Think Again: The still lethal obsession.

No matter how many prizes Prof. Robert Wistrich’s massive tome A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad garners, the book still deserves more attention than it has received. Indeed no amount of attention would be sufficient.

Its packed 938 pages of text reflect neither authorial grandiosity nor editorial lassitude. The copious detail amassed is required so that Wistrich’s central arguments not be dismissed as cherry-picked quotes used to exaggerate the seriousness of the phenomena under discussion. Random House, a commercial publisher, did not request him to cut a single sentence.

A Lethal Obsession stands as a refutation of three widespread misconceptions fostered in the West, partly out of ignorance and partly out of fear. The first is that radical Islam is a relatively minor phenomenon in the Muslim world. On his recent visit to India, US President Barack Obama provided a good example of Western ignorance or dissembling. Asked about jihad, he began his reply by insisting that jihad has several meanings in Islamic thought. Wrong. In contemporary Muslim discourse, jihad invariably refers to conquest to establish the domain of Islam.

The president went on to state, “Islam is one of the world’s great religions, which has been distorted in the hands of a few extremists.” As Wistrich makes clear, however, Islamo-fascism, with its death cult and cosmology of civilizational struggle between the forces of righteousness and demonic evil (with the Jews or Israel always at the center), holds millions, from alienated Muslim youth in Europe, across the 57 Muslim states, in thrall.

Nazi race ideology found fertile soil in the Middle East. Hitler was a hero to the founder of Syrian and Iraqi Ba’athism, Michel Aflaq. Haj Amin al-Husseini, the founding father of Palestinian nationalism, recruited Bosnian Muslims for Hitler’s extermination of Balkan Jewry. In wartime broadcasts from Berlin, he extolled Hitler for having fully grasped the nature of the “Jewish peril” and for “having resolved to find a final solution to liberate the world from this danger.” He synthesized Nazism with the teachings of “the prophet” on the perfidy of the Jews in all times and all places – “bloodsuckers of the nations and corrupters of morality, incapable of loyalty or genuine assimilation.”

Sayyid Qutb, theorist of the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas and al-Qaida are but two offshoots, wrote in his Our Struggle with the Jews (an echo of Mein Kampf) of “the liberating struggle of jihad” that can never cease, and threatened any Muslim regime that should contemplate any form of accommodation with Israel. (He was executed by Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser.) For him, as for so many Muslim thinkers after him, the very existence of the State of Israel represented the measure of the Muslim world’s degradation and moral bankruptcy.

Virulent anti-Semitism, Wistrich quotes the dean of Middle East scholars Bernard Lewis, “is an essential part of Arab intellectual life.” The Protocols of the Elders of Zion has been reprinted in countless editions in almost every Muslim country. It climbed to No. 2 on the Turkish best-seller lists in 2005, at a time when Turkey was still a strategic ally of Israel. Egypt, a nation nominally at peace with Israel, recently broadcast a 24-part TV dramatization of The Protocols.

Conspiracy theories about Jews are readily believed throughout the Arab and Muslim world. Jews are the all-purpose explanation for the Islamic world’s weakness and failure vis-à-vis the West, and a metaphor for all the disorienting aspects of modernity and globalization. Iranian-sponsored Holocaust denial is but the most repugnant of those conspiracy theories. In Pakistan, like Iran a Muslim nation with no border or national dispute with Israel, two-thirds of the population did not discredit out of hand the claim that Jews were behind 9/11 and were told in advance not to show up for work that day.

The Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979 – a revolution without borders, according to its leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini – raised the pride and hopes of downtrodden Muslims around the globe. And with the Soviet expulsion from Afghanistan, the fall of the godless Soviet Union and most recently the emergence of a nuclear Iran, a narrative of Islam ascendant and ready to confront the corrupt, Jew-controlled West has inflamed millions of Muslims around the globe. Determination to extirpate the cancer of Israel is the key element allowing Shi’ite Iran to gather the Sunni Muslim street to its banner. Not surprisingly, a 1999 poll by the American University of Beirut of the Arab world found: 87 percent supported Islamic terror attacks on Israel, 70% opposed peace with Israel and 54% advocated a war of annihilation of Israel.

