Will Israel Strike Iran ?

nyyyyce

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
Re: Israeli: Attack on Iran "UNAVOIDABLE"

Read this earlier. This is troubling....especially with the neo-cons desire to do so and with Liebermann doing everything he can to accomplish the goal as well.
Those PNAC bastards don't need another excuse to force another regime change in that region. This is icing. Lieberman is an @$$ and Israel is trying to force our hand in this thing. Too many party's ready to wage war and not enough diplomacy or acknowledgement of the "real" facts regarding Iran. The propaganda machine is in full gear.
 

African Herbsman

Star
Registered
Re: Israeli: Attack on Iran "UNAVOIDABLE"


THIS "unavoidable" proclamation (from the Israeli Deputy Prime Minister) and
some analyst at Morgan Stanley saying oil will reach $150 a barrel by July 4th
and what happens?

Oil jumped up a record $10.75 per barrel to trade at $138.54 a barrel

If we think gas prices are high now, they are about to go even HIGHER !


That's been the goal from the start. Mission almost accomplished.
 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
Re: Israeli: Attack on Iran "UNAVOIDABLE"

Exclusive:

<font size="5"><center>Flurry over possible Israeli attack on Iran
galvanized by race to succeed Olmert</font size></center>


DEBKAFile
June 6, 2008, 10:38 PM (GMT+02:00)

Two White House spokesmen stressed Friday, June 6, that Washington was committed to solving the Iran issue by diplomacy. They were fielding a barrage of questions on Israeli transport minister Shaul Mofaz’s statement that an attack on Iran’s nuclear sites looks “unavoidable” if it continues uranium enrichment - given the failure of sanctions.

Asked whether the US would support an Israeli strike on Iraq, White House spokesman Scott Stanzel answered indirectly: “I’m not going to talk about hypotheticals. I think we’ve been pretty clear in recent weeks and months about our approach on Iran.”

Dana Perino followed by saying: “I understand that Israel is very concerned… when they have a neighbor in their region – Iran – that says they want to wipe them off the map. We are trying to solve this diplomatically.”

DEBKAfile’s political sources report that, while prime minister Ehud Olmert’s aides and the Israeli media played up the importance of the Iranian dossier he presented to President George W. Bush in the White House Wednesday, June 4, there was little substance to their conversation.

Olmert aimed for the impression that he was on top of his job in the face of calls at home for him to step down over the investigation against him for corrupt practices. Any real exchange of intelligence between the two governments took place in the talks US Director of National Intelligence Adm. Mike McConnell held in Tel Aviv while Olmert was in Washington. The American visitor met with the Mossad chief Meir Dagan and defense minister Ehud Barak, following which he was due to brief President Bush over the weekend.

It is self-evident to every Israeli that Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear bomb would threaten the Jewish state’s existence and no government can afford to stand by and watch it happen. For Mofaz, who is campaigning to succeed Olmert as Kadima leader and next prime minister, a hawkish position on Iran has the best chance of garnering popular support.

This does not promise an attack on Iran is about to happen. So far, Olmert and Barak have been treading water on the Iran problem; they are even dragging their feet on the lingering Hamas missile offensive which is progressively depopulating southwestern Israel.

http://www.debka.com/headline.php?hid=5328
 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
Re: Israeli: Attack on Iran "UNAVOIDABLE"

<font size="3">
Iran demands Security Council action on Israel threat
Sat Jun 7, 2008 </font size>
"Such a dangerous threat against a sovereign state and a member of the United Nations constitutes a manifest violation of international law and contravenes the most fundamental principles of the Charter of the United Nations, and, thus, requires a resolute and clear response on the part of the United Nations, particularly the Security Council,"​

Full Article: http://uk.reuters.com/article/oilRpt/idUKN0731886420080607

`
 

nyyyyce

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
Re: Israeli: Attack on Iran "UNAVOIDABLE"

<font size="3">
Iran demands Security Council action on Israel threat
Sat Jun 7, 2008 </font size>
"Such a dangerous threat against a sovereign state and a member of the United Nations constitutes a manifest violation of international law and contravenes the most fundamental principles of the Charter of the United Nations, and, thus, requires a resolute and clear response on the part of the United Nations, particularly the Security Council,"​

Full Article: http://uk.reuters.com/article/oilRpt/idUKN0731886420080607

`
I was thinking something along these lines - what is Iran thinking. The media/propaganda machine has sheeple focusing in on what the US and Israel are saying and Iran is like: "You do know I can hear you? I am still IN the room."
 

GET YOU HOT

Superfly Moderator
BGOL Investor
Mossad has been behind a long series of false-flag events...even linked the 9-11 events in many capacities and if nothing else... 9-11 increased out involvement in the Middle East...and that is what Israel has always wanted. Iran is one of Israel's biggest threats in the region and we all know...through either zionist israeli's in our own government on through other means, they will push their agenda.... Israel has always played our strings and manuevers our policy like a puppet. I just hope that we don't have another major event before Bush leaves office.

Obama, would win and then they would lose the control they have on the masses, he speaks to people directly with issues and situations they can relate to and are willing to die for. Bush speaks to people with issues that affect them, for which they will die, with nothing to gain.

You can almost count on another major event, there is no other way, for "them", to continue the plan; McCain, would serve as a patsy, if elected...
 

JA_mvua

wannabe star
Registered
Russia's in it for the money. They will settle down if they know we are going to support Israel. Remember, beyond popular belief, we're still the country noone wants to fuck with...

The question should be , all those who are willing to fight and die for the support of Israel please step forward?
 

GET YOU HOT

Superfly Moderator
BGOL Investor
The question should be , all those who are willing to fight and die for the support of Israel please step forward?


Many will, not including myself, but still...


U.S. Christian Views on Jerusalem
There are approximately 150 million affiliated Christians in the United States.8 The Catholic Church accounts for almost one in five Americans. Another 60 to 70 million Americans describe themselves as Evangelical.9 The largest group of Evangelicals comes from the Southern Baptist movement, the largest Protestant body in the country. However, the Evangelical community draws members and churches from many Protestant denominations, including the Reformed, Baptist, Pentecostal, Holiness/Wesleyan, and Lutheran churches.

In reaching out to Christians, it is important to keep in mind that, overall, church-Jewish/Israel relations are shaped by several doctrines that are adopted or rejected by different denominations to varying degrees. Some are:

Replacement theology: Jews have been replaced by the Christians in God's favor; thus, all of God's promises to the Jews, including the Land of Israel, have been inherited by Christianity. The Roman Catholic and other churches have officially renounced this doctrine, but it remains alive in many quarters.

Salvation through conversion only: Personal salvation is possible only through belief in Jesus. Thus, Jews, even if still considered people of the covenant, must convert in order to be saved.

Witnessing/proselytizing: Christians must actively bear witness/proclaim the gospel of Jesus to all people in order for them to have the opportunity (but not be coerced) to embrace Jesus.

Jews' centrality in Jesus' second coming: Only when the biblical Israel is fully restored to the land can the final drama of God's judgment and salvation be carried out.

Even within individual churches, it is often difficult to ascertain clear-cut policy lines regarding Jews, Israel, and Jerusalem. In addition to the evolving nature of official policy, the views of the laity or of individual clergymen often differ. Ongoing Palestinian-Israeli violence also clouds or confuses general policy. Finally, most U.S. Christians do not focus daily on Israel and Jerusalem

http://www.jcpa.org/jl/vp484.htm

also...

http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/01/splitting_the_evangelicals_fro.html
 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
Re: Israeli: Attack on Iran "UNAVOIDABLE"

Op-Ed Contributor

Using Bombs to Stave Off War
Israel will almost surely attack Iran’s nuclear sites
in the next four to seven months


The New York Times
By BENNY MORRIS
Published: July 18, 2008
Li-On, Israel

<font size="3">ISRAEL will almost surely attack Iran’s nuclear sites in the next four to seven months — and the leaders in Washington and even Tehran should hope that the attack will be successful enough to cause at least a significant delay in the Iranian production schedule, if not complete destruction, of that country’s nuclear program. Because if the attack fails, the Middle East will almost certainly face a nuclear war — either through a subsequent pre-emptive Israeli nuclear strike or a nuclear exchange shortly after Iran gets the bomb.

It is in the interest of neither Iran nor the United States (nor, for that matter, the rest of the world) that Iran be savaged by a nuclear strike, or that both Israel and Iran suffer such a fate. We know what would ensue: a traumatic destabilization of the Middle East with resounding political and military consequences around the globe, serious injury to the West’s oil supply and radioactive pollution of the earth’s atmosphere and water.</font size>

But should Israel’s conventional assault fail to significantly harm or stall the Iranian program, a ratcheting up of the Iranian-Israeli conflict to a nuclear level will most likely follow. Every intelligence agency in the world believes the Iranian program is geared toward making weapons, not to the peaceful applications of nuclear power. And, despite the current talk of additional economic sanctions, everyone knows that such measures have so far led nowhere and are unlikely to be applied with sufficient scope to cause Iran real pain, given Russia’s and China’s continued recalcitrance and Western Europe’s (and America’s) ambivalence in behavior, if not in rhetoric. Western intelligence agencies agree that Iran will reach the “point of no return” in acquiring the capacity to produce nuclear weapons in one to four years.

Which leaves the world with only one option if it wishes to halt Iran’s march toward nuclear weaponry: the military option, meaning an aerial assault by either the United States or Israel. Clearly, America has the conventional military capacity to do the job, which would involve a protracted air assault against Iran’s air defenses followed by strikes on the nuclear sites themselves. But, as a result of the Iraq imbroglio, and what is rapidly turning into the Afghan imbroglio, the American public has little enthusiasm for wars in the Islamic lands. This curtails the White House’s ability to begin yet another major military campaign in pursuit of a goal that is not seen as a vital national interest by many Americans.

Which leaves only Israel — the country threatened almost daily with destruction by Iran’s leaders. Thus the recent reports about Israeli plans and preparations to attack Iran (the period from Nov. 5 to Jan. 19 seems the best bet, as it gives the West half a year to try the diplomatic route but ensures that Israel will have support from a lame-duck White House).

The problem is that Israel’s military capacities are far smaller than America’s and, given the distances involved, the fact that the Iranian sites are widely dispersed and underground, and Israel’s inadequate intelligence, it is unlikely that the Israeli conventional forces, even if allowed the use of Jordanian and Iraqi airspace (and perhaps, pending American approval, even Iraqi air strips) can destroy or perhaps significantly delay the Iranian nuclear project.

Nonetheless, Israel, believing that its very existence is at stake — and this is a feeling shared by most Israelis across the political spectrum — will certainly make the effort. Israel’s leaders, from Prime Minister Ehud Olmert down, have all explicitly stated that an Iranian bomb means Israel’s destruction; Iran will not be allowed to get the bomb.

The best outcome will be that an Israeli conventional strike, whether failed or not — and, given the Tehran regime’s totalitarian grip, it may not be immediately clear how much damage the Israeli assault has caused — would persuade the Iranians to halt their nuclear program, or at least persuade the Western powers to significantly increase the diplomatic and economic pressure on Iran.

But the more likely result is that the international community will continue to do nothing effective and that Iran will speed up its efforts to produce the bomb that can destroy Israel. The Iranians will also likely retaliate by attacking Israel’s cities with ballistic missiles (possibly topped with chemical or biological warheads); by prodding its local clients, Hezbollah and Hamas, to unleash their own armories against Israel; and by activating international Muslim terrorist networks against Israeli and Jewish — and possibly American — targets worldwide (though the Iranians may at the last moment be wary of provoking American military involvement).

