‘Western Diplomats Offering Support for Israeli Strike on Iran’

Israel Navy prepares to attack Iran with consent from the West.

From yesterday’s London Times (h/t: Jason Ditz):

Two Israeli missile class warships have sailed through the Suez Canal ten days after a submarine capable of launching a nuclear missile strike, in preparation for a possible attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities….

“This is preparation that should be taken seriously. Israel is investing time in preparing itself for the complexity of an attack on Iran. These manoeuvres are a message to Iran that Israel will follow up on its threats,” an Israeli defence official said….

The exercises come at a time when Western diplomats are offering support for an Israeli strike on Iran in return for Israeli concessions on the formation of a Palestinian state.

The Times reported April 17 that Israel was “preparing itself to launch a massive aerial assault on Iran’s nuclear facilities within days of being given the go-ahead by its new government”.

“Israel wants to know that if its forces were given the green light they could strike at Iran in a matter of days, even hours. They are making preparations on every level for this eventuality. The message to Iran is that the threat is not just words,” an unnamed senior defense official told the Times.

It’s no news that any Israeli strike on Iran would have the consent of the U.S. Israel pledged to “coordinate its moves on Iran with Washington and not surprise the United States with military action” in the middle of May. Today, Ria Novosti reported that U.S. Middle East envoy George Mitchell and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates will hold secret meetings with the Netanyahu Administration in Tel Aviv within the next two weeks.

Saudi Arabia has granted Israel consent to use its airspace to strike Iran, Uzi Mahnaimi and Sarah Baxter reported in The Sunday Times July 5. Israel denies these reports, but both being clients of the U.S., this isn’t surprising, either. U.S. Vice President Joe Biden said that day that Israel has the “sovereign right” to make a first strike on Iran. The Saudis acting contrary is inconceivable with the Saudi-U.S. deals that exist.

A manufactured threat

The U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA), new director-general, Yukiya Amano says there is no evidence Iran is seeking a nuclear weapon. This is consistent with the results of the 17 snap inspections conducted by the outgoing IAEA chief, Mohamad ElBaradei, who reported March 4 [.pdf] that he was “able to continue to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran.”

“The international community. The world has ignored our warnings. Take the case of Iraq, for example. Even though we had no evidence of weapons of mass destruction, they were used as justification for the war — the most dangerous moment of my tenure,” Mr. ElBaradei told Der Spiegel in an interview published May 18. “We still have no ultimate proof of a military nuclear program in Iran.”

“I must provide the international community with all available information and put it in the right context — not exaggerating any dangers, but also not playing anything down,” Mr. ElBaradei told Der Spiegel in another interview published June 11. “They [Iran] continue to insist that they are interested solely in using nuclear power for civilian purposes. We have yet to find a smoking gun that would prove them wrong.” [1]

Nuclear weapons physicist Gordon Prather wrote in April, citing the DEBKAfile, an Israeli news site on military and intelligence affairs: “The targets to be attacked do not include those additional targets alleged by DEBKAfile to be parts of Iran’s nuclear program. Targets to be attacked do include Iran’s military installations; all ten of Iran’s military aircraft bases, Iran’s known ballistic missile sites and known air-defense surface-to-air missile sites.”

Former. U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told Der Spiegel in a July 6 interview, “Iran is a relatively weak and small country that has inherent limits to its capabilities.”

The Israel Lobby

Justin Raimondo wrote an article titled, “The Lobby Wants War With Iran” the week before the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) held its annual U.S. conference. Mr. Raimondo called AIPAC, “a fifth column working on behalf of a foreign power.”

“The Lobby thumbs its nose at the American people, and, with the collusion of our elected officials, continues to get away with fatally distorting American foreign policy and taking us down the road to war,” he wrote in response to AIPAC pressing for U.S. interventionist policies against Iran, shortly after Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) was outed as a de facto double agent for the government of Israel. “Whether the American people will wake up in time to arrest the ongoing corruption of their government and social institutions by a foreign entity, remains to be seen. It is an indication, however, of the deep contempt with which the Lobby views American law and institutions, and, as such, is utterly reprehensible.”

