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Polls:Wide Support for an Attack on Iran « Liveshots.

July 16, 2010 – 11:13 AM | by: Yonat Friling

Israel re-arms ready for war with Iran – Channel 4 News.

Israel could now stage wide-ranging attacks on Iranian targets, a blunt new reports warns. Writing for Channel 4 News, Professor Paul Rogers argues more attention must be paid to Iran amid risks of yet another war in the region.

Israel has successfully re-armed its air force with long-range F-151 and F-161 strike aircraft, supported by an upgraded fleet of tanker aircraft.

It also has a large fleet of unmanned drones, some of them long-range and able to carry bombs and missiles, and is very likely to be in a position to use facilities in Kurdish Iraq and Azerbaijan, both bordering Iran.

In short, Israel could now stage wide-ranging attacks on Iranian targets.

These are the findings of an Oxford Research Group (ORG) report, Military Action Against Iran: Impact and Effects, that analyses the risks and consequences of an Israeli military attack on Iran’s nuclear and missile programmes.

An Israeli military strike on Iran
The analysis points to Israel’s need to do serious damage not just to the bases and nuclear plants in Iran but to all the support facilities, including factories, research centres and even university departments training scientists and engineers.

The attacks would be so wide-ranging they would be seen as something much more than isolated action against remotely located sites.  Iranians would see them as an assault on the country as a whole, and even the unpopular regime of President Ahmadinejad would get strong support.

Such military action would be deeply counter-productive, according to the report, which says one of the first actions Iran would take would be to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, giving the legally required 90-day notice, and would then proceed to put intense efforts into developing a nuclear deterrent and a more substantial force of medium-range missiles.

Iranian military planners have almost certainly anticipated Israeli action and will have already put in place a capability to respond, probably by speeding up the construction of deep underground facilities.

Reconstituting a nuclear/missile programme would almost certainly lead to further Israeli attacks, to which Iran could respond with a wide range of regional actions including interference with world oil supplies.
Israeli military action against Iran “would lead to a sustained conflict and regional instability that would be unlikely to prevent the eventual acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran and might even encourage it”, the report concludes.

Radical response
This is a blunt assessment and raises some very difficult issues as to the best way forward, not least because much of the current diplomatic pressure, including the move towards tougher sanctions against Iran, is backed up by an unstated but implied willingness to use force if everything else fails.

The ORG report is not intended to provide answers to this – its function is to warn of the severe risks of military action – but it does point to two approaches:

• One is to redouble efforts to get a diplomatic settlement, a process more likely to achieve results, if prospects for an Israeli/Palestinian peace process are greatly increased, if relations between Iran and western Gulf States improve and if there is the beginning of a prospect of a regional nuclear-free zone.

There was some modest progress on the latter issue at the recent Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference in New York.

• The other is to accept that Iran may eventually acquire a nuclear capability and use that as the start of a process of balanced regional denuclearisation. There should be no pretence that this would be easy, given Israel’s position and the possibility that an Iranian nuclear weapon capability could encourage regional proliferation.

The problem is that both approaches require a radically different attitude to Iran, both in Israel and the United States, than currently seems likely.

In Washington there is a rising chorus in right-wing circles pointing to the need for the US to prepare for robust military action if diplomacy fails.

As for Israel, the Prime Minister, Mr Netanyahu, was blunt in his Fox TV interview at the weekend, describing Iran as “the ultimate terrorist threat” and saying that it was a mistake to think Iran’s nuclear ambitions could be contained.

For now, the Obama administration seems intent on pursuing a diplomatic solution, in spite of Republican pressure to take a hard line, but the climate of opinion in Israel is much more hawkish.

Just at a time when some radical new thinking is required, Israel seems intent on a singularly tough approach, readily considering military action, quite possibly in southern Lebanon as well as Iran.

While much of the concern in the Middle East and South West Asia is with the post-election problems in Iraq and the worsening conflict in Afghanistan, much more attention needs to be paid to Iran, and the thoroughly dangerous consequences of yet another war in the region.

Paul Rogers is Global Security Consultant to Oxford Research Group and Professor of Peace Studies at Bradford University.

United Arab Emirates Outsourcing Its National Security to the Israeli Air Force » First Thoughts | A First Things Blog.

DEBKA.

Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev

The rejoicing in Washington and major European capitals on Monday, July 12 was premature.
True, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev did finally come round to admitting that Iran is close to acquiring a nuclear weapons capacity, as the West alleges. President Barack Obama therefore felt vindicated in banking his Russian policy on Medvedev rather than the Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin after Moscow backed the expanded sanctions resolution passed by the UN Security Council on June 9.
“The friendship and trust between the two will yield many more benefits in the future,” was the word at the White House.
In London, Paris, Berlin and Rome, the feeling was relief that Moscow had finally woken up to the danger of a nuclear-armed Iran and added weight to the leverage for impressing on Tehran the imperative of abandoning its weapons program.
Indeed, they looked forward to Moscow giving the push to Tehran’s demand to co-opt Turkey and Brazil to the nuclear talks the Five Permanent Security Council members plus Germany which are due to resume with Iran early September.
However, DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s Moscow point out, none of them read Medvedev’s comments right through to the end, which is where he buried the sting of a new Russian posture. Far from seconding American policy on Iran, Moscow has crossed over to the other side and now endorses Iran’s right not only to enrich uranium but to actually acquire nuclear weapons.
Moscow sees sanctions as new basis for diplomacy – not a deterrent
Here are some of the quotes overlooked in the media rendition of the Russian president’s key comments Monday, July 12, to Russian ambassadors and diplomats in Moscow:
Urging his audience to move away from “simplistic approaches,” he maintained that the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, of which Iran is a signatory, does not prohibit a nuclear weapons capability – only its dissemination to other nations or parties.
Sanctions, he said, “are not producing the desired results.” Admitting Iran was “not behaving in the best manner,” Medvedev stressed: “We are consistently urging Tehran to show the necessary openness and cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency.”
The main goal of the latest (sanctions) resolution was, he said, “to restart the negotiating process as soon as possible. If diplomacy misses this chance, it will be a collective failure.”
Medvedev’s and Obama’s take on the UN sanctions resolution are clearly miles apart.
Whereas the US president sees them as a stick for persuading Iran to give up its drive for a nuclear bomb, the Russian president regards sanctions as a fulcrum for putting the dialogue on a new basis when it is resumed on September 1.
This basis would be very hard to swallow in the West, because the point Medvedev was really driving home is that is no longer any sense in rehashing the argument over Iran’s right to enrich uranium, because that argument is moot; Iran has established its right as fact and amply demonstrated it can’t be stopped by any means the West can conjure up.
The Russian president also made it clear that he did not regard international charters as prohibiting Tehran from developing and building a nuclear weapon with the enriched uranium it had accumulated.
Nothing left for dialogue but the size of Iran’s arsenal
If this is where Moscow (and not just the tough-minded Putin) stands (with China expected to follow), there will not be much left to discuss in September other than the size of Iran’s nuclear arsenal – hardly a cause for celebration in Washington, London, Paris or Jerusalem.
Senior Russian sources familiar with the new position President Medvedev touched on revealed to DEBKA-Net-Weekly that it stemmed most immediately from the outcome of Obama’s talks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House on July 6.
They referred in particular to the US president’s consent to grant Israel and its nuclear program the special status the US had awarded the nations of the Nuclear Suppliers Group – NSG.
This is a multinational body of 46 countries concerned with reducing nuclear proliferation by controlling the export and re-transfer of materials usable in nuclear weapon development and by improving the safeguards securing existing materials.
In late 2009, Washington extended this status to India, despite its refusal to join the NPT or accept international supervision of its nuclear facilities and arsenal.
Now Israel has been accepted to the NSG.
Our Russian sources say that only after repeatedly evaluating the intelligence data they received on the Obama-Netanyahu talks did President Medvedev revise his attitude towards the prospect of Iran acquiring a nuclear bomb and switched over to positive.
Medvedev wants Iran to have the same special nuclear status US awarded Israel
He is now proposing to award Iran the same special dispensation for its nuclear weapons status in Moscow as Israel has gained in Washington – with one difference: Whereas Israel is backed only by the US, Iran’s special status would have the support of most of the P5-plus-Germany group.
Our Washington sources report that after they were initially welcomed by US officials, the verbatim text of Medvedev’s ground-breaking comments is now under close study by the National Security Council at the White House to dig out their real and implied import.
Moscow pulled further away from the American line with the signing Wednesday, July 14 of a “road map” of accords for long-term energy cooperation by the Russian Energy Minister Sergei Shmatko and Iranian Petroleum Minister Masud Mir-Kazemi.
They established a joint bank to help fund bilateral projects that would “increase cooperation in transit, swaps and marketing of natural gas as well as sales of petroleum products and petrochemicals.”
By this deal, the Russians will enable Iran to bypass or at least allay the effects of the new American embargo on refined oil product imports and Iran’s international banking activities. The new Russian-Iranian joint mechanisms aim at sabotaging the Obama administration’s most radical deterrent to date to keep Tehran from taking its last leap toward a nuclear weapons capacity.