Such a situation would confront Israeli leaders with two agonizing, dismal choices. One is to allow the Iranians to acquire the bomb and hope for the best — meaning a nuclear standoff, with the prospect of mutual assured destruction preventing the Iranians from actually using the weapon. The other would be to use the Iranian counterstrikes as an excuse to escalate and use the only means available that will actually destroy the Iranian nuclear project: Israel’s own nuclear arsenal.

Given the fundamentalist, self-sacrificial mindset of the mullahs who run Iran, Israel knows that deterrence may not work as well as it did with the comparatively rational men who ran the Kremlin and White House during the cold war. They are likely to use any bomb they build, both because of ideology and because of fear of Israeli nuclear pre-emption. Thus an Israeli nuclear strike to prevent the Iranians from taking the final steps toward getting the bomb is probable. The alternative is letting Tehran have its bomb. In either case, a Middle Eastern nuclear holocaust would be in the cards.

Iran’s leaders would do well to rethink their gamble and suspend their nuclear program. Bar this, the best they could hope for is that Israel’s conventional air assault will destroy their nuclear facilities. To be sure, this would mean thousands of Iranian casualties and international humiliation. But the alternative is an Iran turned into a nuclear wasteland. Some Iranians may believe that this is a worthwhile gamble if the prospect is Israel’s demise. But most Iranians probably don’t.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/18/opinion/18morris.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&oref=slogi
 

African Herbsman

Star
Registered
Re: Israeli: Attack on Iran "UNAVOIDABLE"

^^^ This jewish propaganda is starting to sickitate me. Poor Israel.

Check out the Scott Ritter piece I posted yesterday.
 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
Re: Israeli: Attack on Iran "UNAVOIDABLE"

Do you actually read any of this stuff? Seriously.

QueEx
 

blackbull1970

The Black Bastard
Platinum Member
Re: Israeli: Attack on Iran "UNAVOIDABLE"

If Isreal hits Iran with US support, all hell is going to break out in the mid-east.

Peace.
 

TheDynasty

Certified Genius
BGOL Investor
U.S. to Iran: "You have two weeks."

US sets nuclear deadline for Iran
<!--SvideoInStoryC--> <!--Semp--> <!--Swarning-->
<!--EvideoInStoryC-->

Iran must decide between confrontation and co-operation in the dispute over its nuclear plans, the US has warned.


At talks in Geneva, envoys from the US, EU and UN asked Iran to suspend its uranium enrichment in return for a pledge not to introduce new sanctions.
Iran gave no guarantees it would halt its activities, so the diplomats gave Tehran two weeks to provide an answer.
The meeting was the first time US and Iranian officials have held face-to-face talks on the nuclear issue.
Senior US official William Burns was present at the Geneva talks - although he made no public comment.
Instead, state department spokesman Sean McCormack issued a strongly-worded statement in Washington.
"We hope the Iranian people understand that their leaders need to make a choice between co-operation, which would bring benefits to all, and confrontation, which can only lead to further isolation," he said.



'New opportunity'
Mr McCormack added that Mr Burns had delivered a "clear simple message" that Washington was "serious" about the incentives package but that it would only negotiate with Iran if it upheld its side of the deal.
Diplomats had hoped that Iran would respond to a so-called "freeze-for-freeze" offer, under which a freeze of Iran's uranium enrichment programme at its current levels would be matched by a Western pledge not to strengthen sanctions on Tehran.
"It was a constructive meeting, but still we didn't get the answer to our questions," EU envoy Javier Solana told reporters.





<table> <tbody><tr> <td width="5">
</td> <td class="fact"> 'FREEZE-FOR-FREEZE' OFFER
<!--Smva--> Iran suspends its nuclear activities including the installation of any new centrifuges
At same time the six world powers refrain from any new Security Council resolution on sanctions
Talks can then start on long-term deal on recognising Iran's right to develop nuclear energy for civilian purposes, and lifting of sanctions
<!--Emva--> <!--So-->
<!--Eo--> <!--Smiiib--> </td> </tr> </tbody></table>
"We hope very much we get the answer and we hope it will be done in a couple of weeks," he said.
Mr Solana said he had agreed with Iran's chief negotiator, Saeed Jalili, to speak again either by telephone or personally in two weeks.
The BBC's Jon Leyne in Tehran says Iran is interested in the offer but it is unclear whether there are divisions in the leadership or the Iranians are playing for time.
Mr Jalili said he had put forward many positive ideas and he urged Western powers not turn away from negotiations.
"This package we have proposed contains a number of possibilities. In a nutshell, it is a new opportunity which should not be lost."
But doubt was cast over the value of the talks, after a member of the Iranian delegation said there was "no chance" of a freeze on the uranium-enrichment programme.
Iran says its nuclear facilities are designed to meet its energy needs, denying that it has a weapons programme.
But Tehran's continued activity is defying UN Security Council demands to halt enrichment.



Rising tensions
In addition to the EU, Iranian and US envoys, the talks in Geneva's city hall were attended by representatives from Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia.
The US and Iran have had no diplomatic relations since the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the taking of hostages at the US embassy in Tehran.
Formal contact between the two countries has been extremely limited, though last year they met at ambassadorial level to discuss security in Iraq.
The meeting came after weeks of rising tensions in the Middle East.
The Iranians test-fired missiles last week, and a series of threats and counter-threats between Iran and Israel has been watched nervously in the West.



Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/7515589.stm
 

keysersoze

Star
Registered
Re: Israeli: Attack on Iran "UNAVOIDABLE"

Question?

If Iran Nukes Isreal, what happens to the Dome of the rock?

Or the Al Aqsa Mosque?

How will the Islamic world feel about that? How will they feel about the country that commits that act?


BTW, came across this . . . http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/

Man, where are you living? The only country in the middle east that has actual Nuclear Weapons at this moment is Israel.

Iran is trying to get them. Your buying into the assumption that as soon as Iran gets them, they'll use them.

That's not how nuclear deterrence works. Nuclear deterrence worked between the Soviets & the US did it not? Why can't it work between the Iranians & the Israelis.

read this to show why Nuclear deterrence will work.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutually_Assured_Destruction
 

Race Harley

Rising Star
Platinum Member
Re: U.S. to Iran: "You have two weeks."

We're (the US) is still talking the bully-bullshit?!? Isn't our plate full enough? Spreading shit thin.
 

nyyyyce

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
Re: Israeli: Attack on Iran "UNAVOIDABLE"

Man, where are you living? The only country in the middle east that has actual Nuclear Weapons at this moment is Israel.

Iran is trying to get them. Your buying into the assumption that as soon as Iran gets them, they'll use them.

That's not how nuclear deterrence works. Nuclear deterrence worked between the Soviets & the US did it not? Why can't it work between the Iranians & the Israelis.

On TOP of this, why is the democratic Congress and the media BLATANTLY ignoring the NIE that shattered the lies we a weaving about Iran's nuclear intentions. this -ish stinks, and has stunk since 9/11. PNAC.
 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
<font size="5"><center>In secret note, Olmert says Bush
has deserted Israel against Iran</font size></center>


DEBKAfile Exclusive Report
July 26, 2008, 3:42 PM

Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert this week shot off a strong secret note to US President George W. Bush, DEBKAfile’s sources reveal, protesting the administration’s strategic steps toward rapprochement with Iran.

Israel was not forewarned, Olmert wrote bitterly, although these steps directly violated US-Israel understandings on Iran of the past year. Bush, he said, had broken the promises he gave in face-to-face meetings with the prime minister earlier this year. If nothing is done to arrest Iran’s progress towards a nuclear bomb, Olmert warned, Iran will have all the components ready for assembly by early 2009, that is, in 6-8 months.

This time line is tighter than the one the prime minister gave the Democratic Senator Barack Obama when he visited Jerusalem Wednesday, July 23.

DEBKAfile’s Washington sources add that Bush has not replied to the letter, although the prime minister wrote in a spirit of extreme alarm over the threat to Israel’s security and indeed survival building up in Tehran.

The US response apparently came in the way American military chiefs brushed off Israeli chief of staff Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, when he presented intelligence updates on the state of Iran’s military nuclear program. He was received with great honor during his week’s working visit, but his hosts declined to address the working theories guiding the IDF with regard to that program.

Res. Maj-Gen Yizhak Ben-Israel, former head of IDF Weapons Authority, strongly refuted Saturday, July 26, the estimate published by Time Magazine quoting former Mossad chief Ephraim Halevi (up until 2002) as speaking out against an Israeli attack on Iran, because it “could have an impact on us [Israel] for the next 100 years.”

Ben-Israel, a world-class expert on Iran’s nuclear and missile programs, countered that Israel’s failure to attack Iran’s nuclear sites would “jeopardize its security.” Time is working against the Jewish state,” he said.

As he spoke, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced his country’s nuclear program had managed to double the uranium-enriching centrifuges operating in Natanz to 6,000.

http://www.debka.com/headline.php?hid=5467
 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
Israel's Debate Over an Iran Strike

Despite President Bush's insistence that the military option remains
"on the table" . . .a U.S. air strike on Iranian nuclear sites is
increasingly unlikely in the waning days of the Bush
Administration . . . Israel debates going it, alone


israel_iran_0723.jpg

An Israeli F16C Jet fighter returns to Ramat David air
force base in northern Israel. Menahem Kahana / Getty

TME Magazine
By TIM MCGIRK AND AARON J. KLEIN / JERUSALEM
Thursday, Jul. 24, 2008

Despite President Bush's insistence that the military option remains "on the table" for dealing with Iran's nuclear program, Israeli officials have recognized that a U.S. air strike on Iranian nuclear sites is increasingly unlikely in the waning days of the Bush Administration. The Israelis, along with everyone else, are now counting on European-led diplomatic efforts to persuade the Iranians to halt their uranium-enrichment program. But they know diplomacy may fail, which is why a debate now rages in the highest circles of Israel's government and military: If the Europeans fail and the Americans remain reluctant to launch another war in the Middle East, should Israel strike alone against Iran?

When President Bush visited Israel in mid-May, senior Israeli leaders came away from talks confident that the U.S. would attack Iran if it refused to stop enriching uranium. Says one top Israeli military planner privy to Israel's discussions with the U.S. on Iran: "We were under the illusion during Bush's last visit that he was much more determined to order a military action." No longer.

Last week's U-turn, in which the Bush Administration sent a high-ranking State Department official to join the European delegation meeting Iran's top nuclear negotiator, and the proposal was made to open a U.S. Interests Section to handle consular matters in Tehran — which would be the first U.S. diplomatic presence in Iran since its embassy was stormed in 1979 — has stunned Israeli officials. So dismayed were the Israelis by the latest U.S. moves, one military source told TIME, that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert wrote to Bush complaining that Israel should have been forewarned about the White House's abrupt change of course toward Iran.

Just last month, Israel conducted a complex military exercise, involving more than 150 aircraft flying 900 miles over the Mediterranean Sea, that was widely interpreted as a rehearsal for an air strike against Iran's dozens of nuclear facilities. A top former officer from Mossad (the Israeli equivalent of the CIA) told TIME that Israel is mindful that an air strike on Iran would jolt the U.S. presidential election — probably rebounding badly on Republican contender Senator John McCain. Sources say that Israel sees a narrow "window of opportunity" for military action opening up between November and the swearing-in of the new American President next January. "No Israel leader wants to be blamed for destroying the Republican chances," says the former Mossad officer.