WISTRICH TAKES aim at the idea that Palestinian nationalism has come to see the struggle with Israel as primarily one over borders. Just the opposite: Islamic theological elements play an ever larger role among Palestinians, and not just among followers of Hamas. Yasser Arafat proclaimed in Venezuela in 1980, “We shall not rest until we return to our home, and until we destroy Israel.” He never veered from that goal in front of his own people. Speaking in Arabic in Johannesburg in 1993, after the signing of the Oslo Accords, he assured his audience that Jerusalem is exclusively Muslim, that the only permanent state in present-day Israel would be the state of Palestine, and that the peace process would end in a complete Palestinian takeover.

From the outset of Oslo, as Wistrich documents in copious detail, the PA media has been permeated with the most naked religious and racial hatred of Jews. Sermons urging believers to “have no mercy on the Jews, no matter where they are, in any country. Fight them. Whenever you meet them, kill them,” are broadcast live on the PA’s official TV channel. When Jews are discussed in PA textbooks, it is only to recite the same litany of their immutable, negative traits from the days of the prophet to the present. Zionism is only a modern expression of their essential evil. And finally, suicide bombers are endlessly glorified in the official Palestinian media as holy martyrs, with sports tournaments, streets and town squares named in their honor.

Whatever points of ideology divide the PA and Hamas, writes Wistrich, they fully agree that Zionism is a “criminal conspiracy” against the Palestinian people, Israel’s creation was a satanic, imperialist plot and Palestine is an Islamic land, one and indivisible. How, Wistrich wonders, will generations raised on such beliefs make a stable, long-lasting peace with Israel in any borders?

MOST CHILLING is Wistrich’s lengthy unraveling of the theology of the Iranian revolution. From early in his career, Khomeini applied to Israel Hitler’s description of Jews as “cancer” that must be exterminated. He was obsessed with conspiracies of the “shrewd” Jews for world dominion.

And every Iranian leader since 1979 has followed suit. Former president Mohamad Khatami, the “liberal” reformer, spoke of Israel as “an old wound in the body of Islam that cannot be healed.” And President Mahmoud Ahamadinejad’s “moderate” rival, former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, mused in a public sermon at Teheran University that “one atomic bomb would wipe out Israel.” Long-range missiles are paraded in Teheran bedecked in signs proclaiming, “Israel must be wiped off the face of the earth.”

Ahmadinejad and his sponsor, Supreme Leader Ali Khamanei, combine the desire to wipe out Israel with an apocalyptic eschatology. Ahmadinejad’s spiritual mentor Ayatollah Mohammad Mezbah- Yazdi taught that human agency can speed the return of the hidden imam or mahdi, the Shi’ite messiah, through sufficiently cataclysmic events. The final jihad, in Yazdi’s teaching, is that against the “Great Satan” and his smaller brother. Ominously, Ahmadinejad refers frequently, even in public, to communications he receives from the mahdi.

The millions of Iranians who would die in the conflagration are no concern. In one of his first TV addresses after his first election, Ahmadinejad praised suicide bombers: “Is there an art more beautiful, more divine, more eternal than the art of the martyr’s death?” he asked. Ahmadinejad served as a volunteer in the Iraq-Iran War in the Basij Mostazafan. The Basij sent young children marching to their deaths clearing Iraqi minefields with their exploding bodies.

To ignore Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric today, Wistrich comments, is tantamount to ignoring Hitler’s threats against world Jewry prior to the Holocaust. Perhaps worse, since Ahmadinejad’s pursuit of eschatological conflagration, not subject to rational calculations of the balance of forces, will soon be linked to the power to release nuclear weapons at the push of a button.

Is hope that sanctions will do the trick adequate in face of the magnitude of the danger?

Column One: Rocking Obama’s world.

By CAROLINE B. GLICK
11/26/2010 15:18

Given the threats Obama’s radical policies are provoking, it can only be hoped that the Republicans will rein him in.

Crises are exploding throughout the world.

And the leader of the free world is making things worse.

On the Korean peninsula, North Korea just upended eight years of State Department obfuscation by showing a team of US nuclear scientists its collection of thousands of state-of-the-art centrifuges installed in its Yongbyon nuclear reactor.

