Israeli PM for a military strike against Iran: report

[nrj]

Israel is mulling a possible military strike to foil Iran's nuclear ambitions with its hawkish Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu garnering support within his cabinet for the same, according to a media report in Jerusalem.

Actively supported by Defence Minister Ehud Barak, the Israeli Premier is said to have recently succeeded in persuading ultra-nationalist Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, in support of the strike as they work towards mustering a cabinet majority on the strike, Ha'aretz daily reported citing a senior Israeli official as source.

According to the official, there is a "small advantage" in the cabinet for the opponents of such an attack.
Lieberman had been earlier being an opponent of such a measure.

Awaiting nuclear watchdog International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) report to be released on November 8, political leaders in Israel have started arguing over the possibility of a war with Iran.

Leading ministers publicly dropping hints that Israel could attack the Islamic Republic, although a member of the forum of eight senior ministers said no such decision had been taken.

Senior ministers and diplomats said the IAEA report will have a decisive effect on the decision the Jewish state will take in this regard.

The whole debate was sparked by a column written by one of Israel's leading columnist, Nahum Barnea, for the largest circulated daily 'Yediot Ahronoth' under the headline "Atomic Pressure".


The columnist's concerned tone has brought back the issue to the forefront of the Israeli debate even though thousands of Israeli citizens have been looking for shelter to avoid rocket attacks emanating from Gaza during the past few days.

Western intelligence officials have been recently saying that Iran is forging ahead with its nuclear programme. Intelligence services estimate that Tehran will take two or three years to get the bomb once it decides based on its current capability.

According to Western experts an attack on Iran during the winters this year is almost ruled out because the thick clouds would obstruct the Israel Air Force's performance.


Netanyahu did not rule out the possibility of the need for a military action against the Islamic Republic this week, warning of its increased power and influence during a Knesset (Israeli Parliament) address. "One of those regional powers is Iran, which is continuing its efforts to obtain nuclear weapons. A nuclear Iran would constitute a grave threat to the Middle East and the entire world, and of course it is a direct and grave threat on us," he said on Monday.

Barak said Israel should not be intimidated but did not rule out the possibility that Israel would launch a military attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. "I object to intimidation and saying Israel could be destroyed by Iran," the Defence Minister said.

"We're not hiding our thoughts. However there are issues we don't discuss in public... We have to act in every way possible and no options should be taken off the table... I believe diplomatic pressure and sanctions must be brought to bear against Iran," he said.

Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe Ya'alon said he preferred an American military attack on Iran to an Israeli one. "A military move is the last resort," he said.

Israel's Interior Minister, Eli Yishai, has not made up his mind yet on the issue.

In a speech to his party's activists in the north of Israel, Yishai said "this is a complicated time and it's better not to talk about how complicated it is". "This possible action is keeping me awake at night. Imagine we're [attacked] from the north, south and center. They have short-range and long-range missiles - we believe they have about 100,000 rockets and missiles," he said.

Intelligence and Atomic Energy Minister Dan Meridor said he supports an American move against Iran. "It's clear to all that a nuclear Iran is a grave danger and the whole world, led by the US, must make constant efforts to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.

"The Iranians already have more than four tonnes of 3-4 percent enriched uranium and 70 kgs of 20 percent enriched uranium", Meridor said.


"It's clear to us that they are continuing to make missiles. Iran's nuclearisation is not only a threat to Israel but to several other Western states, and the international interest must unite here", he stressed.

Former Defence Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer said he feared a "horror scenario" in which Netanyahu and Barak decide to attack Iran.

Ben-Eliezer warned of a "rash act" and said he hoped "common sense will prevail."


Barak had said yesterday at the Knesset's Finance Committee that the state budget must be increased by NIS 7-8 million a year for five years to fulfill Israel's security needs.

"The situation requires expanding the budget to enable us to act in a responsible way regarding the defence budget considering the challenges, as well as fulfill some of the demands coming from the Trajtenberg committee," he said.

Israel has dubbed Iran's nuclear programme an existential threat and launched a massive international campaign to foil the Islamic Republic's nuclear ambitions.

Tehran says that its nuclear programme is for peaceful purposes.


