Israel may have no military option against Iran

Haaretz--Israeli leaders should understand that the attack option isn’t really an option - a thousand new fire trucks and even the Iron Dome missile defense system will not provide protection.

Every cloud has a silver lining: Maybe lessons will be learned from the fire. Not only fire extinguishers, fire trucks and new planes, but also new thinking, and fire retardants that douse the really big fire.

The home front’s weakness should teach us that Israel apparently has no military option. This is a much more fateful lesson than all the fire’s other lessons, and it should be dealt with. The apocalyptic descriptions of a missile attack on the home front if Israel attacks Iran or Lebanon appear even more apocalyptic in light of Israel’s conduct when handling a medium-sized forest fire. Discussions on our future, therefore, should move to the arena that Israelis favor: the security arena.

Leave aside human rights and the occupation, don’t worry about morality and justice, forget about peace as a leftist delusion and ignore the Palestinian problem. The issue is Israel’s security interests, perhaps even existential interests.

The next wars will be home-front wars. This time the Israeli home front will be hit in a way we have never experienced. The first Gulf war and the Second Lebanon War were only the movie trailer for what could happen. An attack of thousands of missiles, as predicted by experts, will create a reality Israel will find hard to withstand. It isn’t equipped for it, as we saw on the Carmel, and it isn’t prepared for it, as we saw in the Lebanon war. Continued…

Time to Talk (Properly) to Iran

The- Diplomat--Iran is almost certain to go for a full enrichment programme. But the West should still talk to it, says Abdullah Baabood.

On the sidelines of the Valdai conference in Malta, The Diplomat speaks with Abdullah Baabood, director of the Gulf Research Centre at Cambridge University, about Iran’s nuclear programme.

Do you think sanctions are an effective way of dealing with concerns over Iran’s nuclear programme?

I don’t think sanctions are going to work. For Iran, this is an issue of national pride. I believe the international community should talk with Iran and discuss with it its programme, its intentions, to see how we can all convince it not to follow a military option, and instead help it achieve its stated objective of civilian nuclear power. I don’t think international efforts should stop, but I don’t think sanctions are going to work to force Iran to change course, and they may even bolster the Iranian leadership position. I think dialogue, exchanges of views and probably helping them achieve a civilian programme would probably be more conducive.

So you’d like to see the US engage properly with Iran?

Certainly. Iran hasn’t always been at odds with the United States. Iran during the Shah was a close friend and ally and one part of the US policy in the Gulf. The US was relying on Iran as one of twin pillars, the other pillar being Saudi Arabia. Of course, since the Islamic Revolution, relations haven’t been friendly, but that doesn’t mean they have to continue on this trend.

I think the United States has an interest in talking to Iran, and I believe Iran also has an interest in talking to the US. At the moment there’s a problem of who’s going to start first, but I believe that finally they’ll have to talk and I think that can resolve many issues.

Iran needs to be comfortable as far as the United States’ intentions go, and the regime needs to be recognized as a regional power–and rightly so. Iran, on the other hand, also needs to re-establish its relationship with the international community, and so it can’t continue to be at odds with the United States. They may have issues that they don’t see eye to eye on, but it’s something they can try to iron out. I think in the end, the Iranian-American relationship is going to be conducive to rehabilitating Iran and bringing it back to the international community.

Do you think it’s inevitable that Iran will continue down the nuclear programme path that it’s now on?

I think that it’s inevitable that it will go for the full enrichment programme. They’ll most likely want to achieve at least the capability of producing nuclear arms, which they believe will add a lot to their international status and their position as a regional power. Whether they’ll go all the way toward producing a bomb, though, is questionable. I do hope that they don’t and that the international community will be able to find a solution. But they believe they have a right to enrich and to have their own nuclear technology that’s not dependent on outside powers and outside supply. And as long as they do that under international supervision and scrutiny, and with the intention of it being civilian power, I think the world should be able to work with them


Pakistani Ambassador hosted fundraiser for neocon think-tank

Opednews--The Pakistani ambassador to the U.S. hosted a fundraiser at his residence for a neoconservative D.C. think-tank, which solicited donations of $5,000 for invitations to the event. But the think-tank, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), didn’t bother to tell the Pakistani embassy that the event was a fundraiser or that it was sandwiched in the middle of a two-and-a-half day conference on "Countering the Iranian Threat" put on by the group.

"We didn’t know at all that they have done this fundraising," Imran Gardezi, a spokesperson for the Pakistani embassy, told the Middle East Channel. "And neither did they share with us that they would be doing this conference. Very frankly, we didn’t know about this conference."

Though the dinner appeared in the paper and online conference programs, FDD president Cliff May insisted that the two were unrelated: "The dinner was separate from the conference but it coincided with the conference. Why? Because many friends of FDD were in town for the conference," he wrote in an e-mail to the Middle East Channel. May conceded that his staff may have failed to notify the Pakistani embassy that the group was in the middle of hosting the conference. Continued..