American and Israeli officials have finally confirmed that the industrial grade Cyber War weapons (Stuxnet, Duqu and Flame) used against Iran in the last few years were indeed joint U.S.-Israel operations.
If this was a softening up of Iran's facilities taking advantage of the invisible nature of cyber-war to dull Iran's response prior to unleashing the kinetics, this would be fine.
But we really haven't done very much to stop Iran with these cyber-attacks, now have we?
Stuxnet has been all kinds of fun, but hasn’t, on balance, done jack. Remember what Stuxnet was for: making centrifuges shut down. And it apparently did manage to make a number of centrifuges shut down. But it hasn’t slowed uranium enrichment. One more time: it hasn’t slowed uranium enrichment. It may at most have slowed the rate of acceleration in uranium enrichment. Stuxnet has had its day, and it didn’t put a significant crimp in Iran’s progress.
The point of attacking--even with cyber-weapons--must be to achieve an objective. Our objective should be to stop Iran's mullahs from getting nukes.
Otherwise it is just pointless posturing in an effort to appear like we are doing something substantial.