Poll: Most Americans would back Israel attack on Iran – Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News.

56 percent of Americans support an Israeli strike to prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons, according to a poll conducted by a U.S. research firm.

More than half of Americans would support Israel taking military action against Iran, according to a poll released on Wednesday.

The poll was conducted by TIPP, the polling unit of TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence, a U.S. research firm of both syndicated and custom Market Research solutions.

According to the poll, 43 percent of U.S. Democrats approve of Israel taking military action against Iran to prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons, while 40 percent disapprove. However, when Republicans were asked the same question, 74 percent voiced approval while 17 percent disapproved. Among independents, 56 percent approved of military action while 30 percent disapproved.

Overall, 56 percent of Americans approved a military strike, while 30 percent disapproved, according to the poll.

	Israeli Air Force F-15 fighter jets and a refueling tanker.
	Photo by: Reuters

Meanwhile, the NewsMax website reported on Thursday that a separate Pew Research poll showed similar results, with 66 percent of Americans preferring a strike, while 24 percent objected to it. According to the Pew Research poll, which included 22 countries last month, a majority in 16 of the states preferred a military strike over tolerating a nuclear Iran.

Last week, The Washington Post reported that U.S. Senator John McCain said that he did not believe Israel was considering military action against Iran over its contentious nuclear program.

“I don’t believe we are at the point of making that kind of decision, nor is the Israeli government, given the state that Iran is in now as far as the development of their nuclear weapons is concerned,” McCain told reporters after talks with Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi and Defense Minister Ehud Barak.

Military brass contemplating idea of strike against Iran again | ….

For most of the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, the idea of a military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities, while never formally taken off the table, has been dismissed as the worst possible option for halting Iran’s march towards nuclear weapons. Over the last few months, however, that worst possible option has risen to the status of a possible Plan B.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates, for instance, has gone from arguing “Another war in the Middle East is the last thing we need” in 2008 to saying “I don’t think we’re prepared to even talk about containing a nuclear Iran” in an interview with Fox News last month.

According to Joe Klein, writing in Time, U.S. military leaders have come around to considering the possibility of military action after the failure of some very good negotiated deals.

Klein quotes a recently retired U.S. military official with extensive knowledge of the Iranian issue as saying, “I started to rethink this last November. We offered the Iranians a really generous deal, which their negotiators accepted,” referring to an offer to exchange Iran’s 1.2 tons of low-enriched uranium (3.5% pure) for higher-enriched (20%) uranium for medical research and use. “When the leadership shot that down, I began to think, Well, we made the good-faith effort to engage. What do we do now?”

While negotiations and diplomacy remain the preferred course of action, Klein writes, the repeated rejection of negotiated deals by the Iranian leadership has pushed diplomatic and military leaders into a corner. Klein reports that U.S. military planners have moved well along the path towards planning targeted military strikes, even including the Israelis in the planning process as protection against a rogue strike by the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Adding to the sudden resurfacing of a military option: the opinion of Sunni Muslim leaders in neighboring Persian Gulf states. Yousef al-Otaiba said on July 6 that he favors a military strike despite the economic and military damage it would likely cause his country, and Klein reports that Saudi officials have vigorously pressed the case for a strike to visiting American diplomats. Several states in the region, including Jordan and Egypt, have stated that if Iran goes nuclear, they will too, adding to the destabilizing threat posed by Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

For now, at least officially, military action against Iran remains unthinkable for the reasons Gates gave back in 2008: the attack would prompt retaliation against America and its allies, including Israel, from Iran and its proxy Hezbollah and infuriate the Russians and Chinese, who the U.S. has been assiduously cultivating as members of a unified front against a nuclear Iran. It could be, as Klein speculates in his article, that the saber-rattling is merely an effort to get Iran to negotiate in earnest, but the track record so far on such efforts suggests that the Iranian leadership remains unwilling to offer more than window dressing. In which case, the talk of military action might be real, and the world should prepare for the worst-case scenario.

