– Israeli leaders urge Western nations to present Iran with a credible military threat (Activist Post, August 29, 2011):
Haaretz published an astonishing article today in which an unnamed Israeli defense official revealed that Israeli leaders have been making a concerted effort to build up a “credible military threat to back up economic sanctions already in place” against Iran for their nuclear program.
Despite the fact that Tehran has said many times that the program is purely for power generation and they have no intention of creating a nuclear bomb, Israel seems to be obsessed with this notion.
In the article, the anonymous source (who remains unnamed as per Israeli army regulations) says that crippling the Iranian nuclear program would not be as easy as the one-strike solutions against Iraq in 1981 and Syria in 2007.
The Israeli official stated that the United States has “a better chance of forcing Iran to change its mind over its nuclear program than Israel.”
It is not made clear why this is the case, other than the claim that the Iranian regime fears America more than Israel. The official alleges that “There is no question about it” and thus the United States has some kind of automatic responsibility to threaten Iran on behalf of Israel.
Israel has estimated that Iran is not going to be developing nuclear weapons before 2015, so why is there this rampant fearmongering and demands on the United States?Haaretz mentions what I myself see as one of the most important aspects of this issue: the fact that “Israel is widely believed to have the only nuclear arsenal in the Middle East, and Iran has accused it of hypocrisy over the issue.”
It is not only an accusation of hypocrisy but it is a naked example of the hypocritical thinking that has so much of the world rallying against Israel, especially amongst the Muslim world.
It does not help the international Israeli image when officials are calling upon the United States and other Western countries to threaten Iran with military action even though they do not have nuclear bombs and do not have the imminent capability of developing them.
The question that continues to remain unanswered is: why is Israel special?
Why is one small nation allowed to have an unchecked, unregulated and largely unquestioned nuclear arsenal when every other nation is not? Why is the state of Israel an exception to the rule?
In my mind, no nation is exceptional and this is especially true when the supposedly exceptional nation is one guilty of egregious war crimes and breaches of international law and international humanitarian law.
If Iran had a large arsenal of nuclear weapons and was invading sovereign foreign territory, killing civilians on a regular basis and breaching the Geneva Conventions countless times, I would support the idea of a unified international force demanding the disarmament of that nation.
However, it is not Iran that fits the bill of a terrorist state guilty of crimes against humanity, it is Israel.
These kinds of statements coming from Israeli officials would be somewhat laughable if it was not so incredibly dangerous.One must also consider the recent case of a man found guilty of murdering a prominent Iranian scientist.
This man, true or not, claims to have been hired, directed and brainwashed by agents of the Israeli Mossad.He was found guilty by the Iranian judicial system and sentenced to death. Of course there is the legitimate question of if he was actually working for Mossad or if it is an anti-Israeli propaganda tool and an attempt to pass off blame.
One cannot be sure as his claims are, for the most part, unverifiable or have otherwise remained unverified, however the story is plausible.
Today Majid Jamali Fashi, the alleged Mossad assassin who was accused of assassinating an Iranian nuclear physicist named Masoud Ali-Mohammadi last year, was found guilty and sentenced to death.
While no ironclad evidence of Mossad involvement has been presented, the Iranian Intelligence Ministry claimed they dismantled an Israeli spy network made up of Mossad-trained terrorists and spies. They allegedly arrested the main perpetrators who were connected with the Ali-Mohammadi assassination in 2010.
They claim that Mossad utilized basis in European and non-European nations along with countries bordering Iran “in an attempt to achieve its inhuman and un-Islamic goals.”
Regardless of if these allegations are true, there is a palpable tension between Iran and Israel that seems to have no end in sight.
That being said, Haaretz says that, “Some analysts say the likelihood of an imminent Israeli war with Iran has ebbed, thanks to the perceived success of political pressure on Tehran.”
I sincerely hope this is true as the last thing the world needs, and especially the Middle East, is another war or threats of war.
I hope that the United States will not help serve Israeli interests by presenting Iran “with a credible military threat” as there is no independently verifiable evidence of Iran intending to create a nuclear bomb to begin with.
Sources:
Israel defense official: It would take more than one strike to halt Iran’s nuclear program – Haaretz
‘Mossad assassin handed death penalty’ – Press TV
So what?