But will Israel really go it alone and attack Iran if talks break down, or is the threat simply a bluff aimed at prompting the U.S. and Europe to step up the pressure on Tehran? Until now, Israel has been using a "hold me back, or I'll do something crazy" tactic, concedes the ex–Mossad officer.

The Israelis do believe time is short. An Israeli military planner estimates that Iran will reach "the point of no return" in developing the capacity to build nuclear weapons by early 2009. The U.S. sees things differently, he says, calculating that Iran will have enriched enough uranium to weapons-grade to be able to build a bomb by mid-2010. Both scenarios, says the Israeli planner, "give them some leeway for negotiations, but not much."

Despite Israel's top-notch air force, launching a long-range strike against a multitude of hidden targets in Iran entails huge risks and uncertain rewards. At most, say Israeli intelligence sources, an attack — which Israel would undertake with only a nod and perhaps logistical support from the U.S. — is likely to stall Iran's program by just a year or two. And that makes the cost-benefit analysis weigh against an air strike on Iran, according to some senior Israeli officials who urge caution.

Active and retired Israeli intelligence officials interviewed by TIME tended to dismiss Iran's threats of retaliation against Israel and the U.S. Ephraim Halevy, the previous Mossad chief who now heads the Center for Strategic and Policy Studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, says, "Iran is not 10 feet tall." Halevy contends that a barrage of Iran's missiles on Israel would not do too much damage, since dozens would be shot down by Israel's advanced antimissile system. (Iran staged a missile test recently in which the published photo was doctored to hide the fact that one of the fired missiles was a dud.) Halevy claims that the "relative success" of the U.S. military's surge in Iraq has curtailed Iran's capacity for mischief among its Shi'ite brethren in Iraq. He also doubts that Iran's ally Syria, which has long-range missiles, or its Hizballah and Hamas allies would risk a major dustup merely to exact revenge on Iran's behalf. Still, Halevy warns that the long-term effects of attacking Iran could be devastating for Israel — and the region. "This could have an impact on us for the next 100 years," he says. "It will have a negative effect on public opinion in the Arab world, and we should only do [a strike on Iran] as a last resort."

Meir Javedanfar, a respected, Iranian-born writer and analyst specializing in Israeli-Iranian relations, warns that an Israeli attack would unite Iranians around their hawkish President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. "This would guarantee that Ahmadinejad wins next year's elections," says Javendafar, who adds that right now the incumbent's re-election is in doubt because of the economic hardship he has brought to Iran's middle classes.

Whatever the real prospects for military action, in the game of rhetorical brinksmanship, Israel has matched every hotheaded statement from Ahmadinejad with threats of its own. The Israeli press often compares Iran's bellicose, Holocaust-denying leader to Hitler. In the past few months, right-wing Israeli politicians, retired generals and pundits have ratcheted up rhetoric, calling on Olmert to quash the "existential threat" from Iran. But lately, these war cries have been toned down, in part to prepare the Israeli public for the possibility that Israel will not attack Iran on its own.

Says one former senior Mossad officer who served under Olmert: "Iran's achievement is creating an image of itself as a scary superpower when it's really a paper tiger." In Tehran, meanwhile, more sober heads among the clerical leadership whose authority is greater than the President's are reining in Ahmadinejad, says Javedanfar. After a public scolding in a conservative newspaper by a top aide to Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Ahmadinejad several weeks ago publicly declared that Iran has no intention of attacking Israel or anyone else unless it is hit first. Halevy concurs. "I don't detect an appetite among the Iranians to bring about a catastrophe," he says. But, he cautions, "There's a narrowing gap of opportunity for negotiations."

The danger remains in this high-stakes game of brinksmanship that either Israel or Iran could push the other too far. But the Bush Administration's sudden overture toward Iran, and its moves toward engaging it diplomatically in search of a solution to the nuclear impasse, make it more likely that Israel will follow Washington's lead rather than striking out on its own.

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1826310,00.html
 
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GET YOU HOT

Superfly Moderator
BGOL Investor
Israel bombs Iraq's Nuclear Reactor...
Israeli military exercises lead to precision military strikes...

<iframe title="YouTube video player" width="480" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/NZhSRKxu5Fk" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>



Israeli military exercises over Iran, 2008

<iframe title="YouTube video player" width="480" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/c6xApA38InA" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
 
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QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
<font size="5"><Center>US-Russian deal lets Iran’s
nuclear bomb program off the hook</font size></center>



s_5616.jpg



DEBKAfile Special Report
September 27, 2008

Friday, Sept. 26, 2008 was the day the policy pursued by Ehud Olmert, Tzipi Livni and Shimon Peres, of reliance on the international community to stop Iran developing a nuclear bomb, sank without a trace. The international community declined to adopt fresh economic sanctions to rein in an increasingly defiant Tehran.

A deal between the US and Russia in New York sealed a very brief non-sanctions draft reaffirming previous council decisions for the five permanent Security Council members and Germany to table. It also called for Iran’s compliance.

This ignored the reality of Iran openly flouting all three previous sanctions resolutions: Tehran continues to enrich uranium, reprocess plutonium, build nuclear-capable missiles and stonewall on International Atomic Energy Agency’s questions and inspections.

Even the usually forgiving IAEA director Mohamed ElBaradei changed his tune and admitted Thursday that Iran was on its way to “mastering technology that would enable it to build atomic bombs.”

Yet no comment has come from Israel, either from the Kadima-nominee for prime minister Tzipi Livni or defense minister, Labor’s Ehud Barak, although ElBaradei was clearly preparing the ground to raise his hands and admit failure in stop Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon capability. The world would have to swallow the pill.

This acceptance was reflected in the West’s backing down on a fourth round of sanctions. Iran, free of fear of retribution, may go forward with its first underground nuclear test some time next year, flaunting the inability of its arch-foes, America and Israel, to prevent it attaining the status of first Islamic nuclear power.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could therefore afford to be cockier than ever when he addressed the UN General Assembly in Nazi-style anti-Semitic, anti-Israeli and anti-American language. Tehran would ignore any council demand imposed by “arrogant powers” to curb its nuclear program, he declared. The issue was closed.

The Iranian leader can afford to crow. This week he won solid backing from Iran’s ultimate power, supreme leader ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who called on the nation to give him their support.

This cleared the way for Ahmadinejad’s re-election as president next year and enable him to continue to shepherd the national nuclear weapons program through to completion.

He certainly picked up the gap in perception of the program between Israel and the world powers. While Israeli spokesman still refer to a future threat which there is still time to stop, most world leaders appear reconciled to its presence.

The collapse of Israel’s foreign policy on this issue came at an unfortunate juncture:

1. The pandemonium in the US-led financial world has removed the Iranian threat from international consciousness.

2. Moscow, Iran and Syria are cementing their partnership, giving Tehran’s nuclear aspirations a strong diplomatic umbrella.​

Moscow is pursuing cold war tactics in two new spheres: the Middle East, from its center of gravity in Tehran, and Latin America, resting on Venezuela’s anti-American posture and friendly relations with Iran.

Israel’s foreign policy, lame and defensive at the best of times since Livni took over, appears as oblivious as ever to the disastrous developments pressing down on the Jewish state.

http://www.debka.com/headline.php?hid=5616
 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
<font size="5"><center>
Too late to stop Tehran,
Obama aims to stifle an Israeli attack </font size></center>



1405.jpg

Sound and fury signifying what?



DEBKAfile Special Analysis
September 26, 2009


Maestro Barack Obama's histrionics in New York and Pittsburgh Thursday and Friday, Sept. 24-25 - and his threat of "confrontation" for Iran's concealment of its nuclear capabilities - were water off a duck's back for Tehran, whose nuclear weapons program has gone too far to stop by words or even sanctions.

The Islamic regime only responded with more defiance, announcing that its second uranium enrichment plant near Qom would become operational soon.

The US president's tough words and willingness to step out of his axiomatic insistence on dialogue and turn to economic warfare against Iran may be impressive but it is no longer effective. Tehran is too close to its goal of a nuclear weapons capability to be deterred by offers of engagement or economic penalties.

Obama certainly knows this. He also understands that Iran is now unstoppable except by force. His performance was therefore directed at another target: Israel, whom he is determined to dissuade from resorting to military action against Iran's nuclear installations.

Defense secretary Robert Gates hit the nail on the head when he said Friday: "The reality is there is no military option that does anything more than buy time. The estimates are one to three years or so."

Iran was allowed to reach the point defined by Gates thanks to the permissiveness of two US presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton and two Israeli prime ministers, Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert. They had no illusions about the deterrent value of the three sets of UN Security sanctions imposed to punish Iran, but held back from pre-emptive action on the pretext that there was still plenty of time before Iran was in a position to destroy Israel.

In any case, Israeli leaders argued, Iran's nuclear ambitions were a threat to the whole world and it was therefore incumbent on the "international community" to take care of them.

This of course did not happen. Iran carried on exploiting international inaction, finally capitalizing on Obama's foot-dragging in his first nine months in office.

By now, Iran has used the gift of time to process enough enriched uranium to fuel two nuclear bombs and is able to produce another two per year.

Its advanced medium-range missiles will be ready to deliver nuclear warheads by next year.

Detonators for nuclear bombs are in production at two secret sites.

And finally, a second secret uranium enrichment plant - subject of the stern warning issued collectively in Pittsburgh Friday by Obama, French president Nicolas Sarkozy and British premier Gordon Brown - has come to light, buried under a mountain near Qom. Its discovery doubles - at least - all previous estimates of Iran's nuclear capabilities.

Caught red-handed yet again in massive deceit, the Iranian president Mahdmoud Ahmadinejad had only more defiance to offer. America owes his government an apology, he told interviewers in New York Friday, because the new plant would not be operational for 18 months, and Tehran had therefore not violated International Atomic Energy Agency rules requiring notification.

He was soon caught in another lie.

Saturday, the Iranian news agency was informed by an aide of supreme leader Ali Khamenei that "the new plant would become operational soon."

Iran's published concealments and deceptions are disquieting enough. But a whole lot more are undoubtedly buried in fat intelligence dossiers on Iran's nuclear program - plutonium production, for instance. The progress made in its plutonium-based weapons program was never mentioned in the stern condemnations of the last few days, except indirectly in a quiet comment from an anonymous Israeli official Friday night.

He said Iran operates on two hourglasses and both were running out fast. He was referring obliquely to the enriched uranium and the plutonium tracks.

Sarkozy was clearly thinking about those undiscovered Iranian secrets and evasions when he declared in Pittsburgh:

"Everything - everything must be put on the table now" (at the October 1 meeting of the Six Powers with Iranian negotiators). Obama too urged Iran "to come clean."

All the powers concerned - the US, Russia, France, Germany the UK and even China - have the same information as Israel and are fully aware that Iran has already crossed a number of red lines this year and will cross more in 2010. The more time allowed for diplomacy and engagement, the greater Tehran's defiance. Meanwhile, world powers will argue - not over futile sanctions, but on how to stop Israel, so wasting several more months.

DEBKAfile's sources note that the Gates assessment and the cooling note he injected into the US president's oratory came after Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak visited the Pentagon. The visit clearly did not change Gates' view that the Iranian nuclear program was now too advanced to stop, while the use of force would only gain an interval of up to three years, after which Tehran would pick itself up and start again. Therefore, according to Gates, diplomacy remained the only viable option.

