Iran has signed a deal with China to buy two squadrons of J-10 fighter planes that are based on Israeli technology, the Russian news agency Novosti reported yesterday.So even with these aircraft Iran's air force is no match for that of Israel. I assume that means that even though the Iranian technology will be as good as that of Israel or Saudi Arabia, the numbers of aircraft are not as large and/or the training of pilots and controllers is not equal.
The 24 aircraft are based on technology and components provided to China by Israel following the cancellation of the Lavi project in the mid-1980s. The engines of the J-10 are Russian-made.
The total cost of the planes is estimated at $1 billion, and deliveries are expected between 2008 and 2010.
The estimated operational range of the aircraft, with external fuel tanks, is 3,000 kilometers, which means Israel falls within their radius of operation.
During the 1980s, Israel Aircraft Industries, along with U.S. firms, developed a multi-role aircraft that was considered the most advanced of its type at the time.
Following the development of a prototype, the Reagan administration stopped funding, bringing about the cancellation of the joint project.
Israel then began selling some of the systems it had developed to various countries, including China.
Experts point out that even with these aircraft, Iran's air force is no match for Israel's or even Saudi Arabia's.
Not yet, anyway.
Of course, If I were the Iranian government and was currently being threatened by the most powerful military in the world led by irrational madmen who have already invaded one Muslim country for no good reason, have troops on the ground at Iran's border, naval forces controlling the Persian Gulf and who are threatening Iran, I'd want more air power and the availability of nuclear weapons also. (The nukes are also needed because India, Pakistan and Israel all have them.)
The threat of the use of force seems to be more likely to cause more use of force in those circumstances than effective diplomacy diplomacy does. Of course, like with North Korea, its not either force or diplomacy. The availability of force could be used to set up the conditions for effective diplomacy. Threats and bluster, however, make the necessary diplomacy a lot more difficult.
For the Israelis to sell the (then) latest air force technology to China seems completely irresponsible, though.
Just a thought - a major U.S. government-sponsored effort to find replacement energy sources for oil would make the entire Middle East tinderbox less important and would (if successful) cut heavily into the sources of funds they are using for weaponry. Even just the threat of success of such a program would make the price of belligerency in the Middle East a lot higher.
It is also my opinion that any nation which gets a large part of its foreign currency from oil has a very small group of people who totally control the economy of that nation. That's why all oil-supplying nations which do not also have a diversified industrial economy are authoritarian nations. I am unaware of any exceptions.
Remove the central control over foreign exchange that oil gives the government (slowly and carefully, so that it does not lead to anarchy and civil war immediately) and a democracy is a lot more likely to be born. [*] As long as the government controls the economy through oil, the only alternative organization to offer power to the population will be religious organizations. Religious organizations which organize to fight the power of the unitary state find themselves fighting Asymmetric warfare so they will use Partisan - Guerrilla - terrorist (whatever the latest insult term the state uses is) warfare techniques.
[*] This would not have worked in Iraq as long as the Sunni minority dominated the Shiite majority population and the Kurds. Iraq's problem was set in place by the British when they tool over what became Iraq from the collapsing Ottoman Empire, and there was no government after that time that had both the will and the ability to get off the tiger there.
[Addendum - 11/01/2007 - It has been pointed out to me that Iraqi Kurdistan was added to the British Protectorate of Iraq administered our of Baghdad solely because oil was discovered in Mosul. The shape of today's Iraqi nation was created to give the British control of as much oil as possible.
The Kurds were not pleased with the decision at the time and have not been well-served by it since. As is so often the case, control of oil under the ground required control of the people sitting on top of the oil. Since this ignored the historic conflict between the Kurds, Sunni and Shiites who were lumped together to make it more convenient to control the oil pools they sat on, it led directly to the nasty dictatorship of Saddam. Saddam's dictatorial rule was shaped to repress exactly the civil conflict that was set off by the Bush invasion of Iraq in 2003 which removed him.
The utter stupidity of disbanding the Iraqi military and police after the invasion of Iraq left the inadequately manned U.S. military to control all the repressed conflicts that the American invasion let loose.
The conflicts there today revolve around the problems caused by control of oil, which is being fought out between different social, religious, political and economic groups. To complicate matters further, a single individual is unlikely to be motivated by only one of those artificial categories. All of this is set in the volatile Middle East which has no overall control and where those various social, religious, political and economic groups all are contending against each other for control of the region.
The pools of oil are a source of power in the various conflicts, just as they can be in maintaining an authoritarian government. Control of those oil pools will permit authoritarian control of the people living on top of them and people nearby, so those oil pools are themselves being fought over. It is much too simple to say that the conflicts in Iraq and the Middle East are about oil. Control of oil is just one more source of power among many being fought over.]
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