Despite “rift,” U.S., Israel talking Iran attack – War Room – Salon.com.

We keep hearing that the governments of both countries are at odds. But apparently not when it comes to this issue

AP/Pablo Martinez Monsivais

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets with President Barack Obama in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Tuesday, July 6, 2010.

To hear most media tell it before last week’s meeting between Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu, the only relevant question was whether a deep U.S.-Israel “rift” was temporary or permanent.

But the idea of some kind of substantive schism between the two countries has always been a bit comical. As Bloomberg put it in an underappreciated piece last month, “Obama’s Israel Policy Showing No Difference With Clinton-Bush.”

The latest evidence of the non-rift comes in this new Time story in which Joe Klein passes on spin he’s getting from unnamed U.S. and Israeli government sources about the chances of a U.S. attack on Iran supposedly rising (emphasis ours):

Other intelligence sources say that the U.S. Army’s Central Command, which is in charge of organizing military operations in the Middle East, has made some real progress in planning targeted air strikes — aided, in large part, by the vastly improved human-intelligence operations in the region. “There really wasn’t a military option a year ago,” an Israeli military source told me. “But they’ve gotten serious about the planning, and the option is real now.” Israel has been brought into the planning process, I’m told, because U.S. officials are frightened by the possibility that the right-wing Netanyahu government might go rogue and try to whack the Iranians on its own.

Hard to know what to make of this, especially as Klein opts not to let us in on which side is feeding him this information. But high-level military cooperation is a useful reminder that talk of a “rift” between the Obama and Netanyahu is pretty much bunk.

Justin Elliott is a Salon reporter.

Is Russia’s Backing of Iran Sanctions Starting to Fray? – TIME.

For a couple of weeks in June, it seemed like Russia’s stance on Iran was finally coming into line with that of the U.S. President Barack Obama, in one of the biggest achievements so far of his foreign policy, had convinced Russia to support a new round of U.N. sanctions, approved on June 9, meant to stop Iran from building a nuclear bomb. There was a lot of back-patting at the U.N. Security Council, and on June 24, Obama’s political honeymoon with his Russian counterpart, Dmitri Medvedev, reached a high point when the two chowed down at Ray’s Hell Burger outside Washington, D.C., looking friendlier than ever. But this week, with the two presidents back in their respective capitals, Russia is changing its tone on Iran. The Kremlin appears once again to be playing both sides.

On Wednesday, Energy Minister Sergei Shmatko held a meeting in Moscow with Iranian Oil Minister Massoud Mir Kazemi, and afterwards Shmatko announced that Russia was ready to deliver fuel and oil products to Iran. “The sanctions cannot stop us,” he declared. And it is true: the latest round of U.N. sanctions does not forbid fuel sales to Iran, but the unilateral sanctions imposed by the U.S. and Europe do. Russia’s decision therefore still has a touch of defiance and seems aimed at demonstrating its independence from the West on the Iran dilemma. At the press conference, Kazemi made it clear that this effort was working. “Independent countries are truly cooperating with Iran,” he said. 

The following day, Russia took this initiative further by suggesting it might still sell S-300 missile systems to Iran under an existing contract. For years, Iran has been desperate to buy these rockets, which would make its nuclear installations practically invulnerable to attacks from the air. But the U.S. and Israel, who still consider airstrikes a last resort in dealing with Iran’s nuclear program, have pressured Russia not to complete the sale. On June 18, about a week after the U.N. sanctions were adopted, Russia appeared to concede. “Moscow believes that the sanctions resolution clearly forbids the sale of the S-300 system to Iran,” Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Denisov told Russia’s state news agency RIA Novosti that day. Later in June, experts from Russia’s Federal Service for Military and Technical Cooperation also concluded that these weapons could not be sold to Iran under the new U.N. sanctions. The Israelis and the U.S. breathed a sigh of relief.

But on Thursday, Sergei Chemezov, the head of Russia’s state weapons exporter and a long-time friend of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, said the sale had not been frozen. “The final decision on signing or dropping the contract must be made by the President,” Chemezov said at a summit on Russian-German relations in the Russian city of Ekaterinburg.

