What Will Israel Do?

[Ros]

Aan wiens kant ik sta is hier niet aan de orde. Mijn steun gaat in ieder geval niet uit naar landen die alle problemen met militair geweld op willen lossen. Ik heb er een gruwelijke hekel aan dat een arrogant land als Israel schijnbaar met ieders goedvinden aan aanval op een ander land uit mag voeren. Omdat Iran schijnbaar van plan is om een kernwapen op Israel af gaat vuren. Jij, ik en iedereen weet dat dit niet het geval is. De Iraniers mogen dan wel rare romeinen zijn maar zo stom om aan te sturen op een conflict met kernwapens zijn ze echt niet.  En waar haalt Israel de moed vandaan om het recht op te eisen of af te dwingen om als enige in de regio over kernwapens te mogen beschikken ?.

Een soort Koude Oorlog situatie in het Midden Oosten is m.i. helemaal niet zo verkeerd om grootschalige conflicten te voorkomen. Gelukkig en hopenlijk zal de politieke ommekeer in de VS een mindere pro Israel weg inslaan en niet iedere actie van Israel meer ondersteunen.

Maar de Israeli's hebben schijnbaar aan 60 jaar ellende nog niet genoeg gehad 

[Ton de Zwart]

Met Iran iets fatsoenlijks doen?  Om een tafel gaan zitten?   
Het is wel weer duidelijk aan wiens kant jij staat Ros.
Was verwachtbaar...

[Ros]

60 jaar lang oorlog voeren nog niet lang genoeg ?. Waaron niet fatsoenlijk aan tafel met Iran en afspreken om beide het kernwapentuig op te ruimen. Oh.....nee, Israel heeft geen kernwapens  :-X

Zou Israel besluiten om een aanval op Iran uit voeren zou ik bijna hopen dat landen in het Midden Oosten de handen ineen slaan en een vreselijke dreun uitdelen........mag men natuurlijk niet zeggen.

[Lex]

Target: Iran?