The answer to this argument is simple: It is exactly this approach which gave Iran 11 quiet years to develop its weapons capacity. For Israel and Middle East, a three-year setback is a very long time, a security boon worth great risk, because a) It would be a happy respite from the dark clouds hanging over the country from Iran and also cut back Hamas and Hizballah terrorist capabilities, and b) In the volatile Middle East anything can happen in 36 months.

But the US defense secretary believes Israel, like the rest of the world, must accept life under the shadow of a nuclear-armed Iran and make the best of it.

This view is shared by the Kremlin. It was advanced by prime minister Vladimir Putin to Binyamin Netanyahu during his secret trip to Moscow on Sept. 7.

According to DEBKAfile's Russian sources, when the Israeli prime minister tried to counter Putin's thesis and explain what restraint meant for Israel, the Russian prime minster became impatient and told his guest to leave.

After that interview, the Israeli government can no longer avoid appreciating that Gates and Putin talk the real talk for Washington and Moscow, while their leaders' moralistic condemnations of Iran are mainly hot air for public consumption and for maneuvering Israel into a position where a military strike would be hard to conceive.

Netanyahu's Sphinx-like silence on the nuclear to-do in the US this week was apt. But it is hard to tell what he is hiding. Will he succumb to the world powers' pressure to sit tight while Iran goes all the way to a military nuclear capability - or face up to it and act?

This is the most important decision of Netanyahu's political life as two-time prime minister of Israel. It will also determine Israel's future.


http://www.debka.com/article.php?aid=1405
 

nittie

Star
Registered
Re: Another Arab-Israeli War ? or is Israel about to Hit Iran ?

The system works when people get involved, look at how gas prices dropped when people stopped driving. Its really amazing how easy it is to influence policy and prices but people have to mobilize or it won't happen.
 

nittie

Star
Registered
Re: Another Arab-Israeli War ? or is Israel about to Hit Iran ?

The writing is on the wall for Israel. It's just a matter of time before the Middle East reunites and form the old Ottoman empire. Might not happen in the next 20yrs or so but it will happen. The U.S. has to dismantle Israel, deport all potential terrorist and get out of that region before it's too late.
 

Lamarr

Star
Registered
I support a policy of non-intervention. It's morally correct & it don't cost us anything! So if they wanna fight, let em fight
 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
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TRANSCRIPT



Zbigniew Brzezinski Interview Part 3


PAUL JAY (Intro): In 1979, when the Irian revolution overthrew the American allied Shah, Zbigniew Brzezinski was National Security advisor to President Jimmy Carter. Thirty years later, Iran is still a central challenge facing US geo-political strategy.


In the third segment of my interview with Dr. Brzezinski, I asked him about Israel’s threat to bomb Iranian Nuclear facilities and the American strategy towards Iran.


I started by asking Dr. Brzezinski about an interview he gave last September to the website the daily beast. In that interview, Dr. Brzezinski was asked:


How aggressive can Obama be in insisting to the Israelis that a military strike might be in America’s worst interest? HE answered: "We are not exactly impotent little babies. They have to fly over our airspace in Iraq. Are we just going to sit there and watch?


He was then asked: "What if they fly over anyway? Well, we have to be serious about denying them that right. That means a denial where you aren’t just saying it. If they fly over, you go up and confront them. They have the choice of turning back or not.


I sat down with Dr. Brzezinski at the Center for Strategic Studies in Washington DC. where he is a counselor and trustee.

__________________________


JAY: Talk about American strategy towards Iran. And it's fairly well known you had a bit of a falling-out with President Obama on this. You were talking about opposing any potential Israeli attack on Iran. You weren't the only [inaudible]


BRZEZINSKI: No, I wasn't saying "opposing". I was saying that we should not let them use our airspace without our permission, because no matter what, we would be held as complicit, and we will be paying the price for it. So our view is that this is not desirable; we should not allow our airspace to be used. If we want it to be used, fine, but let's be clear about it: it's not a good idea to stumble into a war regarding which you're ambivalent. That decision has to be made with open eyes. But my view on Iran is that we have to be patient, and that deterrence can work. We don't need to increase the scale of the conflict in the region that we have been discussing, because an increase in that conflict involving the Iranians in a collision with us would make our task in Afghanistan absolutely impossible. It would probably reignite the conflict in Iraq, would set the Persian Gulf ablaze, would increase the price of oil twofold, threefold, fourfold, and Americans will be paying five, six dollars a gallon at the gas stations. Europe will become even more dependent on the Soviet Union for energy. So what is the benefit to us?


JAY: The people advocating this more militaristic approach, I have to ask, do you think they mean it? Or is this good cop, bad cop?


BRZEZINSKI: I'm not a mind reader. I don't know.


JAY: [inaudible] Pandora's box this would open boggles the mind.


BRZEZINSKI: Well, I would think any reasonable person would conclude that, and I think the United States is not in favor of the war, and that's why we're doing what we can in Geneva.


JAY: Is Israel serious in these threats?


BRZEZINSKI: I have no idea. I have no idea. All I know is, as an analyst of international politics, that this would be a disaster. And, frankly, I think that it'll be a disaster for us more than for Israel—more than for Israel in the short run, and a fundamental disaster for Israel in the long run, because if the consequence of that is that in the end we are forced out of the region, as we might be because almost sort of dynamic hatred that develops—and have no illusions about it, the conflict spreads, we're going to be alone. The Russians are not going to be with us. They're not suckers. The Europeans are not going to be with us. They don't like to be in the forefront of conflict for historic reasons. We are going to be engaged. And if we are finally driven out, how much would you bet on the survival of Israel for more than five to ten years after all that has happened? So, you know, some people who criticize me for being straightforward on this think this is an anti-Israeli point of view. You know, they're entitled to their demagogy. But my view is it'll be a geopolitical disaster for us in the short run, and to the extent that Israelis are concerned about it, for themselves.


JAY: The pressure that's being put on Iran is pushing Iran closer to Russia and China.


BRZEZINSKI: No, it's not pushing them close to Russia or China. We're pushing the Chinese and the Russians to engage in a more direct conflict with the Iranians, but they're reluctant because they have a different view on the situation. And in a different way, each has different interests.


JAY: But Russia and China are both getting much more involved in the Iranian economy [inaudible] Shanghai Cooperation Agreement meetings.


BRZEZINSKI: No, no, no, no. Wait a second. Wait a second. The Chinese are getting more involved in Iranian economy 'cause they need energy, and they're not going to be particularly grateful if we produce a conflict in the region. And that will also affect them. And what consequences that might have for the world economy is hard to predict. All I'm saying is don't trifle with the silly notion, oh, we'll just bomb them and the problem is solved. It's a false analogy, and historically it's one fundamental lesson we shouldn't forget: Stalin and the Soviet Union was more of a threat than Iran ever will be, and yet we deterred it. Mao Zedong talked of a nuclear war which might kill 300 million people, and so what [inaudible] we didn't have a war with the Chinese. Why should we act like crazies in dealing with Iran?


JAY: Thanks very much.


BRZEZINSKI: Thank you very much.


JAY: Thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=4715
 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
Re: Israeli: Attack on Iran "UNAVOIDABLE"

<font size="6"><center>
The Point of No Return</font size></center>


  • <font size="3">For the Obama administration, the prospect of a nuclearized Iran is dismal to contemplate— it would create major new national-security challenges and crush the president’s dream of ending nuclear proliferation. </font size>

  • <font size="3">But the view from Jerusalem is still more dire: a nuclearized Iran represents, among other things, a threat to Israel’s very existence. </font size>

  • <font size="3">The Question:In the gap between Washington’s and Jerusalem’s views of Iran lies the question: who, if anyone, will stop Iran before it goes nuclear, and how? </font size>

<font size="3"><center>As Washington and Jerusalem study each other intensely, here’s an
inside look at the strategic calculations on both sides—and at how,
if things remain on the current course, an Israeli air strike will unfold.</font size>

iran-wide.jpg
</center>


September 2010 ATLANTIC MAGAZINE
By Jeffrey Goldberg


IT IS POSSIBLE that at some point in the next 12 months, the imposition of devastating economic sanctions on the Islamic Republic of Iran will persuade its leaders to cease their pursuit of nuclear weapons. It is also possible that Iran’s reform-minded Green Movement will somehow replace the mullah-led regime, or at least discover the means to temper the regime’s ideological extremism. It is possible, as well, that “foiling operations” conducted by the intelligence agencies of Israel, the United States, Great Britain, and other Western powers—programs designed to subvert the Iranian nuclear effort through sabotage and, on occasion, the carefully engineered disappearances of nuclear scientists—will have hindered Iran’s progress in some significant way. It is also possible that President Obama, who has said on more than a few occasions that he finds the prospect of a nuclear Iran “unacceptable,” will order a military strike against the country’s main weapons and uranium-enrichment facilities.

But none of these things—least of all the notion that Barack Obama, for whom initiating new wars in the Middle East is not a foreign-policy goal, will soon order the American military into action against Iran—seems, at this moment, terribly likely. What is more likely, then, is that one day next spring, the Israeli national-security adviser, Uzi Arad, and the Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak, will simultaneously telephone their counterparts at the White House and the Pentagon, to inform them that their prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has just ordered roughly one hundred F-15Es, F-16Is, F-16Cs, and other aircraft of the Israeli air force to fly east toward Iran—possibly by crossing Saudi Arabia, possibly by threading the border between Syria and Turkey, and possibly by traveling directly through Iraq’s airspace, though it is crowded with American aircraft. (It’s so crowded, in fact, that the United States Central Command, whose area of responsibility is the greater Middle East, has already asked the Pentagon what to do should Israeli aircraft invade its airspace. According to multiple sources, the answer came back: do not shoot them down.)

In these conversations, which will be fraught, the Israelis will tell their American counterparts that they are taking this drastic step because a nuclear Iran poses the gravest threat since Hitler to the physical survival of the Jewish people. The Israelis will also state that they believe they have a reasonable chance of delaying the Iranian nuclear program for at least three to five years. They will tell their American colleagues that Israel was left with no choice. They will not be asking for permission, because it will be too late to ask for permission.


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When the Israelis begin to bomb the uranium-enrichment facility at Natanz, the formerly secret enrichment site at Qom, the nuclear-research center at Esfahan, and possibly even the Bushehr reactor, along with the other main sites of the Iranian nuclear program, a short while after they depart en masse from their bases across Israel—regardless of whether they succeed in destroying Iran’s centrifuges and warhead and missile plants, or whether they fail miserably to even make a dent in Iran’s nuclear program—they stand a good chance of changing the Middle East forever; of sparking lethal reprisals, and even a full-blown regional war that could lead to the deaths of thousands of Israelis and Iranians, and possibly Arabs and Americans as well; of creating a crisis for Barack Obama that will dwarf Afghanistan in significance and complexity; of rupturing relations between Jerusalem and Washington, which is Israel’s only meaningful ally; of inadvertently solidifying the somewhat tenuous rule of the mullahs in Tehran; of causing the price of oil to spike to cataclysmic highs, launching the world economy into a period of turbulence not experienced since the autumn of 2008, or possibly since the oil shock of 1973; of placing communities across the Jewish diaspora in mortal danger, by making them targets of Iranian-sponsored terror attacks, as they have been in the past, in a limited though already lethal way; and of accelerating Israel’s conversion from a once-admired refuge for a persecuted people into a leper among nations.