This puts Medvedev in a very tough spot. Since the summer of 2008, when Obama announced his drive to move beyond Cold War rivalries and reset U.S.-Russian relations, he and his Russian counterpart have developed a personal rapport. Sitting in their shirtsleeves in Ray’s Hell Burger, they seemed the picture of camaraderie, and a few days earlier, Medvedev could hardly contain his glee as he toured Silicon Valley, the symbol of American ingenuity that he has staked his presidency on emulating at home.

But this relationship has always come with demands on Medvedev, with a strong stance against Iran near the top of the list. On this issue in particular, Medvedev has delivered on several occasions. Indeed, at the same summit on Thursday where Chemezov made his surprise comments about selling Iran the S-300s, Medvedev said at a separate press conference that Russia “was not indifferent” to the military components of Iran’s nuclear program. “Iran must find the courage to start full-fledged cooperation with the international community, even if it does not like some of the questions that are posed,” he said, sitting alongside German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who had flown in for the summit.

At the same time, Medvedev realizes that sidelining Iran would come at a serious price, not least of all for Russia’s budget. The S-300 contract is worth around $800 million, and if Russia fails to honor it, Iran has said it would impose a penalty that experts estimate at another $400 million. The Islamic Republic could also refuse to buy any more military products from Russia in the future, leading to an estimated loss of up to $500 million per year, according to an investigative report published on June 30 by the daily newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta. The report also noted that China, Russia’s emerging rival in the arms trade, would be happy to take its place.

On the security front, Moscow also has a lot to lose. Insurgents and advisers from Arab states are regularly caught in the mountains of the North Caucasus, the hub of the Muslim insurgency fighting to turn part of Russia into an Islamic caliphate. No evidence has ever surfaced of Iran financing these insurgents. But if it begins to count Russia as one of its enemies — as it had threatened to do in the lead-up to the June U.N. sanctions vote — experts say that Iran could throw its weight behind jihadis in Russia, just as it does in Israel for terrorist groups like Hezbollah and Hamas. Likewise in Central Asia, a patchwork of predominantly Muslim states, Iran could position itself against Russia as a rival for influence, particularly in Tajikistan, which shares strong cultural and linguistic ties with Iran.

“So if it wants, Iran has many ways of inflicting damage on Russia, of shifting the security landscape in Central Asia and the Caucasus in a way that could destabilize the region,” says Fyodor Lukyanov, political analyst and editor of the journal Russia in Global Affairs. “It has not yet done that, but if there is a radical change in relations with Russia, it can.” Lukyanov says that Russia has already gone as far as it can in alienating Iran to please the U.S, and Obama will need to offer Russia some major rewards if he wants an even tougher stand on the nuclear issue. But with Russia now appearing to backpedal on its support for sanctions, such rewards might be necessary just to get the Kremlin to keep the promises it’s already made.

Palestinians ‘preparing’ for Israeli strike on Iran.

By Aaron Klein
© 2010 WorldNetDaily

JERUSALEM – The Palestinian Authority has told its intelligence and security agencies to study the consequences of an Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities, WND has learned.

The PA directed its intelligence agencies to prepare a study detailing the affect an Israeli strike on Iran would have on so-called Palestinian refugees in Iraq, Lebanon and Syria, according to Palestinian security sources.

The sources said PA agencies also were told to prepare a security contingency plan for dealing with Iranian retaliation against Israel that would include Hamas and other Islamic groups launching attacks against Israel from both the Gaza Strip and PA-patrolled West Bank.

“Among other things, the PA is studying how to get refugees out of Lebanon if Israel retaliates there against Hezbollah,” said one security source.

Israel has long feared that any strike on Iran would result in counter-attacks against the Israeli home front by Iranian proxies, including Hezbollah to the north and Hamas in Gaza toward the south.

Also, there is concern Syria could get involved in any such conflict. Syria is in a military alliance with Iran, although the Obama administration has been trying to woo Syria away from the Iranian axis with little progress.

Syria has advanced missiles and rockets that can blanket every part of Israel, while Hezbollah has rearmed itself with tens of thousands of rockets and missiles since Israel’s 2006 war that targeted Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The news of the PA preparing a response to a possible Israeli strike on Iran came as Hezbollah’s second-in-command, Naim Kassem, claimed in an interview published yesterday that his group has a “large and precise” list of Israeli targets to attack if a war breaks out.

“We now hold a large and precise bank of Israeli targets, and Israel will have to pay the price for any step it takes,” Kassem said to the An-Nahar newspaper, according to Agence-France Presse.

