Thursday, August 27, 2015

Will Israel Attack Iran?

An interesting article from http://www.ucg.org/ about Israel and Iran. This follows this post about Chinese weapons. This follows this post about recession. For a free magazine subscription or to get the books recommended for free click HERE! or call 1-888-886- 8632.
Please follow me here for continued posts.

Will Israel Attack Iran?

by Jerold Aust Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

Add to my study list

Can you hear the time bomb ticking in the Middle East? If you flinch under the weight of the escalating price and humiliating dependence on foreign oil, if you hear the threats from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad against Israel and the West and if you hear Ahmadinejad's defiant rejection of the West's oft-repeated demands for Iran to cease and desist from enriching uranium, then you do indeed hear the Iranian bomb ticking in the Middle East. Could it go off in the not-too-distant future?
Israelis cannot just wait for the bomb to go off; they live next door. Will Israel attack Iran and if so, when? Recently, Israel conducted an obvious military exercise over the Mediterranean Sea near Greece. The idea of this military exercise was to show that Israel's planes would fly the distance necessary to mount a mission to knock out Iran's nuclear facilities. Israel's implied threat is simple and direct: If enrichment continues, we could strike!

Israeli military exercises over the Mediterranean

Putnam Media Managing Editor Rick Pedraza wrote an insightful article for Newsmax.com titled “Bolton: Israel Will Strike Iran if Obama Is Elected.” It addressed a recent Fox News interview of former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton. Pedraza commented on Israel's massive air force exercise over Greece, which the Greek, Israeli and U.S. forces later confirmed was a test run for a strike on Iran's main uranium enrichment plant.
The ordinary person may not have considered Israel's determined, strategic and geopolitical defense against Iran's covert and overt threats of nuclear warfare. Bolton has: “'I think if they are to do anything, the most likely period is after our elections and before the inauguration of the next President.' They'd have to make a judgment whether to [strike] during the remainder of President Bush's term in office or wait for his successor” (www.newsmax.com ).
Remarkably, and counterintuitive to what might be considered a public norm, “Bolton believes Arab countries will support an Israeli strike, effectively ending Iran's nuclear ambitions, while publicly denouncing it”(ibid., emphasis added).
Former Ambassador Bolton thinks that if Senator John McCain wins the presidential race, the Israelis might postpone the attack, offering, “McCain's stance on Iran 'is far more realistic than that of the Bush administration'” (ibid.). Mr. Bolton thinks that Iran would not respond immediately to a strike since they would fear an American reprisal.

Israel, a very tiny nation

With all the saber rattling, Israel has little recourse but to take a very strong military stand, no matter the threat. This small nation is surrounded by overwhelming numbers of Arab states. Israel occupies a pitiful pinch of real estate blanketed by its Arab neighbors, many within its own borders. Every inch of Israel's territory is seen as critical to its safety.
It's easy to discover why Israel is in such a precarious and highly dangerous geopolitical position, a tempting prize for its larger neighbors. Israel, with an area of about 8,000 square miles, is ½0th the size of California. Israel is 260 miles long with a 120-mile coastline and is 70 miles across at its widest point. Israel is surrounded by more than 20 Arab nations equal to more than 630 times its size, more than 50 times its population—and the surrounding nations currently hold all the oil.

U.S. presidential influence in the mix

With only a few months until the American presidential elections, Israel should and likely will give the Bush administration one more chance to stop Iran's rush to enter the atomic and nuclear age. If nothing concrete happens before January 2009, it's possible that Israel will wait no more.
Will or can the United States do more than offer veiled threats to Iran, considering the U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan? The surge is working in Iraq, but Iraqi police alone aren't yet able to keep the peace. Taliban fighters are attempting to regain a foothold in Afghanistan. There is speculation that the United States may transfer troops from Iraq to Afghanistan to quell the Taliban surge.
The perplexing entanglement in the Middle East brings to mind Winston Churchill's 1939 radio broadcast in which he referred to forecasting the reaction of Russia to German aggression: “It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma [i.e., a puzzle, difficult to solve]; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.”
Perhaps the key to the Iranian threat, counterintuitively, might just be the Arab nations' fear of Iranian hegemony right next door. Though they are overwhelmingly Muslim, the majority of Iranians are ethnically Persians rather than Arabs. The Iranians are also predominately Shiite Muslims (like the majority in Iraq), which makes the Sunni Muslims who control the rest of the Middle East's oil quite nervous.
If there's a military strike on Iran, either from Israel or the West, oil could spike to over $200 a barrel, further alienating the West from unsympathetic oil cartels. Gasoline could rise to $6 a gallon if not more.
It is clear that any U.S. intrusion into Iranian affairs would provoke a strong reaction from surrounding Arab countries, at least verbally. But would they do more? Consider that Iran's neighbors would not like Iran to have the bomb. Privately they would like a leveling of the playing field. An Iran with nuclear weapons would be a threat to the Arab nations, as well as to Israel. So don't assume that threatening rhetoric from nearby Arabic nations means that they are in league with Iran on this hot topic.
The U.S. presidential race is being weighed in the balance by both Iran and Israel. Both Iran and Israel will play out their hands based on how tough they think the next U.S. president will be on Middle Eastern geopolitics.