If a strike does succeed in crippling the Iranian nuclear program, however, Israel, in addition to possibly generating some combination of the various catastrophes outlined above, will have removed from its list of existential worries the immediate specter of nuclear-weaponized, theologically driven, eliminationist anti-Semitism; it may derive for itself the secret thanks (though the public condemnation) of the Middle East’s moderate Arab regimes, all of which fear an Iranian bomb with an intensity that in some instances matches Israel’s; and it will have succeeded in countering, in militant fashion, the spread of nuclear weapons in the Middle East, which is, not irrelevantly, a prime goal of the enthusiastic counter-proliferator who currently occupies the White House.


I AM NOT ENGAGING in a thought exercise, or a one-man war game, when I discuss the plausibility and potential consequences of an Israeli strike on Iran. Israel has twice before successfully attacked and destroyed an enemy’s nuclear program. In 1981, Israeli warplanes bombed the Iraqi reactor at Osirak, halting—forever, as it turned out—Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions; and in 2007, Israeli planes destroyed a North Korean–built reactor in Syria. An attack on Iran, then, would be unprecedented only in scope and complexity.

I have been exploring the possibility that such a strike will eventually occur for more than seven years, since my first visit to Tehran, where I attempted to understand both the Iranian desire for nuclear weapons and the regime’s theologically motivated desire to see the Jewish state purged from the Middle East, and especially since March of 2009, when I had an extended discussion about the Iranian nuclear program with Benjamin Netanyahu, hours before he was sworn in as Israel’s prime minister. In the months since then, I have interviewed roughly 40 current and past Israeli decision makers about a military strike, as well as many American and Arab officials. In most of these interviews, I have asked a simple question: what is the percentage chance that Israel will attack the Iranian nuclear program in the near future? Not everyone would answer this question, but a consensus emerged that there is a better than 50 percent chance that Israel will launch a strike by next July. (Of course, it is in the Israeli interest to let it be known that the country is considering military action, if for no other reason than to concentrate the attention of the Obama administration. But I tested the consensus by speaking to multiple sources both in and out of government, and of different political parties. Citing the extraordinary sensitivity of the subject, most spoke only reluctantly, and on condition of anonymity. They were not part of some public-relations campaign.) The reasoning offered by Israeli decision makers was uncomplicated: Iran is, at most, one to three years away from having a breakout nuclear capability (often understood to be the capacity to assemble more than one missile-ready nuclear device within about three months of deciding to do so). The Iranian regime, by its own statements and actions, has made itself Israel’s most zealous foe; and the most crucial component of Israeli national-security doctrine, a tenet that dates back to the 1960s, when Israel developed its own nuclear capability as a response to the Jewish experience during the Holocaust, is that no regional adversary should be allowed to achieve nuclear parity with the reborn and still-besieged Jewish state.

In our conversation before his swearing-in, Netanyahu would not frame the issue in terms of nuclear parity—the Israeli policy of amimut, or opacity, prohibits acknowledging the existence of the country’s nuclear arsenal, which consists of more than 100 weapons, mainly two-stage thermonuclear devices, capable of being delivered by missile, fighter-bomber, or submarine (two of which are said by intelligence sources to be currently positioned in the Persian Gulf). Instead, he framed the Iranian program as a threat not only to Israel but to all of Western civilization.

“You don’t want a messianic apocalyptic cult controlling atomic bombs,” he said. “When the wide-eyed believer gets hold of the reins of power and the weapons of mass death, then the world should start worrying, and that’s what is happening in Iran.” Israel, Netanyahu told me, is worried about an entire complex of problems, not only that Iran, or one of its proxies, would destroy Tel Aviv; like most Israeli leaders, he believes that if Iran gains possession of a nuclear weapon, it will use its new leverage to buttress its terrorist proxies in their attempts to make life difficult and dangerous; and he fears that Israel’s status as a haven for Jews would be forever undermined, and with it, the entire raison d’être of the 100-year-old Zionist experiment.


http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/09/the-point-of-no-return/8186/
 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
Re: Israeli: Attack on Iran "UNAVOIDABLE"

<font size="5">
The Point of No Return
Part Two
___________________</font size>


IN OUR CONVERSATION, Netanyahu refused to discuss his timetable for action, or even whether he was considering military preemption of the Iranian nuclear program. But others familiar with his thinking helped me understand his worldview. Netanyahu’s belief is that Iran is not Israel’s problem alone; it is the world’s problem, and the world, led by the United States, is duty-bound to grapple with it. But Netanyahu does not place great faith in sanctions—not the relatively weak sanctions against Iran recently passed by the United Nations Security Council, nor the more rigorous ones being put in place by the U.S. and its European allies. Those close to him say that Netanyahu understands, however, that President Obama, with whom he has had a difficult and intermittently frigid—though lately thawing—relationship, believes that stringent sanctions, combined with various enticements to engage with the West, might still provide Iran with what one American administration official described to me as “a dignified off-ramp for Tehran to take.”

But, based on my conversations with Israeli decision-makers, this period of forbearance, in which Netanyahu waits to see if the West’s nonmilitary methods can stop Iran, will come to an end this December. Robert Gates, the American defense secretary, said in June at a meeting of NATO defense ministers that most intelligence estimates predict that Iran is one to three years away from building a nuclear weapon. “In Israel, we heard this as nine months from June—in other words, March of 2011,” one Israeli policy maker told me. “If we assume that nothing changes in these estimates, this means that we will have to begin thinking about our next step beginning at the turn of the year.”

The Netanyahu government is already intensifying its analytic efforts not just on Iran, but on a subject many Israelis have difficulty understanding: President Obama. The Israelis are struggling to answer what is for them the most pressing question: are there any circumstances under which President Obama would deploy force to stop Iran from going nuclear? Everything depends on the answer.

The Israelis argue that Iran demands the urgent attention of the entire international community, and in particular the United States, with its unparalleled ability to project military force. This is the position of many moderate Arab leaders as well. A few weeks ago, in uncommonly direct remarks, the ambassador of the United Arab Emirates to the United States, Yousef al-Otaiba, told me—in a public forum at the Aspen Ideas Festival—that his country would support a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. He also said that if America allowed Iran to cross the nuclear threshold, the small Arab countries of the Gulf would have no choice but to leave the American orbit and ally themselves with Iran, out of self-protection. “There are many countries in the region who, if they lack the assurance the U.S. is willing to confront Iran, they will start running for cover towards Iran,” he said. “Small, rich, vulnerable countries in the region do not want to be the ones who stick their finger in the big bully’s eye, if nobody’s going to come to their support.”

Several Arab leaders have suggested that America’s standing in the Middle East depends on its willingness to confront Iran. They argue self-interestedly that an aerial attack on a handful of Iranian facilities would not be as complicated or as messy as, say, invading Iraq. “This is not a discussion about the invasion of Iran,” one Arab foreign minister told me. “We are hoping for the pinpoint striking of several dangerous facilities. America could do this very easily.”

The Israeli national-security adviser, Uzi Arad, once told me that the prime minister will sometimes, in the course of briefing foreign visitors on the importance of taking action against Iran’s nuclear program, say jokingly: “Let me tell you a secret. The American military is bigger than Israel’s.”

Barack Obama has said any number of times that he would find a nuclear Iran “unacceptable.” His most stalwart comments on the subject have been discounted by some Israeli officials because they were made during his campaign for the presidency, while visiting Sderot, the town in southern Israel that had been the frequent target of rocket attacks by Hamas. “The world must prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon,” he said. “I will take no options off the table in dealing with this potential Iranian threat. And understand part of my reasoning here. A nuclear Iran would be a game-changing situation, not just in the Middle East, but around the world. Whatever remains of our nuclear nonproliferation framework, I think, would begin to disintegrate. You would have countries in the Middle East who would see the potential need to also obtain nuclear weapons.”

But the Israelis are doubtful that a man who positioned himself as the antithesis of George W. Bush, author of invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq, would launch a preemptive attack on a Muslim nation.

“We all watched his speech in Cairo,” a senior Israeli official told me, referring to the June 2009 speech in which Obama attempted to reset relations with Muslims by stressing American cooperativeness and respect for Islam. “We don’t believe that he is the sort of person who would launch a daring strike on Iran. We are afraid he would see a policy of containing a nuclear Iran rather than attacking it.”

This official noted that even Bush balked at attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities, and discouraged the Israelis from carrying out the attack on their own. (Bush would sometimes mock those aides and commentators who advocated an attack on Iran, even referring to the conservative columnists Charles Krauthammer and William Kristol as “the bomber boys,” according to two people I spoke with who overheard this.)

“Bush was two years ago, but the Iranian program was the same and the intent was the same,” the Israeli official told me. “So I don’t personally expect Obama to be more Bush than Bush.”

If the Israelis reach the firm conclusion that Obama will not, under any circumstances, launch a strike on Iran, then the countdown will begin for a unilateral Israeli attack. “If the choice is between allowing Iran to go nuclear, or trying for ourselves what Obama won’t try, then we probably have to try,” the official told me.

Which brings us to a second question, one having to do with the nature of the man considering military action: would Netanyahu, a prime minister with an acute understanding of the essential role America plays in securing the existence of Israel (Netanyahu is a graduate of both Cheltenham High School, outside Philadelphia, and MIT, and is the most Americanized prime minister in Israel’s history, more so even than the Milwaukee-raised Golda Meir), actually take a chance on permanently alienating American affection in order to make a high-risk attempt at stopping Iran? If Iran retaliates against American troops in Iraq or Afghanistan, the consequences for Israel’s relationship with America’s military leadership could be catastrophic. (Of course, Netanyahu would be risking more than his relationship with the United States: a strike on Iran, Israeli intelligence officials believe, could provoke all-out retaliation by Iran’s Lebanese subsidiary, Hezbollah, which now possesses, by most intelligence estimates, as many as 45,000 rockets—at least three times as many as it had in the summer of 2006, during the last round of fighting between the group and Israel.)

“The only reason Bibi [Netanyahu] would place Israel’s relationship with America in total jeopardy is if he thinks that Iran represents a threat like the Shoah,” an Israeli official who spends considerable time with the prime minister told me. “In World War II, the Jews had no power to stop Hitler from annihilating us. Six million were slaughtered. Today, 6 million Jews live in Israel, and someone is threatening them with annihilation. But now we have the power to stop them. Bibi knows that this is the choice.”

Numerous Israeli commentators and analysts have pointed out to me that Netanyahu is not unique in his understanding of this challenge; several of the prime ministers who preceded him cast Iran’s threat in similarly existential terms. Still, Netanyahu is different. “He has a deep sense of his role in Jewish history,” Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, told me.

To understand why Netanyahu possesses this deep sense—and why his understanding of Jewish history might lead him to attack Iran, even over Obama’s objections—it is necessary to understand Ben-Zion Netanyahu, his 100-year-old father.


BEN-ZION NetanyAHU—his first name means “son of Zion”—is the world’s foremost historian of the Spanish Inquisition and a onetime secretary to Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of the intractable, “revisionist” branch of Zionism. He is father to a tragic Israeli hero, Yonatan Netanyahu, who died while freeing the Jewish hostages at Entebbe in 1976; and also father to Benjamin, who strives for greatness in his father’s eyes but has, on occasion, disappointed him, notably when he acquiesced, in his first term as prime minister in the late 1990s, to American pressure and withdrew Israeli forces from much of the West Bank city of Hebron, Judaism’s second-holiest city. Benjamin Netanyahu is not known in most quarters for his pliability on matters concerning Palestinians, though he has been trying lately to meet at least some of Barack Obama’s demands that he move the peace process forward.