On Israel's 60th birthday, the Jewish state may be readying for its biggest fight yet. What that could mean for the next American president.
Generally speaking, six decades after the founding of your nation, you shouldn't still be fighting for your right to exist. You should have achieved at least that much. And after the wars of 1948, '67 and '73, and other conflicts—including two intifadas—many Israelis would like to think they've honorably battled their way to the right to existence. But they haven't made it yet. Today, on its 60th birthday, Israel remains as much in existential peril as it was in those early months after the U.N. General Assembly approved the partition of Palestine and Arab armies attacked the infant state.
Arguably, it is at even greater risk now than it was then. Very soon now Israel could be engaged in the biggest battle for existence it has ever faced in its not-so-short-any-longer history. And the next U.S. president—whether it is Barack Obama or John McCain—may have a bigger crisis on his hands than anything since 9/11. While Israeli officials insist they are sticking to diplomacy, a number of circumstances are aligning to make an Israeli strike on Iran more likely before the end of 2008:
•   A new, much more dire Israeli assessment that Iran will have the ability to build an atomic bomb by 2009 (earlier reports had drifted toward 2010 or later).
•   The flagging of U.S.-European efforts to pressure Iran economically and isolate it. The Bush administration's Iran point man, Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns, has just retired from the State Department—leaving a huge vacuum—and many Israelis have a growing sense that Washington is figuring out how to live with an Iranian nuclear capability. Meanwhile, European companies are making new multibillion-dollar investments in Iran's energy sector, including Austria's OMV and Switzerland's EGL.
•   The ongoing rebuilding of Hizbullah's missile armada in nearby Lebanon, which gives Iran an ever greater retaliatory capability the longer the Israelis wait.
•   Iran's Scheherazade-like efforts to endlessly prolong an investigation by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) into the history and intent of its nuclear program. A new IAEA report is due by the third week of May, and Iran has agreed to deliver comments on the agency's ongoing investigation, but the issue is not expected to be resolved by then.
•   Russia's willingness to supply Tehran with close-range surface-to-air defense missiles, even as it declares it is willing to join sanctions against Iran. Rumors continue to circulate, though Moscow denies it, that Russia is negotiating to sell Iran longer-range S-300 antiaircraft systems. These very sophisticated defenses, once installed, would dramatically alter the odds against Israeli air strikes.
And last but certainly not least, the imminent end of the Bush administration, which is arguably the friendliest—certainly the most compliant—U.S. government the Israelis have ever seen. When Israel attacked Hizbullah in Lebanon in the summer of '06, the Bush administration gave a green light to the Jewish state and deliberately delayed diplomatic discussions to end the war. Just a few weeks ago Bush approvingly described the Israeli raid on a Syrian reactor last September as a "warning" to Iran and North Korea. An Obama administration is far less likely to cheerlead for Israel, while McCain's approach remains uncertain.
Many Iran experts argue that, despite Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's regular calls for Israel's destruction, it is far from certain that Tehran intends to fully develop a nuclear weapon or, if it did, would actually entertain using it against Israel or any other state. Ahmadinejad is up for re-election in 2009 and remains unpopular among Iranian governmental elites. Certainly one option for Israel—which possesses a substantial nuclear arsenal of its own—is to apply the time-honored logic of deterrence against Iran, especially if Ahmadinejad is ousted and cooler heads prevail in Tehran. And even Israeli hardliners know that the repercussions of an attack on Iran would be vicious and long-lasting, heightening the likelihood that Ahmadinejad and other hardliners would remain in power and perhaps embroiling Israel in a regional war.
Some U.S. technical and defense experts also argue that even now Israel does not have the ability to be more than a nuisance to Iran's program. Iran's enrichment program is far more dispersed, secret and well protected than the Osirak reactor in Iraq, which Israeli planes destroyed in 1981. "They could destroy all of the facilities at [Iran's] Natanz and it wouldn't seriously set them back," says David Albright, one of Washington's most respected trackers of Iran's nuclear program.
What is beyond dispute, however, is that the longer the Israelis wait, the more resistant the Iranians become to a military solution, particularly if they install those Russian antiaircraft systems. Iran's new generation of IR-2 centrifuges are harder to detect as well. "Nobody has yet pointed out that these centrifuges are much easier to put into dispersed, small facilities," Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies said at a briefing in Washington on Wednesday.
And for many Israeli hardliners, there is little choice. Their view is that they have been left, once again, isolated on the world stage. The likelihood of a U.S. strike on Iran has virtually vanished. (On Tehran's nuclear program, that is. A U.S. military action against Iranian targets just across the border from Iraq remains a possibility.) Bush, still bogged down in Iraq, is looking more each day like a lame duck. While Bush made serious efforts during his last Mideast trip in January—he's off on another next week—to disown last fall's National Intelligence Estimate, which concluded that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program, Washington has not officially revised that estimate. According to Bruce Riedel, a former official with the National Security Council, even Hillary Clinton's recent threat to "obliterate" Iran if it attacked Israel was seen by some Israelis as a tacit embrace of the new U.S. fallback position: we can't stop an Iranian bomb, so we'll assert our deterrent against the use of one.
The bottom line is that the longer Israel waits to strike, the more difficult it will become to take out Iran's nuclear program militarily and to endure the fallout diplomatically. At the same time the promised benefits of waiting—the hoped-for diplomatic solution based on economic pressure—seem to be receding. Much depends now on the political survival of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who is engulfed in yet another scandal, this time involving a bribery investigation. But if you're looking for the launch pad of the next global crisis, keep your eyes on Jerusalem.

Michael Hirsh
NEWSWEEK WEB EXCLUSIVE
Updated: 4:52 PM ET May 8, 2008

[Lex]

A unilateral military strike against Iran is much more likely following the latest intel report about Tehran's nuke program.

