In 2005, the Nobel Prize in Economic Science was awarded to Israeli mathematician and game theory specialist Robert J. Aumann, co-founder of the Center for Rationality at Hebrew University. This Jerusalem resident explains: �the entire school of thought that we have developed here in Israel� has turned �Israel into the leading authority in this field.�

Israeli strategists rely on game theory models to ensure the intended response to staged provocations and manipulated crises. With the use of game theory algorithms, those responses become predictable, even foreseeable -- within an acceptable range of probabilities. The waging of war �by way of deception� is now a mathematical discipline.

Such �probabilistic� war planning enables Tel Aviv to deploy serial provocations and well-timed crises as a force multiplier to project Israeli influence worldwide. For a skilled agent provocateur, the target can be a person, a company, an economy, a legislature, a nation or an entire culture -- such as Islam. With a well-modeled provocation, the anticipated reaction can even become a powerful weapon in the Israeli arsenal.

For instance, a skilled game theorist could foresee that, in response to a 9/11-type mass murder, �the mark� (the U.S.) would deploy its military to avenge that attack. With phony intelligence fixed around a preset goal, a game theory algorithm could anticipate that those forces might well be redirected to invade Iraq -- not to avenge 9/11 but to pursue the expansionist goals of Greater Israel.

To provoke that invasion required the displacement of an inconvenient truth (Iraq played no role in 9/11) with what lawmakers and the public could be deceived to believe. The emotionally wrenching nature of that incident was essential in order to induce Americans to abandon rational analysis and to facilitate their reliance on false intelligence.

Americans were (predictably) provoked by that mass murder. The foreseeable reaction -- shock, grief and outrage -- made it easier for them to believe that an infamous Iraqi Evil Doer was to blame. The displacement of facts with beliefs lies at heart of how Israel, the world�s leading authority in game theory, induces other nations to wage their wars.

False but plausible

To displace facts with credible fiction requires a period of �preparing the minds� so that the mark will believe a pre-staged storyline. Thus the essential role of a complicit media to promote: (a) a plausible present danger (Iraqi weapons of mass destruction), (b) a plausible villain (a former ally rebranded as an Evil Doer), and (c) a plausible post-Cold War threat to national security (The Clash of Civilizations and �Islamo-fascism�).

Reports from inside Israeli intelligence suggest that the war-planners who induced the 2003 invasion of Iraq began their psyops campaign no later than 1986 when an Israeli Mossad operation (Operation Trojan) made it appear that the Libyan leadership was transmitting terrorist directives from Tripoli to their embassies worldwide. Soon thereafter, two U.S. soldiers were killed by a terrorist attack in a Berlin discotheque. Ten days later, U.S., British and German aircraft dropped 60 tons of bombs on Libya.

The following is a senior Mossad operative�s assessment (published in 1994 in The Other Side of Deception) of that 1986 operation -- five years before the Gulf War and 15 years before the murderous provocation that preceded the invasion of Iraq:

After the bombing of Libya, our friend Qadhafi is sure to stay out of the picture for some time. Iraq and Saddam Hussein are the next target. We�re starting now to build him up as the big villain. It will take some time, but in the end, there�s no doubt that it�ll work.

Could this account by former Mossad case officer Victor Ostrovsky be correct? If so, Tel Aviv�s Iraqi operation required more pre-staging than its relatively simple Libyan deception.

America the mark

From a game theory perspective, what is the probability of a violent reaction in the Middle East after more than a half-century of serial Israeli provocations -- in an environment where the U.S. is identified (correctly) as the Zionist state�s special friend and protector?

During the 1967 War, the Israeli killing of 34 Americans aboard the USS Liberty confirmed that a U.S. president (Democrat Lyndon Johnson) could be induced to condone murderous behavior by Israel. Two decades later, Operation Trojan confirmed that a U.S. president (Republican Ronald Reagan) could be induced to attack an Arab nation based on intelligence fixed by Israel.

For more than six decades, the U.S. has armed, financed, befriended and defended Zionism. This �special relationship� includes the U.S.-discrediting veto of dozens of U.N. resolutions critical of Israeli conduct. From a game theory perspective, how difficult was it to anticipate that -- out of a worldwide population of 1.3 billion Muslims -- 19 Muslim men could be induced to perpetrate a murderous act in response to U.S support for Israel�s lengthy mistreatment of Arabs and Muslims, particularly Palestinians?

Israeli game theorists operate not from the Center for Morality or the Center for Justice but from the Center for Rationality. As modeled by Zionist war planners, game theory is devoid of all values except one: the ability to anticipate -- within an acceptable range of probabilities -- how �the mark� will react when provoked. Thus we see the force-multiplier potential for those who wage war with well-planned provocations and well-timed crises.

Israeli behavior is often immoral and unjust but that does not mean it is irrational. For Colonial Zionists committed to the pursuit of an expansionist agenda, even murderous provocations are rational because the response can be mathematically modeled, ensuring the results are reasonably foreseeable. That alone is sufficient for a people who, as God�s chosen, consider it their right to operate above the rule of law.

Previously published in Palestine Think Tank.