“Hezbollah has worked to develop its readiness to rise to the challenge should it arise, and we can safely say that in the past four years we have prepared ourselves far more than Israel has,” he said.

Kassem denied Hezbollah is seeking a fight.

“That does not mean that war is near,” he said.

An Attack on Iran: Back on the Table – TIME.

In late 2006, George W. Bush met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon and asked if military action against Iran’s nuclear program was feasible. The unanimous answer was no. Air strikes could take out some of Iran’s nuclear facilities, but there was no way to eliminate all of them. Some of the nuclear labs were located in heavily populated areas; others were deep underground. And Iran’s ability to strike back by unconventional means, especially through its Hizballah terrorist network, was formidable. The military option was never officially taken off the table. At least, that’s what U.S. officials always said. But the emphasis was on the implausibility of a military strike. “Another war in the Middle East is the last thing we need,” Secretary of Defense Robert Gates wrote in 2008. It would be “disastrous on a number of levels.” (See pictures of President Bush in the Middle East.)

Gates is sounding more belligerent these days. “I don’t think we’re prepared to even talk about containing a nuclear Iran,” he told Fox News on June 20. “We do not accept the idea of Iran having nuclear weapons.” In fact, Gates was reflecting a new reality in the military and intelligence communities. Diplomacy and economic pressure remain the preferred means to force Iran to negotiate a nuclear deal, but there isn’t much hope that’s going to happen. “Will [sanctions] deter them from their ambitions with regards to nuclear capability?” CIA Director Leon Panetta told ABC News on June 27. “Probably not.” So the military option is very much back on the table.

What has changed? “I started to rethink this last November,” a recently retired U.S. official with extensive knowledge of the issue told me. “We offered the Iranians a really generous deal, which their negotiators accepted,” he went on, referring to the offer to exchange Iran’s 1.2 tons of low-enriched uranium (3.5% pure) for higher-enriched (20%) uranium for medical research and use. “When the leadership shot that down, I began to think, Well, we made the good-faith effort to engage. What do we do now?” (See pictures of terror in Tehran.)

Other intelligence sources say that the U.S. Army’s Central Command, which is in charge of organizing military operations in the Middle East, has made some real progress in planning targeted air strikes — aided, in large part, by the vastly improved human-intelligence operations in the region. “There really wasn’t a military option a year ago,” an Israeli military source told me. “But they’ve gotten serious about the planning, and the option is real now.” Israel has been brought into the planning process, I’m told, because U.S. officials are frightened by the possibility that the right-wing Netanyahu government might go rogue and try to whack the Iranians on its own. (Comment on this story.)

One other factor has brought the military option to a low boil: Iran’s Sunni neighbors really want the U.S. to do it. When United Arab Emirates Ambassador Yousef al-Otaiba said on July 6 that he favored a military strike against Iran despite the economic and military consequences to his country, he was reflecting an increasingly adamant attitude in the region. Senior American officials who travel to the Gulf frequently say the Saudis, in particular, raise the issue with surprising ardor. Everyone from the Turks to the Egyptians to the Jordanians are threatening to go nuclear if Iran does. That is seen as a real problem in the most volatile region in the world: What happens, for example, if Saudi Arabia gets a bomb, and the deathless monarchy there is overthrown by Islamist radicals?

For the moment, the White House remains as skeptical as ever about a military strike. Most senior military leaders also believe Gates got it right the first time — even a targeted attack on Iran would be “disastrous on a number of levels.” It would unify the Iranian people against the latest in a long series of foreign interventions. It would also unify much of the world — including countries like Russia and China that we’ve worked hard to cultivate — against a recowboyfied U.S. There would certainly be an Iranian reaction — in Iraq, in Afghanistan, by Lebanese Hizballah against Israel and by the Hizballah network against the U.S. and Saudi homelands. A catastrophic regional war is not impossible. (See who’s who in Barack Obama’s White House.)

Of course, it is also possible that this low-key saber-rattling is simply a message the U.S. is trying to send the Iranians: it’s time to deal. There have been rumblings from Tehran about resuming negotiations, although the regime has very little credibility right now. The assumption — shared even by some of Iran’s former friends, like the Russians — is that any Iranian offer to talk is really an offer to stall. A specific, plausible Iranian concession may be needed to get the process back on track. But it is also possible that the saber-rattling is not a bluff, that the U.S. really won’t tolerate a nuclear Iran and is prepared to do something awful to stop it.