main one.

And in this case, even if you accept it fully, you have to allow that it's packed round with bluff on all sides. And the idea of Kissinger being bluffed in this particular case stretches my credibility. K had many faults, but responding supinely to threats from small countries that owed him favors was not one of them. I can see him and Nixon (who was preoccupied by the events leading up to the Saturday night massacre at the time, leaving K pretty much in control) *saying* this was why they had to do something in order to bully other people who were against it. But I can't see them consciously acting because they were scared of what Israel might do. That would have made their heads explode. A threat like that would have made them want to bomb Israel. K wasn't kidding when he said blackmail would not be an effective tactic. And more realistically, I think if they felt they were being blackmailed, it would have strengthened them in their original intention that Israel needed to be taken down a notch.

On top of that, I have to say, if I have a choice between an incendiary interpretation and an SOP one, all things being equal, I'll choose the later, just because it's usually the way to bet. And in this case, I don't even think all things are equal. I think the Cold War competition argument is much more convincing. But we can go into the minutiae of that offlist. It's way far afield from the original target which is McCain.

Speaking of which, I love your new teaser "See the comments to see whether I'm 100% right about this or only 98% right." It' a pleasure to argue in a forum that is both civil and funny. Real give and take -- now that's a tiny revolution.

Ralph,

I think it's the mark of a successful website that no horse corpses escape without being beaten to mush. So let me contribute my own further smacks.

For the question of how serious the Israeli losses were, I defer to your superior knowledge. But the picture that creates seems strange. Everyone agrees Meir very badly wanted to come to Washington for a meeting with Nixon. Why would she want so much to do this if she didn't believe the situation was pretty bad? And what would she have gone to ask for, if not supplies?

Also, this is not Hersh's interpretation alone. You might be interested in this UPI article from 2002. Of course, the key sentence -- "The Israelis demanded an emergency airlift of weapons and spare parts from the United States to support an all-out war effort" -- is not sourced to anyone at all.

Michael,

I'm not sure about how to bet on these kinds of things. I sympathize with your perspective. But I've found many times that the SOP interpretation is significantly off. The Iraq/WMD story looms largely in my mind here.

I've also often found that people who you'd think would know the most about events don't. For instance, it's 100% certain that Saudi Arabia funded the Iraqi nuclear program during the 80s. And it's 95% certain the U.S. government was well aware of this. But I've run into people in positions where you'd assume they MUST know that who had literally no idea.

So, I think there are big, big flaws -- ideological and material -- in our information gathering. I don't believe large pieces of the picture can go completely missing, but they can appear in unnoticed footnotes.

In regards to Kissinger's views, I understand what you mean. But it's still plausible to me. He didn't have to just worry about the Israelis, he had to worry about the Arab and Soviet reaction, knowing they would pick up on Israeli nuclear preparations (and they did, as Israel expected). Plus he had to worry about Nixon, because who the hell knew *what* he was going to do at that point? That's a really, really dangerous situation. So I can easily imagine him hating it but feeling it was the best path to defusing things somewhat.

I'm glad you like the update. One of the things that depresses me most about America today is there are almost no places for serious but friendly discussions of these topics. So I am trying at least not to make things worse.