more on the Brookings Iran simulation

Two quick links regarding the Brookings Institutions December 2009 simulation of an Israeli strike on Iran:

• Kenneth M. Pollack, Osiraq Redux: A Crisis Simulation of an Israeli Strike on the Iranian Nuclear Program, Brooks Institution, February 2010.
• David E. Sanger, Imagining an Israeli Strike on Iran, New York Times, 26 March 2010.

*The milgeek in me is a little dubious about feasibility of the military scenario (“using a refueling base hastily set up in the Saudi Arabian desert without Saudi knowledge”) —it is one thing to refuel C-130s and helicopters in the desert as the Americans attempted in Operation Eagle Claw in 1980 (which, of course, went rather badly)… it is quite another thing with large numbers of modern high-performance strike aircraft in a country with quite good AWACS radar coverage. Still the simulation was largely about the politics, so it doesn’t much matter.