Will Israel survive?

Will Israel strike at Iranian nuclear facilities? If they conclude they need to, they probably will. It's a matter of self-preservation. With the recent announcement that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will step down after September elections, that seems more likely. Olmert has generally been viewed as a weak and ineffective leader, particularly in military matters.
What will be the outcome of all this? It won't be what most people would expect. Ironically, the Bible shows the Middle East and Israel being invaded by a European-based power described by Daniel as the king of the North (Daniel 11:40-41). Zechariah describes a terrible attack on Jerusalem, with half the city going into captivity (Zechariah 14:1-3).
But after all this, the inhabitants of the Middle East—Jews, Arabs and Iranians alike—will not be thinking about bombs but plowshares (Isaiah 2:4)!
To understand these prophetic events better, request or read online our free booklet The Middle East in Bible Prophecy . WNP

http://www.ucg.org/world-news-and-prophecy/will-israel-attack-iran

Friday, February 6, 2009

Israel's Fateful Elections

This is important analysis from Caroline Glick, of Jewish World Review, of what Israel's election means to itself, the Middle East, and the rest of the world!!

Israel's fateful elections
By Caroline B. Glick
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0209/glick020609.php3

Tuesday's general elections will officially end the briefest and most nonchalant electoral season Israel has ever experienced. Regrettably, the importance of these elections is inversely proportional to their lack of intensity. This is, these are the most fateful elections Israel has ever had. The events of the past week make this point clearly.
Monday Iran successfully launched a domestically manufactured satellite on a ballistic missile called the Safir-2 space rocket. Since the launch, experts have noted that the Safir-2 can also be used to launch conventional and non-conventional warheads. The Safir-2 has an estimated range of 2000-3000 kilometers. And so the successful satellite launch showed that today Iran is capable of launching missiles not only against Israel, but against southern Europe as well.
Many Israeli leaders viewed Monday's launch as a "gotcha" moment. For years they have been saying that Iran's nuclear program is a threat to global security - not merely to Israel's security. And Monday's launch just demonstrated that they were right all along. Israel isn't the only country on Iran's target list.
Unfortunately for Israel, the international community couldn't care less. Its response to Iran's latest provocation was to collectively shrug its shoulders.
On Wednesday emissaries of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany convened in Wiesbaden, Germany to discuss their joint policies towards Iran in the aftermath of the satellite launch. Some Israelis argued that Iran's provocation forced these leaders' hands. Their reputations for toughness were on the line. They would have to do something.
Unfortunately for Israel, the emissaries of Russia, Britain, China, France, Germany and the US are more interested in convincing the mullahs that they are nice than in convincing them that they are tough.
Far from deciding to take concerted action against Iran, the great powers did nothing more than wish the Obama administration good luck as it moves to directly engage the mullahs. As their post-conference press release put it, the six governments' answer to Iran's show of force was to "agree to consult on the next steps as the US administration undertakes its [Iranian] policy review."
As US President Barak Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have explained, the US is reviewing its policy towards Iran in the hopes of finding a way to directly engage the Iranian government. While they claim that the aim of these sought after direct negotiations will be to convince the mullahs to give up their nuclear weapons program, since taking office the new administration has sent out strong signals that preventing Iran from going nuclear has taken a backseat to simply holding negotiations with Teheran.
According to a report in Aviation News, last week the US Navy prevented Israel from seizing an Iranian weapons ship on the Red Sea suspected of carrying illicit munitions to either Gaza or Lebanon. A week and a half ago, the US Navy boarded the ship in the Gulf of Aden and carried out a cursory inspection. It demurred from seizing the ship however, because as US Admiral Michael Mullen the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff explained on January 27, the US believed it had no international legal right to seize the ship.
In inspecting the ship the US was operating under UN Security Council Resolution 1747 which bars Iran from exporting arms. The US argued that it lacked authority to seize the ship because 1747 has no enforcement mechanism. Yet the fact of the matter is that if the US were truly interested in intercepting the ship and preventing the arms from arriving at their destination, the language of 1747 is vague enough to support such a seizure.
And that's the point. The US was uninterested in seizing the ship because it was uninterested in provoking a confrontation with Teheran which it seeks to engage. It was not due to lack of legal authority that the US reportedly prevented the Israeli Navy from seizing the ship on the Red Sea, but due to the administration's fervent wish to appease the mullahs.
Today the ship, which was sailing under a Cypriot flag, is docked at the Port of Limassol. Cypriot authorities have reportedly inspected the ship twice, have communicated their findings to the Security Council, and are still waiting for guidance on how to deal with the ship.
All of this brings us back to next Tuesday's elections. With the US effectively giving up on confronting Iran, the entire burden for blocking Iran's quest for nuclear weapons falls on Israel's shoulders.
This means that the most important question that Israeli voters must ask ourselves between now and Tuesday is which leader and which party are most capable of achieving this vital goal?
All we need to do to answer this question is check what our leaders have done in recent years to bring attention to the Iranian threat and build coalitions to contend with it.