Ehud Olmert, like George W. Bush, is trying hard to make it seem that nothing has changed, and that the international diplomatic coalition against Iran is still intact. "The state of Israel is not the main flag-bearer against the quirks of the regime in Tehran," the Israeli prime minister declared testily last week, after officials in his own government seemed to suggest that Israel had been left on its own by Washington. Olmert said that the recent U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran--which stunned leaders around the world by concluding, after years of bellicose rhetoric from Bush officials about Iran's nuclear ambitions, that Tehran had halted its weapons program in 2003--has "generated an exaggerated debate" in Israel. "Some of us even interpreted the report as an American retreat from its support of Israel," Olmert said. "This is groundless ...  I trust and am confident that the United States will continue to lead the international campaign to stop the development of a nuclear Iran."
But Olmert is not Moses; he can't hold back elemental forces all by himself. And a rising tide of opinion in Israel's intelligence and national-security circles believes that the NIE does signal American retreat--and, more profoundly, renewed Israeli isolation over what is deemed an existential threat out of Tehran. Gen. Ephraim Sneh, a former deputy defense minister who has warned for years that Israel would eventually have to confront Iran alone, told me that "today we are closer to this situation than we were three weeks ago ... we have to be prepared to forestall this threat on our own." Some prominent American experts think that the NIE all but assures Israeli military action at some point. "I came back from a trip to Israel in November convinced that Israel would attack Iran," Bruce Riedel, a former career CIA official and senior adviser to three U.S. presidents--including Bush--on Middle East and South Asian issues, told me Thursday, citing conversations he had with Mossad and defense officials. "And that was before the NIE. This makes it even more likely. Israel is not going to allow its nuclear monopoly to be threatened."
Riedel said the Bush administration compounded the problem by failing to signal to the Israelis that the NIE assessment was coming. "Something like this should have been presented to the Israelis through professional intelligence channels," he said. Yuval Steinitz, a member of the right-wing Likud Party, told me that he had led a delegation of Knesset members to Washington a few weeks before the NIE was made public Dec. 3. Steinitz said he met with Vice President Dick Cheney, national-security adviser Stephen Hadley and other administration officials, but not even they seemed aware that their 2005 estimate that Iran was definitely pursuing nuclear weapons was about to be repudiated. Even though Iran was discussed, he said, "no one seemed to have any sign this was forthcoming," he says.
Many Israeli experts are appalled by the tone of the report, which concludes with "high confidence" that Iran halted its "nuclear weapons program." The NIE arrived at this finding even though it also asserted that Washington now had concrete evidence of that program, and despite Tehran's brazen pursuit of uranium enrichment. Even formerly moderate European and Russian officials suggest that the report went too far, especially in concluding that the U.S. intel community still has "moderate confidence" that the suspension of the program continues. Uzi Arad, a former Mossad official and adviser to Benjamin Netanyahu, the former Likud prime minister, said that on a recent trip he made to Moscow, a Russian general poked fun at the naiveté of the NIE, commenting that if the Iranians had halted weapons development in 2003 it was partly because they were satisfied with progress there and wanted to devote investment to harder parts of the nuclear equation, like enrichment. In the end, these critics say, Iran is likely to be  further emboldened by the report (Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad lost no time in boasting of America's "surrender"). "The irony is that the effect of this report may be self-negating--by itself it will accelerate Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons," Arad said.
Some experts question whether the Israelis have the capability to seriously damage Iran's nuclear program, which is secured in secret, hardened facilities around the country. But others point out that the new NIE gives evidence of far better intelligence on Iran--possibly including the whereabouts of its facilities. "It did state for first time that a military nuclear program was in motion until 2003," said Sneh. "That was a major revelation that should have been picked up, and it was very damaging incriminating evidence, justifying much harsher action against Iran."
A few experts, such as David Albright of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington, say the intel still seems scant on the location of Iran's secret centrifuge development and manufacturing complex. Still, Albright points out that the Israelis are likely encouraged by the nonreaction to their September airstrike on what is reported to have been a Syrian nuclear facility, which may have been a test run for Iran, or at least a warning directed at Tehran. "Israel has gotten away with it in a sense," says Albright. He suggests that any Israeli pre-emptive action might not be a "traditional strike" but could involve more "sabotage of equipment." The Israelis also know that the Arab states are terrified of an Iranian nuclear power, possibly to the point of looking the other way at another such strike.
Sneh, like others, isn't conceding failure yet on the official Israeli and U.S. approach, which involves isolating Iran diplomatically and economically. A third U.N. Security Council resolution authorizing economic sanctions against Iran is expected to pass next year, but it is likely to be fairly hollow because of Russian and Chinese opposition. One reason for Bush's abruptly announced nine-day visit to the region in mid-January is to deal with the fallout from the NIE, which includes not only the possibility that Israel will act unilaterally but also that Bush's prized Annapolis peace process will stall. The Bush trip is, in part, an implicit concession to U.S. hawks that the NIE went too far in absolving Iran. It is also a conscious effort to reassure both Israel and the Arab states that Washington will stand up to Iran's increasing intrusiveness and hegemonic tendencies. A dominant conspiracy theory in Arab capitals in the wake of the NIE is that Washington is seeking to cut a deal with Tehran--one that would effectively allow it to keep its nascent uranium-enrichment capability--in exchange for Iranian help in stabilizing Iraq.
Bush may also reassure the Israelis and Arab allies that the NIE overstated things in letting Iran off the hook. In yet another briefing to angry congressmen Wednesday, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell conceded that "we could have written parts of it more clearly," according to a senior congressman who was there. The ranking Republican member of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Rep. Peter Hoekstra, says he's calling for an independent commission to probe the report. "Most of the world looks at it and says it's an embarrassment to the United States because once again the U.S. intelligence community has dramatically changed its position," Hoekstra told NEWSWEEK. And it may well be that Washington must take back its words one more time to prevent the Israelis from acting on their own.

By Michael Hirsh
NEWSWEEK
Updated: 6:21 PM ET Dec 20, 2007