In recent weeks, intense discussions have taken place in Israeli military and intelligence circles about whether or not to launch a military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Apparently, the key question in the debate was how to ensure that the United States took part in the attack or, at the very least, intervened on Israel’s side if the initial strike triggered a wider war.
Reports of these discussions have caused considerable alarm in Washington and in a number of European capitals. Some western military experts have been quoted as saying that the window of opportunity for an Israeli air attack on Iran will close within two months, since the onset of winter would make such an assault more difficult.
Concern that Israel may decide to attack without giving the US prior warning is thought to be the main reason for the visit to Tel Aviv on October 3 of the US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta. His aim seems to have been to rein in the Israeli hawks.
Amos Harel of the Israeli daily Haaretz summed up Panetta’s message as follows: America is standing by Israel, but an uncoordinated Israeli strike on Iran could spark a regional war. The US will work to defend Israel, but Israel must behave responsibly.
At his joint press conference with Israel’s Defence Minister Ehud Barak, Panetta said: “The US is very concerned, and we will work together to do whatever is necessary to keep Iran from posing a threat to the region. But doing so depends on the countries working together.” He repeated the word ‘together’ several times. In other words, Israel should not act without an American green light.
In recent years, Israel has often threatened to attack Iran. Why has the subject been revived this time? Is Israel worried that Iran is close to acquiring the capability to manufacture a nuclear bomb? Most intelligence experts agree that Iran has not yet made a decision to build nuclear weapons. A more likely Israeli motive is its concern that the five permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany — the so-called P5+1 — may accept an Iranian offer of renewed talks.
Israel’s greatest fear is that the P5+1 will reach a compromise with Iran which would allow it to continue enriching uranium for civilian purposes. This might then lead in due course to the world agreeing to co-exist with a nuclear Iran. If that were to happen, Israel’s monopoly of nuclear weapons — a key asset in maintaining its regional military supremacy — would be lost.
Iran has, in fact, made several recent overtures to the US and its allies. When he was in New York last month to attend the annual meeting of the UN General Assembly, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told The Washington Post that Iran would stop producing uranium enriched to 20 per cent if foreign countries would provide the fuel needed for the Tehran research reactor, which makes medical isotopes. Some 850,000 Iranians are said to depend on such isotopes for cancer treatment.
Late last month, Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, sent a letter to Catherine Ashton, the EU’s foreign affairs chief, requesting fresh talks with the P5+1 to try to resolve the long-standing dispute. Yet another overture was made by Iran’s Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi when, in an interview with Asia Times on September 29, he said that Iran was “prepared to undertake the necessary efforts to restore mutual confidence, and if there is a specific concern, it should be addressed in talks… We must look for innovative proposals.”
Fereydoun Abbasi, head of Iran’s Atomic Organisation, has invited Yukiya Amano, Secretary-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), to visit Iran and inspect its nuclear facilities. ‘Our recommendation is that Amano accept this invitation… Today, the situation is that we are again ready to consider the fuel swap,’ he said. (This was the proposed swap of a large quantity of low-enriched uranium for a small quantity of 20 per cent enriched uranium for medical purposes. Amano’s IAEA board is due to meet in Vienna on November 17-18, a meeting that is keenly awaited.
Several influential voices have been urging the US to respond positively to Iran’s overtures. “Why not test Iran’s seriousness?” asked Reza Marashi in an article in the Huffington Post on September 30. Marashi is a former Iran desk officer at the US State Department and is now Director of Research at the National Iranian American Council.
In an article in the International Herald Tribune on September 29, Charles Ferguson, president of the Federation of American Scientists, and Ali Vaez, director of the Federation’s Iran Project, urged the US and its allies to take Ahmadinejad at his word. They even suggested that the western powers should provide Iran with 50 kilograms of fuel for the Tehran research reactor as a humanitarian gesture that would buy Washington goodwill with the Iranian people, while curtailing Iran’s enrichment activities.
None of these appeals is likely to be heard. US President Barack Obama has collapsed in the face of pressure from powerful pro-Israeli lobbies and a fervently pro-Israeli US Congress. As he is seeking re-election next year, we will hear nothing more of the call he made during his 2008 campaign for the need for diplomacy with Iran.
The danger is that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may now seek to break out of Israel’s current political isolation by mounting a spectacular attack on Iran. Having lost Turkey and Egypt, and facing a revolt by the international community against his Greater Israel ambitions, he may think that the time was ripe to seize the initiative. His calculation may be that a lethal blow against Iran would weaken an already deeply-troubled Syria and leave Hezbollah orphaned. Israel would have killed three birds with one stone.
Will Israel seek an American green light if it decides to attack Iran or might Netanyahu believe that Obama, enslaved to Israeli interests, would have no choice but to follow suit?
According to the October 6 edition of TTU, a French intelligence bulletin, the US and Israel are planning an unprecedented joint land forces exercise next May with the goal of establishing a common ‘intervention force’ ready for action in the event of a major regional war. Admiral James Stavridis, head of Eurocom — America’s European command — paid a recent unpublicised visit to Israel for talks with General Benny Gantz, Israel’s chief of staff. According to TTU, the plan is to set up American command posts in Israel and Israeli command posts in Eurocom. Cooperation between the two powers has rarely been closer.
These are dangerous times in the Middle East.