In late 2006, citing the Iranian nuclear menace, Yisrael Beitenu leader Avigdor Lieberman joined the Olmert government where he received the tailor-made title of Strategic Affairs Minister. At the time Lieberman joined the cabinet, the public outcry against the government for its failure to lead Israel to victory in the war with Iran's Lebanese proxy Hizbullah had reached a fever pitch. The smell of new elections was in the air as members of Knesset from all parties came under enormous public pressure to vote no confidence in the government.
By joining the government when he did, Lieberman single-handedly kept the Olmert government in power. Explaining his move, Lieberman claimed that the danger emanating from Iran's nuclear program was so great that Israel could not afford new elections.
But what did he accomplish by saving the government by taking that job? The short answer is nothing. Not only did his presence in the government make no impact on Israel's effectiveness in dealing with Iran, it prolonged the lifespan of a government that had no interest in forming a strategy for contending with Iran by two years.
In light of this fact, perhaps more than any other Israeli politician, Lieberman is to blame for the fact that Israel finds itself today with no allies in its hour of greatest peril. Had he allowed the people to elect more competent leaders in the fall of 2006, we might have been able to take advantage of the waning years of the Bush administration to convince the US to work with us against Iran.
Then there is Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni. If Lieberman was the chief enabler of Israel's incompetent bungling of the Iranian threat, as Israel's chief diplomat, it is Livni - together with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert - who deserves the greatest condemnation for that bungling.
Throughout her tenure as Foreign Minister and still today as Kadima's candidate for Prime Minister, Livni claims that she supports using diplomacy to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. But in her three years as Israel's top diplomat, Livni never launched any diplomatic initiative aimed at achieving this goal. In fact, she has never even publicly criticized the European and American attempts to appease the mullahs.
Livni has remained silent for three years even though it has been clear for five years that the West's attempts to cut a deal with Teheran serve no purpose other than to provide the Iranians time to develop their nuclear arsenal. She has played along with the Americans and the Europeans and cheered them on as they passed toothless resolutions against Iran in the Security Council which - as the Iranian weapons ship docked in Cyprus shows - they never had the slightest intention of enforcing.
As for Defense Minister Ehud Barak, as a member of the Olmert government, his main personal failure has been his inability to convince the Pentagon to approve Israel's requests to purchase refueling jets and bunker buster bomb kits, and to permit Israeli jets to fly over Iraqi airspace. To achieve these aims, Barak could have turned to Israel's friends in the US military and in Congress. But he did no such thing. And now, moving into the Obama administration, Israel finds itself with fewer and fewer allies in Washington's security community.
For the past several years, only one political leader in Israel has had the foresight and wisdom to both understand the dangers of Iran's nuclear program and to understand the basis for an Israeli diplomatic approach to contending with the threat that can serve the country's purposes regardless of whether or not at the end of the day, Israel is compelled to act alone.
In 2006, Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu took it upon himself to engage the American people in a discussion of the danger Iran poses not only to Israel but to the world as a whole. In late 2006, he began meeting with key US governors and state politicians to convince them to divest their state employees' pension funds from companies that do business with Iran. This initiative and complementary efforts by the Washington-based Center for Security Policy convinced dozens of state legislatures to pass laws divesting their pension funds from companies that do business with Iran.
Netanyahu also strongly backed the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs' initiative to indict Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as an international war criminal for inciting genocide. Both the divestment campaign and the campaign against Ahmadinejad have been Israel's most successful public diplomacy efforts in contending with Iran. More than anything done by the government, these initiatives made Americans aware of the Iranian nuclear threat and so forced the issue onto the agendas of all the presidential candidates.
For their part, instead of supporting Netanyahu's efforts, Livni, Barak and Lieberman have disparaged them or ignored them.
Because he is the only leader who has done anything significant to fight Iran's nuclear program, Netanyahu is the only national leader who has the international credibility to be believed when he says - as he said this week - that Israel will not allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons. For its part, Likud under Netanyahu is the only party that has consistently drawn the connection between Iran, its Palestinian, Lebanese, Iraqi and Afghan terror proxies, its Syrian client state and its nuclear weapons program and made fighting this axis the guiding principle of its national security strategy.
Given the US-led international community's decision not to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, it is clear that in the coming months Israel will need to do two things. It will need to put the nations of the world on notice that they cannot expect us to stand by idly as they welcome Iran into the nuclear club. And Israel will need to prepare plans to strike Iran's nuclear installations without America's support.
More than ever before, Israel requires leaders who understand the gravity of the hour and are capable of acting swiftly and wisely to safeguard our country from destruction. Only Netanyahu and Likud have a credible track record on this subject.
For the sake of our country, our nation and our posterity, it is our responsibility to consider this fact when we enter the voting booths on Tuesday.

brianlee

Thursday, August 27, 2015