“Always in the back of Bibi’s mind is Ben-Zion,” one of the prime minister’s friends told me. “He worries that his father will think he is weak.”

Ben-Zion Netanyahu’s most important work, The Origins of the Inquisition in 15th-Century Spain, upended the scholarly consensus on the roots of that bleak chapter in Jewish history. He argued that Spanish hatred of Jews was spurred by the principle of limpieza de sangre, or the purity of blood; it was proto-Nazi thought, in other words, not mere theology, that motivated the Inquisition. Ben-Zion also argued that the Inquisition corresponds to the axiom that anti-Semitic persecution is preceded, in all cases, by carefully scripted and lengthy dehumanization campaigns meant to ensure the efficient eventual elimination of Jews. To him, the lessons of Jewish history are plain and insistent.

Ben-Zion, by all accounts, was worshipped by his sons in their childhood, and today, the 60-year-old Benjamin, who has been known to act in charmless ways, conspicuously upholds the Fifth Commandment when discussing his father. At a party marking Ben-Zion’s 100th birthday, held this past March at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem, before an assembly that included the president of Israel, Shimon Peres, Benjamin credited his father with forecasting the Shoah and, in the early 1990s, predicting that “Muslim extremists would try to bring down the Twin Towers in New York.” But he also told stories in a warmer and more personal vein, describing a loving father who, though a grim and forbidding figure to outsiders, enjoys cowboy movies and played soccer with his sons.

After a brief debate between Ben-Zion and another prominent academic about competing interpretations of the Inquisition—“It is an unusual 100th-birthday commemoration when a debate about the Inquisition breaks out,” said Menachem Begin’s son, Benny, who is a minister-without-portfolio in Netanyahu’s cabinet—Ben-Zion rose to make valedictory remarks. His speech, unlike his son’s, was succinct, devoid of sentiment, and strikingly unambiguous.

“Our party this evening compels me to speak of recent comments made about the continued existence of the nation of Israel and the new threats by its enemies depicting its upcoming destruction,” Ben-Zion began. “From the Iranian side, we hear pledges that soon—in a matter of days, even—the Zionist movement will be put to an end and there will be no more Zionists in the world. One is supposed to conclude from this that the Jews of the Land of Israel will be annihilated, while the Jews of America, whose leaders refuse to pressure Iran, are being told in a hinted fashion that the annihilation of the Jews will not include them.”

He went on, “The Jewish people are making their position clear and putting faith in their military power. The nation of Israel is showing the world today how a state should behave when it stands before an existential threat: by looking danger in the eye and calmly considering what should be done and what can be done. And to be ready to enter the fray at the moment there is a reasonable chance of success.”

Many people in Likud Party circles have told me that those who discount Ben-Zion’s influence on his son do so at their peril. “This was the father giving his son history’s marching orders,” one of the attendees told me. “I watched Bibi while his father spoke. He was completely absorbed.” (One of Netanyahu’s Knesset allies told me, indelicately, though perhaps not inaccurately, that the chance for movement toward the creation of an independent Palestinian state will come only after Ben-Zion’s death. “Bibi could not withdraw from more of Judea and Samaria”—the biblical names for the West Bank—“and still look into his father’s eyes.”)

On Iran, Benjamin Netanyahu frames the crisis in nearly the same world-historical terms as his father. “Iran has threatened to annihilate a state,” Netanyahu told me. “In historical terms, this is an astounding thing. It’s a monumental outrage that goes effectively unchallenged in the court of public opinion. Sure, there are perfunctory condemnations, but there’s no j’accuse—there’s no shock.” He argued that a crucial lesson of history is that “bad things tend to get worse if they’re not challenged early.” He continued, “Iranian leaders talk about Israel’s destruction or disappearance while simultaneously creating weapons to ensure its disappearance.”


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QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
Re: Israeli: Attack on Iran "UNAVOIDABLE"

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The Point of No Return
Part Three
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One of the more melancholic aspects of the confrontation between Iran and Israel is that Persian and Jewish civilizations have not forever been adversaries; one of the heroes of the Bible is the Persian king Cyrus, who restored the Jews to the land of Israel from their Babylonian captivity 2,500 years ago. (A few years after Harry Truman granted recognition to the reborn state of Israel in 1948, he declared, “I am Cyrus.”)

Iran is the home of an ancient Jewish community—Jews have lived there since the Babylonian exile, a millennium before Muhammad’s followers carried Islam to Persia. And in the modern era, Iran and Israel maintained close diplomatic ties before the overthrow of the shah in 1979; Israel’s support of the shah obviously angered his enemies, the newly empowered mullahs in Tehran, but this is insufficient to explain the depth of official Iranian hatred of Israel and Jews; something else must explain the sentiment expressed by Mohsen Rezai, the former commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, who said in 1991—14 years before the rise of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian politician most associated in the West with the regime’s flamboyant anti-Semitism—“The day will come when, like Salman Rushdie, the Jews will not find a place to live anywhere in the world.”

The answer might be found in a line of Shia Muslim thinking that views Jews as ritually contaminated, a view derived in part from the Koran’s portrayal of Jews as treasonous foes of the Prophet Muhammad. As Robert Wistrich recounts in his new history of anti-Semitism, A Lethal Obsession, through the 17th and 18th centuries Shia clerics viewed Jews variously as “the leprosy of creation” and “the most unclean of the human race.” I once asked Ali Asghar Soltanieh, a leading Iranian diplomat who is now Iran’s ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, why the leadership of Iran persistently described Israel not as a mere regional malefactor but as a kind of infectious disease. “Do you disagree?” he asked. “Do you not see that this is true?”

In a speech in June, Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, explained Middle East history this way: “Sixty years ago, by means of an artificial and false pretext, and by fabricating information and inventing stories, they gathered the filthiest, most criminal people, who only appear to be human, from all corners of the world. They organized and armed them, and provided them with media and military backing. Thus, they occupied the Palestinian lands, and displaced the Palestinian people.” The “invented story” is, of course, the Holocaust. Ahmadinejad’s efforts to deny the historical truth of the Holocaust have the endorsement of high officialdom: the Iranian foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, said in 2005, “The words of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on the Holocaust and on Israel are not personal opinion, nor isolated statements, but they express the view of the government.”

The Iranian leadership’s own view of nuclear dangers is perhaps best exemplified by a comment made in 2001 by the former Iranian president Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, who entertained the idea that Israel’s demise could be brought about in a relatively pain-free manner for the Muslim world. “The use of an atomic bomb against Israel would destroy Israel completely while [a nuclear attack] against the Islamic countries would only cause damages,” Rafsanjani said.

It is this line of thinking, which suggests that rational deterrence theory, or the threat of mutual assured destruction, might not apply in the case of Iran, that has the Israeli government on a knife’s edge. And this is not a worry that is confined to Israel’s right. Even the left-wing Meretz Party, which is harsh in its condemnation of Netanyahu’s policies toward the Palestinians, considers Iran’s nuclear program to be an existential threat.

Israeli policy makers do not necessarily believe that Iran, should it acquire a nuclear device, would immediately launch it by missile at Tel Aviv. “On the one hand, they would like to see the Jews wiped out,” one Israeli defense official told me. “On the other hand, they know that Israel has unlimited reprisal capability”—this is an Israeli euphemism for the country’s second-strike nuclear arsenal—“and despite what Rafsanjani and others say, we think they know that they are putting Persian civilization at risk.”

The challenges posed by a nuclear Iran are more subtle than a direct attack, Netanyahu told me. “Several bad results would emanate from this single development. First, Iran’s militant proxies would be able to fire rockets and engage in other terror activities while enjoying a nuclear umbrella. This raises the stakes of any confrontation that they’d force on Israel. Instead of being a local event, however painful, it becomes a global one. Second, this development would embolden Islamic militants far and wide, on many continents, who would believe that this is a providential sign, that this fanaticism is on the ultimate road to triumph.

“You’d create a great sea change in the balance of power in our area,” he went on. An Iran with nuclear weapons would also attempt to persuade Arab countries to avoid making peace with Israel, and it would spark a regional nuclear-arms race. “The Middle East is incendiary enough, but with a nuclear-arms race, it will become a tinderbox,” he said.

Other Israeli leaders believe that the mere threat of a nuclear attack by Iran—combined with the chronic menacing of Israel’s cities by the rocket forces of Hamas and Hezbollah—will progressively undermine the country’s ability to retain its most creative and productive citizens. Ehud Barak, the defense minister, told me that this is his great fear for Israel’s future.

“The real threat to Zionism is the dilution of quality,” he said. “Jews know that they can land on their feet in any corner of the world. The real test for us is to make Israel such an attractive place, such a cutting-edge place in human society, education, culture, science, quality of life, that even American Jewish young people want to come here.” This vision is threatened by Iran and its proxies, Barak said. “Our young people can consciously decide to go other places,” if they dislike living under the threat of nuclear attack. “Our best youngsters could stay out of here by choice.”

Patriotism in Israel runs very high, according to numerous polls, and it seemed unlikely to me that mere fear of Iran could drive Israel’s Jews to seek shelter elsewhere. But one leading proponent of an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, Ephraim Sneh, a former general and former deputy defense minister, is convinced that if Iran crossed the nuclear threshold, the very idea of Israel would be endangered. “These people are good citizens, and brave citizens, but the dynamics of life are such that if someone has a scholarship for two years at an American university and the university offers him a third year, the parents will say, ‘Go ahead, remain there,’” Sneh told me when I met with him in his office outside of Tel Aviv not long ago. “If someone finishes a Ph.D. and they are offered a job in America, they might stay there. It will not be that people are running to the airport, but slowly, slowly, the decision-making on the family level will be in favor of staying abroad. The bottom line is that we would have an accelerated brain drain. And an Israel that is not based on entrepreneurship, that is not based on excellence, will not be the Israel of today.”

Most critically, Sneh said, if Israel is no longer understood by its 6 million Jewish citizens, and by the roughly 7 million Jews who live outside of Israel, to be a “natural safe haven,” then its raison d’être will have been subverted. He directed my attention to a framed photograph on his wall of three Israeli air force F-15s flying over Auschwitz, in Poland. The Israelis had been invited in 2003 by the Polish air force to make this highly symbolic flight. The photograph was not new to me; I had seen it before on a dozen office walls in the Israeli Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv. “You see those planes?” Sneh asked me. “That’s the picture I look at all the time. When someone says that they will wipe out the Jews, we have to deny him the tools. The problem with the photograph is that we were too late.”

To understand why Israelis of different political dispositions see Iran as quite possibly the most crucial challenge they have faced in their 62-year history, one must keep in mind the near-sanctity, in the public’s mind, of Israel’s nuclear monopoly. The Israeli national narrative, in shorthand, begins with shoah, which is Hebrew for “calamity,” and ends with tkumah, “rebirth.” Israel’s nuclear arsenal symbolizes national rebirth, and something else as well: that Jews emerged from World War II having learned at least one lesson, about the price of powerlessness.

