What Rough Beast watch

From F.A. MacKenzie, "The War in the Caucasus"

Last time we ran across General Martin Dempsey of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he was emerging from talks with Israeli leaders in unusually uncommunicative mood, with no communiqués and no chitchat with the hungry waiting press, last 20 January.

Even more remarkable, no leak about what he said to the Israelis has appeared in either U.S. or Israeli news media, indicating that both sides have regarded what Dempsey said as extremely sensitive. 

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The substance of Dempsey's warning to the Israelis has become known, however, to active and retired senior flag officers with connections to the JCS, according to a military source who got it from those officers.

This unsigned article from IPS claims that Dempsey

told Israeli leaders Jan. 20 that the United States would not participate in a war against Iran begun by Israel without prior agreement from Washington, according to accounts from well-placed senior military officers.

Dempsey's warning, conveyed to both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak, represents the strongest move yet by President Barack Obama to deter an Israeli attack and ensure that the United States is not caught up in a regional conflagration with Iran.

And what happened to the Amos Harel scoop about how the Israelis were going to tell Dempsey that they agreed Iranians had not yet decided to make a bomb? No leaks on that, but it apparently doesn't matter, because the IDF view officially is that they have to strike before the Iranians make up their minds; if they wait until after, it will be too late, on the basis of a whole complex of Reliable Expert hypotheses concerning everything from the technical issues of uranium purification to the personality issues of the bazaari merchants of Tehran.

But then Haaretz's leaks say that the Israeli leadership hasn't made their decision either.

Ken Pollack, a former White House and CIA official with expertise on the Gulf, said the sudden rise in public discussion of an Israeli strike on Iran's known nuclear sites - including increasingly dire warnings from Israel's leaders - were misleading.

"If Israel has a good military option, they just take it, they don't talk about it, they don't give warnings," said Pollack, director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. "So the fact that they are talking about it, to me, is one tip-off that they don't have a good military option."

 I don't know what it is about the whole situation that has me so spooked, or why I seem to have adopted the story, which is really not the kind of thing I'm even any good at, let alone properly informed about (I mean, I am Informed, but I don't have any special sources). But ever since the first talk came out about blockading Hormuz, I have had a Really Bad Feeling that I imagine resembles the feeling inspired by World War I as the monster slowly assembled itself, and I just want to be sure to stay awake, and keep talking. Today's signs—the IPS leak and the Pollack snark—seem like good signs. Let's hope they are.