Israeli PM for a military strike against Iran: report - Indian Express

 

[W.G.Ewald]

Analysis: What may be involved i... JPost - Iranian Threat - News

 

[W.G.Ewald]

Tehran says that its nuclear programme is for peaceful purposes.

There would be peace in the Middle East after Israel is destroyed, according to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

 

[Yusuf]

I think they have missed the period they could have actually achieved something with a strike. Iran now has multiple sites and also better defenses that i initiated after similar threats over the last few years. I dont think Israel alone can get anything done in this regard.

 

[nrj]

UK speeding up planning for potential US-led Iran attack

[h=1]UK speeding up planning for potential US-led Iran attack[/h]'Guardian' reports UK Ministry of Defense believes US may have intensified plans for targeted missile strikes of Iranian nuclear targets; report comes amid visit of UK military chief to Israel, visit by Barak to London.

The British military is accelerating planning for its part in a potential US-led attack on Iran's nuclear facilities, The Guardian reported on Wednesday, days after the UK's military chief visited Israel.

Defense Minister Ehud Barak is currently in London on a state visit, where he met with senior officials, including British National Security Advisor Sir Peter Ricketts.

The Iranian nuclear threat is believed to be at the top of the agenda of talks between Barak and British officials.

According to the Guardian report, the UK Ministry of Defense believes the US may have intensified plans for targeted missile strikes of Iranian nuclear targets.

The newspaper quoted British officials as saying that the UK would assist the US in such a mission. Britain is reportedly examining locations for mobilizing its Royal Navy ships and submarines to assist a possible American aerial and naval campaign against Iran.

Washington could also ask London for permission to use the British island of Diego Gacria, in the Indian ocean, as a base of operations.

Meanwhile, an army source told The Jerusalem Post that British military chief Sir David Richards visited Israel this week.

Richards was a guest of IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Benny Gantz, the source said.

He arrived as "part of an annual visit" aimed at maintaining international cooperation, the source said. The source did not disclose the content of talks held by Richards and Israeli officials.

The visit was not announced earlier because it is standard practice in Britain to refrain from publicizing such visits while they occur.

The army source confirmed that "no announcement was released" during Richards' arrival.

"The IDF has a system of international cooperation which sees foreign figures visit Israel," the source added.

'UK speeding up planning for pote... JPost - Diplomacy & Politics

 

[Tshering22]

Iran is too huge for IDF jets to detect and strike. Add to that, the new anti-Israel dimension Turkey has after kicking Israeli jets out of Konya Air Base. This means if Israel is to strike, it has to cross:

- Turkey
- Lebanon
- Syria
- Iraq

And then finally once they reach Iranian airspace, deal with Iranian:

- SAMs (strong network of it)
- Air force (not strong enough but has quantitative and home turf advantage).
- Naval AAA.

And knowing Israeli air arsenal, I doubt that they have anything that can sustain such a long journey and then have enough fuel and weapons load to battle so many odds, scout entire Iran for nukes, destroy them and then return.

It is tough especially at this time when Iran is obsessed with Israel so badly.

 

[Falcon]

I found a new way for Israel to attack Iran...

 

[ejazr]

U.S. Jews Should Heed Top Israeli Soldiers Who Oppose Bombing Iran - The Daily Beast

There's nothing American Jews love more than Israeli soldiers, except perhaps, Israeli spies. Go to American synagogues—especially Orthodox synagogues—and you'll find boys wearing green-and-yellow skullcaps bearing the Israel Defense Force's Hebrew acronym. A central element of the Birthright Israel program, which aims to instill a love of Israel and Judaism in young American Jews, is their mifgash, or encounter—often R-rated—with Israeli soldiers. For my Bar Mitzvah, I was given a tome celebrating the exploits of Israel's external and internal spy agencies, the Mossad and Shin Bet. My 6-year-old son recently came back from the library of his Jewish school carrying a volume entitled Keeping Israel Safe: Serving the Israel Defense Forces.

So perhaps American Jews should start noticing that an astonishing number of Israel's top soldiers and spies are warning against bombing Iran. It began last summer, when Meir Dagan, fresh from a highly successful, eight-year stint as head of the Mossad, called attacking Iran "the stupidest thing I have ever heard." He noted that while in office, he had joined with Yuval Diskin, director of the Shin Bet, and Gabi Ashkenazi, chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Fund, to block this "dangerous adventure."