Doublethink diplomacy

“The Americans thought they could threaten Iran with a big stick and force it to back down. But the arrogance of treating a country like Iran like a donkey led to a hardening of positions,” Mr. ElBaradei said May 18 before voicing he was “frustrated” on June 11.

President Obama campaigned that he would negotiate with Iran and acknowledges Iran’s “legitimate aspirations” toward its civilian nuclear energy program. The leaders of the G-8 released a statement after their summit in Italy last week stating: “We remain committed to finding a diplomatic solution to the issue of Iran’s nuclear program… We recognize that Iran has the right to a civilian nuclear programme, but that comes with the responsibility to restore confidence in the exclusively peaceful nature of its nuclear activities.”

Mr. Obama admitted Iran wasn’t developing a nuclear weapon, but said that Iran has to meet the September deadline to negotiate with the West or the G-8 would “take further steps” — whether or not Iran continues to be fully compliant with the IAEA and fully within the conduct allowed by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to which it is a co-signatory, though it has no nuclear weapons.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is calling for countries to impose “even stricter sanctions on Iran to try to change the behavior of the regime”. Sanctions would hurt the Iranian people first, in an effort to starve, impoverish the people into overthrowing the regime — a violent act on the people of a foreign nation to change its politics. Never mind that this borders on “international terrorism”.

“Congress can’t have it both ways on taxpayer-funded sanctions and rewards,” Grant Smith wrote June 28. “If gasoline imports indirectly support Iran’s nuclear ambitions, then $2.775 billion in cash for conventional U.S. weapons and military technology clearly allows Israel to focus on development and deployment of its illicit nuclear arsenal.”

In March, former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski said that a method the U.S. could employ with Iran is to “design the negotiation to fail, and to make Iran appear to blame. This would be achieved by setting preconditions, threatening with sanctions and force, calling for regime change and labeling the Iranian government as a ‘terrorist entity'”[2] and that timetables for negotiations, as the one stated by the G-8 last week, “create a sense of urgency and pressure which (prevents) serious exploration of the issues.” Mr. Brzezinski implied in an interview this last May that the U.S. was currently employing this method.

The AIPAC-funded Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) co-founder and Mrs. Clinton’s then-special advisor on the Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia Dennis Ross co-authored a book released June 11, Myths, Illusions, and Peace – Finding a New Direction for America in the Middle East, with David Makovsky. Mr. Ross and Mr. Makovsky — not only raised the possibility of military action against Iran, but — clearly state in this book that diplomacy by the Obama Administration would be nothing more than a dog-and-pony show to the American people and the international community to make military action “easier to sell”.

U.S. State Department spokesperson Ian Kelly was asked on June 15 whether or not Mrs. Clinton had “full confidence in Dennis Ross to continue in his present role”; to which Mr. Kelly replied, “Absolutely.”

“It’s a very good book, by the way…. It probably was inappropriate, but there it is. It’s out there,” Mr. Kelly added with an awkward grin on his face after continuing to be pressed on the topic. “He is a very close advisor of the Secretary on a number of issues related to Iran and the region. But he also came out of the academic community, and he’s entitled — he was entitled to his opinion. He wrote the book before he came on board here.”

On June 25, Mr. Ross was removed from his post as special advisor to Mrs. Clinton “on a number of issues related to Iran” in the State Department and was promoted to the White House by the anti-war [sic] U.S. president in what the AFP reported as: “a key job overseeing policy in a vast region encompassing the Middle East, the Gulf, Afghanistan, Pakistan and South Asia.”

The only surprise that the Obama Administration is launching a proxy war by giving Israel the nod to strike Iran is that this could be a surprise.

Notes:

1. There have been reports of a “smoking laptop” with documents that included “blueprints for a nuclear warhead”. Gareth Porter has written and discussed extensively of this being a hoax perpetrated by Israeli intelligence.
2. The quote is Press TV’s paraphrase of Mr. Brzezinski’s remark to them.