In his new book, The Worst-Kept Secret: Israel’s Bargain With the Bomb, Avner Cohen, the preeminent historian of Israel’s nuclear program, writes that David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, was nearly obsessed with developing nuclear weapons as the only guarantor against further slaughter. “What Einstein, Oppenheimer, and Teller, the three of them are Jews, made for the United States, could also be done by scientists in Israel, for their own people,” Ben-Gurion declared. Cohen argues that the umbrella created by Israel’s nuclear monopoly has allowed the Jewish state to recover from the wounds of the Holocaust.

But those wounds do not heal, Sneh says. “The Shoah is not some sort of psychological complex. It is an historic lesson. My grandmother and my grandfather were from Poland. My father fought for the Polish army as an officer and escaped in 1940. My grandparents stayed, and they were killed by the Polish farmer who was supposed to give them shelter, for a lot of money. That’s why I don’t trust the goyim. One time is enough. I don’t put my life in the hands of goyim.”


ONE MONDAY EVENING in early summer, I sat in the office of the decidedly non-goyishe Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, and listened to several National Security Council officials he had gathered at his conference table explain—in so many words—why the Jewish state should trust the non-Jewish president of the United States to stop Iran from crossing the nuclear threshold.

“The expression ‘All options are on the table’ means that all options are on the table,” Emanuel told me before the meeting, in a tone meant to suggest both resolve and irritation at those who believe the president lacks such resolve. The group interview he had arranged was a kind of rolling seminar on the challenges Iran poses; half a dozen officials made variations of the same argument: that President Obama spends more time talking with foreign leaders on Iran than on any other subject.

One of those at the table, Ben Rhodes, a deputy national-security adviser who served as the lead author of the recent “National Security Strategy for the United States” as well as of the president’s conciliatory Cairo speech, suggested that Iran’s nuclear program was a clear threat to American security, and that the Obama administration responds to national-security threats in the manner of other administrations. “We are coordinating a multifaceted strategy to increase pressure on Iran, but that doesn’t mean we’ve removed any option from the table,” Rhodes said. “This president has shown again and again that when he believes it is necessary to use force to protect American national-security interests, he has done so. We’re not going to address hypotheticals about when and if we would use military force, but I think we’ve made it clear that we aren’t removing the option of force from any situation in which our national security is affected.”

There was an intermittently prickly quality to this meeting, and not only because it was hosted by Emanuel, whose default state is exasperation. For more than a year, these White House officials have parried the charge that their president is unwilling to face the potential consequences of a nuclear Iran, and they are frustrated by what they believe to be a caricature of his position. (A former Bush administration official told me that his president faced the opposite problem: Bush, bogged down by two wars and believing that Iran wasn’t that close to crossing the nuclear threshold, opposed the use of force against Iran’s program, and made his view clear, “but no one believed him.”)

At one point, I put forward the idea that for abundantly obvious reasons, few people would believe Barack Obama would open up a third front in the greater Middle East. One of the officials responded heatedly, “What have we done that would allow you to reach the conclusion that we think that a nuclear Iran would represent a tolerable situation?”

It is undeniably true, however, that the administration has appeared on occasion less than stalwart on the issue. The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, has criticized Obama as a purveyor of baseless hope. At the UN Security Council last September, Sarkozy said, “I support the extended hand of the Americans, but what good have proposals for dialogue brought the international community? More uranium enrichment and declarations by the leaders of Iran to wipe a UN member state off the map,” he said, referring to Israel.

Obama administration officials, particularly in the Pentagon, have several times signaled unhappiness at the possibility of military preemption. In April, the undersecretary of defense for policy, Michele Flournoy, told reporters that military force against Iran was “off the table in the near term.” She later backtracked, but Admiral Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has also criticized the idea of attacking Iran. “Iran getting a nuclear weapon would be incredibly destabilizing. Attacking them would also create the same kind of outcome,” he said in April. “In an area that’s so unstable right now, we just don’t need more of that.”

The gathering in Emanuel’s office was meant to communicate a number of clear messages to me, including one that was more militant than that delivered by Admiral Mullen: President Obama has by no means ruled out counterproliferation by force. The meeting was also meant to communicate that Obama’s outreach to the Iranians was motivated not by naïveté, but by a desire to test Tehran’s intentions in a deliberate fashion; that the president understands that an Iranian bomb would spur a regional arms race that could destroy his antiproliferation program; and that American and Israeli assessments of Iran’s nuclear program are synchronized in ways they were not before. One official at the table, Gary Samore, the National Security Council official who oversees the administration’s counterproliferation agenda, told me that the Israelis agree with American assessments that Iran’s uranium-enrichment program is plagued with problems.

“The most essential measure of nuclear-weapons capability is how quickly they can build weapons-grade material, and from that standpoint we can measure, based on the IAEA reports, that the Iranians are not doing well,” Samore said. “The particular centrifuge machines they’re running are based on an inferior technology. They are running into some technical difficulties, partly because of the work we’ve done to deny them access to foreign components. When they make the parts themselves, they are making parts that don’t have quality control.” (When I mentioned this comment to a senior Israeli official, he said, “We agree with this American assessment, but we also agree with Secretary Gates that Iran is one year away from crossing the nuclear threshold.”)

Dennis Ross, the former Middle East peace negotiator who is currently a senior National Security Council official, said during the meeting that he believes the Israelis now understand that American-instigated measures have slowed Iran’s progress, and that the administration is working to convince the Israelis—and other parties in the region—that the sanctions strategy “has a chance of working.”

“The president has said he hasn’t taken any options off the table, but let’s take a look at why we think this strategy could work,” he said. “We have interesting data points over the past year, about Iran trying to deflect pressure when they thought that pressure was coming, which suggests that their ability to calculate costs and benefits is quite real. Last June, when they hadn’t responded to our bilateral outreach, the president said that we would take stock by September. Two weeks before the G-20”—a meeting of the leaders of the world’s 20 largest economies—“the Iranians said they would talk, after having resisted talking until that point. They didn’t do it because suddenly they saw the light; they did it because pressure was coming. They’re able to think about what matters to them.”

Ross went on to argue that the sanctions Iran now faces may affect the regime’s thinking. “The sanctions are going to cut across the board. They are taking place in the context of Iranian mismanagement—the Iranians are going to have to cut [food and fuel] subsidies; they already have public alienation; they have division in the elites, and between the elites and the rest of the country. They are looking at the costs of trying to maintain control over a disaffected public. They wanted to head off sanctions because they knew that sanctions would be a problem. There is real potential here to affect their calculus. We’re pursuing a path right now that has some potential. It doesn’t mean you don’t think about everything else, but we’re on a path.”

One question no administration official seems eager to answer is this: what will the United States do if sanctions fail? Several Arab officials complained to me that the Obama administration has not communicated its intentions to them, even generally. No Arab officials I spoke with appeared to believe that the administration understands the regional ambitions of their Persian adversary. One Arab foreign minister told me that he believes Iran is taking advantage of Obama’s “reasonableness.”

“Obama’s voters like it when the administration shows that it doesn’t want to fight Iran, but this is not a domestic political issue,” the foreign minister said. “Iran will continue on this reckless path, unless the administration starts to speak unreasonably. The best way to avoid striking Iran is to make Iran think that the U.S. is about to strike Iran. We have to know the president’s intentions on this matter. We are his allies.” (According to two administration sources, this issue caused tension between President Obama and his recently dismissed director of national intelligence, Admiral Dennis Blair. According to these sources, Blair, who was said to put great emphasis on the Iranian threat, told the president that America’s Arab allies needed more reassurance. Obama reportedly did not appreciate the advice.)

In Israel, of course, officials expend enormous amounts of energy to understand President Obama, despite the assurances they have received from Emanuel, Ross, and others. Delegations from Netanyahu’s bureau, from the defense and foreign ministries, and from the Israeli intelligence community have been arriving in Washington lately with great regularity. “We pack our thermometers and go to Washington and take everyone’s temperature,” one Israeli official told me.

The increased tempo of these visits is only one sign of deepening contacts between Israel and America, as Iran moves closer to nuclear breakout: the chief of staff of the Israeli army, Lieutenant General Gabi Ashkenazi, is said to speak now with his American counterpart, Admiral Mullen, regularly. Mullen recently made a stop in Israel that had one main purpose, according to an Israeli source: “to make sure we didn’t do anything in Iran before they thought we might do something in Iran.”

Not long ago, the chief of Israeli military intelligence, Major General Amos Yadlin, paid a secret visit to Chicago to meet with Lester Crown, the billionaire whose family owns a significant portion of General Dynamics, the military contractor. Crown is one of Israel’s most prominent backers in the American Jewish community, and was one of Barack Obama’s earliest and most steadfast supporters. According to sources in America and Israel, General Yadlin asked Crown to communicate Israel’s existential worries directly to President Obama. When I reached Crown by phone, he confirmed that he had met with Yadlin, but denied that the general traveled to Chicago to deliver this message. “Maybe he has a cousin in Chicago or something,” Crown said. But he did say that Yadlin discussed with him the “Iranian clock”—the time remaining before Iran reached nuclear capability—and that he agreed with Yadlin that the United States must stop Iran before it goes nuclear. “I share with the Israelis the feeling that we certainly have the military capability and that we have to have the will to use it. The rise of Iran is not in the best interest of the U.S.

“I support the president,” Crown said. “But I wish [administration officials] were a little more outgoing in the way they have talked. I would feel more comfortable if I knew that they had the will to use military force, as a last resort. You cannot threaten someone as a bluff. There has to be a will to do it.”

On my last visit to Israel, I was asked almost a dozen times by senior officials and retired generals if I could explain Barack Obama and his feelings about Israel. Several officials even asked if I considered Obama to be an anti-Semite. I answered this question by quoting Abner Mikva, the former congressman, federal judge, and mentor to Obama, who famously said in 2008, “I think when this is all over, people are going to say that Barack Obama is the first Jewish president.” I explained that Obama has been saturated with the work of Jewish writers, legal scholars, and thinkers, and that a large number of his friends, supporters, and aides are Jewish. But philo-Semitism does not necessarily equal sympathy for Netanyahu’s Likud Party—certainly not among American Jews, who are, like the president they voted for in overwhelming numbers, generally supportive of a two-state solution, and dubious about Jewish settlement of the West Bank.

When I made these points to one senior Israeli official, he said: “This is the problem. If he is a J Street Jew, we are in trouble.” J Street is the liberal pro-Israel organization established to counter the influence of AIPAC and other groups. “We’re worried that he thinks like the liberal American Jews who say, ‘If we remove some settlements, then the extremist problem and the Iran problem go away.’”

Rahm Emanuel suggested that the administration is trying to thread a needle: providing “unshakeable” support for Israel; protecting it from the consequences of an Iranian nuclear bomb; but pushing it toward compromise with the Palestinians. Emanuel, in our meeting, disputed that Israel is incapable of moving forward on the peace process so long as Iran looms as an existential threat. And he drafted the past six Israeli prime ministers—including Netanyahu, who during his first term in the late 1990s, to his father’s chagrin, compromised with the Palestinians—to buttress his case. “Rabin, Peres, Netanyahu, Barak, Sharon, Olmert—every one of them pursued some form of a negotiated settlement, which would have been in Israel’s own strategic interest,” he said. “There have been plenty of other threats while successive Israeli governments have pursued a peace process. There is no doubt that Iran is a major threat, but they didn’t just flip the switch on [the nuclear program] a year ago.”