Since then, a throng of current and former security officials have issued similar warnings. In December, Dagan's successor at Mossad, Tamir Pardo, suggested that an Iranian nuclear weapon was not an existential threat. This month, another former Mossad chief, Efraim Halevy, declared that "it is not in the power of Iran to destroy the state of Israel." Former IDF chief of staff Dan Halutz added that "Iran poses a serious threat but not an existential threat" and that bombing would mean "taking upon ourselves a task that is bigger than us." It's remarkable, when you think about it. Almost every week, Israeli security officials say things about Iran's nuclear program that, if Barack Obama said them, would get him labeled anti-Israel by American Jewish activists and the GOP.

The struggle between Israel's civilian and military leaders eerily evokes the struggle inside the Bush administration over war with Iraq. Like Dick Cheney, Benjamin Netanyahu has only one mode: apocalyptic. His idols are Winston Churchill and Revisionist Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky, both men famed for having foreseen the Nazi menace when others looked away. And throughout his career, Netanyahu has plugged virtually every adversary Israel faces into the Hitler role. In 1993, when then–Foreign Minister Shimon Peres brokered the Oslo Accords, Netanyahu compared him with Neville Chamberlain. In his 1993 book, A Place Among the Nations, reissued in 2000 as A Durable Peace, Netanyahu compared the Palestinian effort "to gouge Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] out of Israel" to the Nazi effort to force Czechoslovakia to cede the "Sudeten district." In a CNN interview with Piers Morgan in 2011, Netanyahu analogized negotiating with Hamas to negotiating with Hitler. And in 2006 he told an American Jewish audience that "it's 1938 and Iran is Germany."

The point is not that an Iranian nuclear weapon poses no threat to Israel. An Iranian nuke would shift the regional power balance in Iran and Hizbullah's favor, and potentially trigger a frightening arms race in the Middle East. But shifting power balances and increased threat levels are a far cry from Netanyahu's language of existential destruction, a vocabulary that equates the defenseless European Jews of 1938 with contemporary Israel, a country with dozens, if not hundreds, of nuclear weapons.

Sympathetic observers of Israel may be tempted to conclude that Netanyahu's Holocaust imagery is the natural response of a Jewish leader faced with threats from gangsters like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But that's not true, as evidenced by the insistence of top Israeli security officials that Iran does not represent a Nazi-style existential threat. In truth, Netanyahu's taste for the apocalyptic flows less from his Jewishness than from his conservatism—a conservatism learned during his close association with the Republican right while he served as a diplomat in Washington and New York in the 1980s. His insistence that Israel launch a preventive war on Iran before it gains nuclear capacity echoes right wingers like James Burnham, who urged the U.S. to wage preventive war against the Soviet Union to prevent it from building an atomic bomb in the late 1940s. And it echoes men like Cheney who spread panic about the Soviets in the 1970s and 1980s, about China and North Korea in the 1990s, and about Iraq after 9/11.

Israel today is witnessing the same struggle that Washington witnessed in 2002 and 2003, a struggle between people who think practically and people who think ideologically, between people trying to soberly assess a given adversary and people who can view that adversary only by analogy with the mightiest, most demonic powers the world has ever known. One of the most appalling features of America's invasion of Iraq was how ignorant top policymakers turned out to be about the country they set out to conquer and remake. Netanyahu doesn't seem much better. According to The New York Times, he has been telling visitors that the Iranian people may welcome being bombed by Israel. No wonder Meir Dagan is scared.

We all know how the Iraq debate turned out: Skeptics in the military, State Department, and intelligence agencies were sidelined or cowed. Similarly in Israel, Dagan has had his diplomatic passport revoked, and Netanyahu's allies have pushed legislation to prevent former security officials from speaking to the media.

The most valuable thing American Jewish leaders can do to influence Israel's internal struggle is to stop equating being pro-Israel with being pro-war. American Jews have long basked in the wartime prowess of Israel's soldiers and spies. Perhaps it's time we started admiring their aversion to war as well.