RELATED:
Could the Iranian terror plot be fake?
by Justin Raimondo
Source: Antiwar.com
Oct 13 2011
Fake, fake, fake – I’m talking about the latest anti-Iranian propaganda coming out of Washington, which claims the Iranian Revolutionary Guards were involved in a “plot” to take out the Saudi ambassador to the US and blow up both the Saudi and Israeli embassies. The narrative reads like a formulaic melodrama: two Iranians, one a naturalized US citizen, purportedly approached someone they thought was a member of a Mexican drug cartel – according to the indictment [.pdf], it was a “sophisticated” drug cartel, not the plebeian sort – and proposed paying him $1.5 million to murder Adel al Jubeir, the Kingdom’s ambassador in Washington – oh, and by the way, the Iranians supposedly said, “Are you guys any good with explosives?”
The key to understanding just how fake this story is can be found in the New York Times report, which informs us:
“For the entire operation, the government’s confidential sources were monitored and guided by federal law enforcement agents, Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney for the Southern District, said in the news conference. ‘So no explosives were actually ever placed anywhere,’ he said, ‘and no one was actually in ever in any danger.’”
Translation: the whole thing is phony from beginning to end.
This is another one of US law enforcement’s manufactured “anti-terrorist” triumphs, where the feds set somebody up, fabricate a “crime” out of thin air, and then proceed to “solve” a case that never really existed to begin with. This has been the general pattern of our “anti-terrorist” operations in the US since the beginning – because finding and catching real terrorists is much too hard, at least for our Keystone Kops. Instead of going out and actually, you know, looking for the Bad Guys, and then apprehending them, they lure some unsuspecting Muslim immigrant into a trap, and spring it when the time is right.
The long narrative spun by the indictment tells us everything but what we really need to know, which is: how is it that these two Iranian “terrorists” just happened to meet up with a Mexican drug cartel assassin who just happened to be a longtime DEA informant? I guess that would be giving too much away: far better to spice up the story with scary details, such as the conversation between one of the alleged plotters and the informant, in the course of which the former says “If you have to blow up the restaurant and kill a hundred Americans, well then f*ck ‘em!”
The credibility rating of this story, taken on its face, is close to zero. Let’s say the Iranians really were plotting to kill the Saudi ambassador on American soil: would they contract it out to the Mexican Mafia, send all kinds of traceable money wires from Iran to the US, and not care if they killed a hundred Americans in the process of achieving their goal? Or would they send some fanatic, who would not only do it for free but also eliminate himself (or herself)? This flimsy cock-eyed tale is sotransparently fake that it’s an embarrassment to the United States of America. Can’t our spooks do better than this?
This fabrication marks a new trend in the field of anti-Iranian war propaganda. Previously, the War Party was relying on the same technique they used in the run-upto the invasion of Iraq: the old “weapons of mass destruction” gambit. The big problem with that is it’s old, and tired: no one believes it anymore [.pdf]. Once burned, twice shy, as the saying goes. This latest lie is a fresh angle on a continuing theme, merely substituting Iran for the traditional bogeyman known as al-Qaeda.
That this story involves the Mexican drug cartels, and Attorney General Eric Holderproclaiming that we’re going to “hold the Iranian government accountable,” has got to be some kind of sick joke: after all, here is a man who stood by and watched while US law enforcement agents let guns travel over the US border to arm those very same cartels. Is this “coup” for the Justice Department the pay-off for that harebrained scheme – and when is Holder going to be held accountable?
That our government would float a narrative like this without any apparent regard for the basic rules of fiction-writing – create believable characters who do believable things – is Washington’s way of showing contempt for the Iranians, the American people, and anyone else who stands in the way of their war agenda. They don’t care if it’s not believable. They think Americans will swallow anything, that we’re too busytrying to survive day-to-day, these days, to inquire much further than the “official” account. And of course our brain-dead media, which is reduced to a chiefly stenographic role, isn’t going to ask any inconvenient questions.
This story is very scary – not because it’s credible, or believable, because it is neither. However, it’s the most frightening story I’ve heard in quite a while because it shows that the US government is bound and determined to go to war with Iran, no matter what the consequences. Throwing caution to the winds, our rulers have decided to go all out against Tehran – all the better to mask our current economic malaise under the damage done by the tripling and quadrupling of oil prices. This way, Obama can blame our crashing economy on Tehran, rather than his own discredited policies – and sideline the Republicans, who have been criticizing him for being “soft” on Iran.
The making of American foreign policy is all about domestic politics. By preparing the country for war with Iran, Obama will not only defang the GOP, but also appease the all-important Israel lobby, which has been beating the war drums for years.
What Obama and his gang are hoping is that the American people are too tired, toobeaten down, and too broke to care enough about this latest exercise in war propaganda to question it. Certainly the “mainstream” media, which is Obama’s loudest cheering section, isn’t about to question it.
Here is where the administration has probably miscalculated: people are just angry enough to wonder “why now?” They’re just broke enough to resent being asked to pay for yet another holy crusade overseas. And they’re just tired enough of the bull that gets reported as “news” day after day to start asking all kinds of uncomfortable questions about this latest offering by the Washington fable factory.
The Americans are already backing away from the assertion that the Iranian government is directly responsible for the actions of these two individuals, averring that top Iranian officials didn’t “necessarily” know what was going on. As the details of this case become known, Holder’s story is going to start unraveling like a substandard sweater.