Emanuel had one more message to deliver: for the most practical of reasons, Israel should consider carefully whether a military strike would be worth the trouble it would unleash. “I’m not sure that given the time line, whatever the time line is, that whatever they did, they wouldn’t stop” the nuclear program, he said. “They would be postponing.”

It was then that I realized that, on some subjects, the Israelis and Americans are still talking past each other. The Americans consider a temporary postponement of Iran’s nuclear program to be of dubious value. The Israelis don’t. “When Menachem Begin bombed Osirak [in Iraq], he had been told that his actions would set back the Iraqis one year,” one cabinet minister told me. “He did it anyway.”



IN MY CONVERSATIONS with former Israeli air-force generals and strategists, the prevalent tone was cautious. Many people I interviewed were ready, on condition of anonymity, to say why an attack on Iran’s nuclear sites would be difficult for Israel. And some Israeli generals, like their American colleagues, questioned the very idea of an attack. “Our time would be better spent lobbying Barack Obama to do this, rather than trying this ourselves,” one general told me. “We are very good at this kind of operation, but it is a big stretch for us. The Americans can do this with a minimum of difficulty, by comparison. This is too big for us.”

Successive Israeli prime ministers have ordered their military tacticians to draw up plans for a strike on Iran, and the Israeli air force has, of course, complied. It is impossible to know for sure how the Israelis might carry out such an operation, but knowledgeable officials in both Washington and Tel Aviv shared certain assumptions with me.

The first is that Israel would get only one try. Israeli planes would fly low over Saudi Arabia, bomb their targets in Iran, and return to Israel by flying again over Saudi territory, possibly even landing in the Saudi desert for refueling—perhaps, if speculation rife in intelligence circles is to be believed, with secret Saudi cooperation. These planes would have to return home quickly, in part because Israeli intelligence believes that Iran would immediately order Hezbollah to fire rockets at Israeli cities, and Israeli air-force resources would be needed to hunt Hezbollah rocket teams.

When I visited Major General Gadi Eisenkot, the general in charge of Israel’s Northern Command, at his headquarters near the Lebanese border, he told me that in the event of a unilateral Israeli strike on Iran, his mission would be to combat Hezbollah rocket forces. Eisenkot said that the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel, which began when Hezbollah fighters crossed the border and attacked an Israeli patrol, was seen by the group’s Iranian sponsors as a strategic mistake. “The Iranians got angry at Hezbollah for jumping ahead like that,” Eisenkot said. American and Israeli intelligence officials agree that the Iranians are now hoping to keep Hezbollah in reserve until Iran can cross the nuclear threshold.

Eisenkot contended that the 2006 war was a setback for Hezbollah. “Hezbollah suffered a lot during this war,” he said. Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, “lost a lot of his men. He knows he made a mistake. That is one reason we have had four years of quiet. What has changed in four years is that Hezbollah has increased its missile capability, but we have increased our capabilities as well.” He concluded by saying, in reference to a potential Israeli strike on Iran, “Our readiness means that Israel has freedom of action.”

Even if Israel’s Northern Command successfully combated Hezbollah rocket attacks in the wake of an Israeli strike, political limitations would not allow Israel to make repeated sorties over Iran. “The Saudis can let us go once,” one general told me. “They’ll turn their radar off when we’re on our way to Iran, and we’ll come back fast. Our problem is not Iranian air defenses, because we have ways of neutralizing that. Our problem is that the Saudis will look very guilty in the eyes of the world if we keep flying over their territory.”

America, too, would look complicit in an Israeli attack, even if it had not been forewarned. The assumption—often, but not always, correct—that Israel acts only with the approval of the United States is a feature of life in the Middle East, and it is one the Israelis say they are taking into account. I spoke with several Israeli officials who are grappling with this question, among others: what if American intelligence learns about Israeli intentions hours before the scheduled launch of an attack? “It is a nightmare for us,” one of these officials told me. “What if President Obama calls up Bibi and says, ‘We know what you’re doing. Stop immediately.’ Do we stop? We might have to. A decision has been made that we can’t lie to the Americans about our plans. We don’t want to inform them beforehand. This is for their sake and for ours. So what do we do? These are the hard questions.” (Two officials suggested that Israel may go on pre-attack alert a number of times before actually striking: “After the fifth or sixth time, maybe no one would believe that we’re really going,” one official said.)

Another question Israeli planners struggle with: how will they know if their attacks have actually destroyed a significant number of centrifuges and other hard-to-replace parts of the clandestine Iranian program? Two strategists told me that Israel will have to dispatch commandos to finish the job, if necessary, and bring back proof of the destruction. The commandos—who, according to intelligence sources, may be launched from the autonomous Kurdish territory in northern Iraq—would be facing a treacherous challenge, but one military planner I spoke with said the army would have no choice but to send them.

“It is very important to be able to tell the Israeli people what we have achieved,” he said. “Many Israelis think the Iranians are building Auschwitz. We have to let them know that we have destroyed Auschwitz, or we have to let them know that we tried and failed.”

There are, of course, Israeli leaders who believe that attacking Iran is too risky. Gabi Ashkenazi, the Israeli army chief of staff, is said by numerous sources to doubt the usefulness of an attack, and other generals I spoke with worry that talk of an “existential threat” is itself a kind of existential threat to the Zionist project, which was meant to preclude such threats against the Jewish people. “We don’t want politicians to put us in a bad position because of the word Shoah,” one general said. “We don’t want our neighbors to think that we are helpless against an Iran with a nuclear bomb, because Iran might have the bomb one day. There is no guarantee that Israel will do this, or that America will do this.”

After staring at the photograph of the Israeli air-force flyover of Auschwitz more than a dozen different times in more than a dozen different offices, I came to see the contradiction at its core. If the Jewish physicists who created Israel’s nuclear arsenal could somehow have ripped a hole in the space-time continuum and sent a squadron of fighters back to 1942, then the problem of Auschwitz would have been solved in 1942. In other words, the creation of a serious Jewish military capability—a nuclear bomb, say, or the Israeli air force—during World War II would have meant a quicker end to the Holocaust. It is fair to say, then, that the existence of the Israeli air force, and of Israel’s nuclear arsenal, means axiomatically that the Iranian nuclear program is not the equivalent of Auschwitz.

I put this formula to Ephraim Sneh, the former general and staunch advocate of an Israeli attack. “We have created a strategic balance in our favor,” he said, “but Iran may launch a ballistic missile with a nuclear bomb, and this F-15 in the picture cannot prevent that.”

This is a devilish problem. And devilish problems have sometimes caused Israel to overreach.

Benjamin Netanyahu feels, for reasons of national security, that if sanctions fail, he will be forced to take action. But an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, successful or not, may cause Iran to redouble its efforts—this time with a measure of international sympathy—to create a nuclear arsenal. And it could cause chaos for America in the Middle East. One of the few people I spoke with in Israel who seemed to be at least somewhat phlegmatic about Iran’s nuclear threat was the country’s president, Shimon Peres, the last member of Israel’s founding generation still in government. Peres sees the Iranian nuclear program as potentially catastrophic, to be sure. But he advocates the imposition of “moral sanctions” followed by economic sanctions, and then the creation of “an envelope around Iran of anti-missile systems so the missiles of Iran will not be able to fly.” When I asked if he believed in a military option, he said, “Why should I declare something like that?” He indicated he was uncomfortable with the idea of unilateral Israeli action and suggested that Israel can afford to recognize its limitations, because he believes, unlike many Israelis, that President Obama will, one way or another, counter the threat of Iran, not on behalf of Israel (though he said he believes Obama would come to Israel’s defense if necessary), but because he understands that on the challenge of Iran, the interests of America and Israel (and the West, and Western-allied Arab states) naturally align.

Based on months of interviews, I have come to believe that the administration knows it is a near-certainty that Israel will act against Iran soon if nothing or no one else stops the nuclear program; and Obama knows—as his aides, and others in the State and Defense departments made clear to me—that a nuclear-armed Iran is a serious threat to the interests of the United States, which include his dream of a world without nuclear weapons. Earlier this year, I agreed with those, including many Israelis, Arabs—and Iranians—who believe there is no chance that Obama would ever resort to force to stop Iran; I still don’t believe there is a great chance he will take military action in the near future—for one thing, the Pentagon is notably unenthusiastic about the idea. But Obama is clearly seized by the issue. And understanding that perhaps the best way to obviate a military strike on Iran is to make the threat of a strike by the Americans seem real, the Obama administration seems to be purposefully raising the stakes. A few weeks ago, Denis McDonough, the chief of staff of the National Security Council, told me, “What you see in Iran is the intersection of a number of leading priorities of the president, who sees a serious threat to the global nonproliferation regime, a threat of cascading nuclear activities in a volatile region, and a threat to a close friend of the United States, Israel. I think you see the several streams coming together, which accounts for why it is so important to us.”

When I asked Peres what he thought of Netanyahu’s effort to make Israel’s case to the Obama administration, he responded, characteristically, with a parable, one that suggested his country should know its place, and that it was up to the American president, and only the American president, to decide in the end how best to safeguard the future of the West. The story was about his mentor, David Ben-Gurion.

“Shortly after John F. Kennedy was elected president, Ben-Gurion met him at the Waldorf-Astoria” in New York, Peres told me. “After the meeting, Kennedy accompanied Ben-Gurion to the elevator and said, ‘Mr. Prime Minister, I want to tell you, I was elected because of your people, so what can I do for you in return?’ Ben-Gurion was insulted by the question. He said, ‘What you can do is be a great president of the United States. You must understand that to have a great president of the United States is a great event.’”

Peres went on to explain what he saw as Israel’s true interest. “We don’t want to win over the president,” he said. “We want the president to win.”

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Tuco

Rising Star
Registered
What does Israel gain from attacking Iran?

I've been reading & hearing more & more that war with Iran is imminent; w/ da likely provocation being that Israel is gonna start the attack, essentially forcing the US into the conflict.

- what exactly does Israel gain from going to war w/ Iran? Its like they're itchin to get in there, w/ or w/out the OK from the US. It looks like this could turn into another world war , w/ Lebanon, Syria, Saudi Arabia, etc etc getting into the fray....not to mention Israel's possible annihilation.


- I've read that this question of Iran developing nuclear weapons was, at the very least, addressed by the US back in '07 w/ a NIE (I 4get what it stands for), when the US basically reported that there was nothing 2 worry about w/ Iran & them developing nukes. Obviously that stance has changed, and has been expanded w/ charges that Iran supports "the terrorists", including housing bin Laden. Lol. Is this whole thing re: nukes ONLY a false flag for whatever oil is left there? Or is there smething else I'm missing?
 

Tuco

Rising Star
Registered
Re: What does Israel gain from attacking Iran?

it just seems like another false flag (on US' part at least) to go to war....cuz they and Israel are joined @ da hip. i just dont know what Israel has to gain from actively goin to war w/ Iran. Why Iran?
 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
Re: What does Israel gain from attacking Iran?

it just seems like another false flag (on US' part at least) to go to war....cuz they and Israel are joined @ da hip. i just dont know what Israel has to gain from actively goin to war w/ Iran. Why Iran?

Are you really interested in a debate/discussion, or do you have a locked-opinion on the issue ???

  • Expound, if you would, on your false flag theory;

  • What does the U.S. have to gain with troops already deployed in two wars and a slumping economy; and

  • Is Israel's fear of Iran possessing nuclear weapons simply unfounded?

QueEx
 
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