WarSclerotic

At 1 AM Israel time, a non-bi-lined story appeared on Ynet quoting Finance minister Yuval Steinitz:

“In the first such statement by a Cabinet member, Steinitz said: “The US must issue a clear ultimatum to Iran, tell it that if it does not change its behavior within weeks, the military option that has been on the table up until now will become relevant.”Steinitz, who is a close associate of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is familiar with Iran’s nuclear program from his service as the chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.”

That story, not carried elsewhere in the Israeli press has not been picked up by a single news source anywhere in the world close to 12 hours later.

Within an hour of the appearance of that story, another story appeared in the NY Times claiming that the US had convinced Israel that Iran was more than a year away from the ability to construct a nuclear weapon.  This story was picked up and carried by at least 700 news sources according to Google news.

What’s going on here?

It’s pretty clear that the Steinitz statement was some sort of a “trial balloon” sent by Israel to the US.  With the news blackout in place, it is understandable why the Israeli press was unable to pick up the story.  Why has nobody else picked it up?  Is it something that doesn’t merit being reported?  Hardly.  It’s the first time Israel has directly called on the US to issue an ultimatum threatening an attack or at minimum a blockade.

Today, Debka reports that the Iranians had come to the same conclusion that I had regarding the “Galant affair,” namely that it was a PR smokescreen to cover Israel’s failure to respond to the Bushehr activation.

So far, there have been no further reactions from the Israeli government regarding either story.  That “something” is going on behind the scenes is an unavoidable conclusion.  What that “something” is, I have no way of knowing.

Tomorrow’s activation of Bushehr will answer the question of whether Israel will tolerate the Iranian regime “going nuclear.”  What will happen beyond that, given Steinitz’s statement remains to be seen.

JW

This entry was posted on August 20, 2010 at 6:36 PM and is filed under Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.