And just to top off the show, as Stephen Bosworth, US President Barack Obama’s point man on North Korea, was busily arguing that this revelation is not a crisis, the North fired an unprovoked artillery barrage at South Korea, demonstrating that actually, it is a crisis.

But the Obama administration remains unmoved. On Tuesday Defense Secretary Robert Gates thanked his South Korean counterpart, Kim Tae-young, for showing “restraint.”

On Thursday, Kim resigned in disgrace for that restraint.

The US has spoken strongly of not allowing North Korea’s aggression to go unanswered. But in practice, its only answer is to try to tempt North Korea back to feckless multilateral disarmament talks that will go nowhere because China supports North Korean armament. Contrary to what Obama and his advisers claim, China does not share the US’s interest in denuclearizing North Korea. Consequently, Beijing will not lift a finger to achieve that goal.

Then there is Iran. The now inarguable fact that Pyongyang is developing nuclear weapons with enriched uranium makes it all but certain that the hyperactive proliferators in Pyongyang are involved in Iran’s uranium-based nuclear weapons program. Obviously the North Koreans don’t care that the UN Security Council placed sanctions on Iran. And their presumptive role in Iran’s nuclear weapons program exposes the idiocy of the concept that these sanctions can block Iran’s path to a nuclear arsenal.

Every day as the regimes in Pyongyang and Teheran escalate their aggression and confrontational stances, it becomes more and more clear that the only way to neutralize the threats they pose to international security is to overthrow them. At least in the case of Iran, it is also clear that the prospects for regime change have never been better.

IRAN’S REGIME is in trouble. Since the fraudulent presidential elections 17 months ago the regime has moved ferociously against its domestic foes.

But dissent has only grown. And as popular resentment towards the regime has grown, the likes of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, supreme dictator Ali Khamenei and their Revolutionary Guards have become terrified of their own people. They have imprisoned rappers and outlawed Western music. They have purged their schoolbooks of Persian history. Everything that smacks of anything non-Islamic is viewed as a threat.

Members of the regime are so frightened by the public that this week several members of parliament tried to begin impeachment proceedings against Ahmadinejad. Apparently they hope that ousting him will be sufficient to end the public’s call for revolutionary change.

But Khamenei is standing by his man. And the impeachment proceedings have ended as quickly as they began.

The policy implications of all of this are clear.

The US should destroy Iran’s nuclear installations and help the Iranian people overthrow the regime. But the Obama administration will have none of it.

Earlier this month, Gates said, “If it’s a military solution, as far as I’m concerned, it will bring together a divided nation.”

So in his view, the Iranian people who risk death to defy the regime every day, the Iranian people who revile Ahmadinejad as “the chimpanzee,” and call for Khamenei’s death from their rooftops every evening, will rally around the chimp and the dictator if the US or Israel attacks Iran’s nuclear installations.

Due to this thinking, as far as the Obama administration is concerned the US should stick to its failed sanctions policy and continue its failed attempts to cut a nuclear deal with the mullahs.

As Michael Ledeen noted last week at Pajamas Media, this boilerplate assertion, backed by no evidence whatsoever, is what passes for strategic wisdom in Washington as Iran completes its nuclear project. And this US refusal to understand the policy implications of popular rejection of the regime is what brings State Department wise men and women to the conclusion that the US has no dog in this fight. As State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley told The Wall Street Journal this week, the parliament’s bid to impeach Ahmadinejad was nothing more than the product of “rivalries within the Iranian government.”

THEN THERE is Lebanon. Since Ahmadinejad’s visit last month, it is obvious that Iran is now the ruler of Lebanon and that it exerts its authority over the country through its Hizbullah proxy.

Hizbullah’s open threats to overthrow Prime Minister Saad Hariri’s government if Hizbullah’s role in assassinating his father in 2005 is officially acknowledged just make this tragic reality more undeniable. And yet, the Obama administration continues to deny that Iran controls Lebanon.

A month after Ahmadinejad’s visit, Obama convinced the lame duck Congress to lift its hold on $100 million in US military assistance to the Hizbullah-dominated Lebanese military. And the US convinced Israel to relinquish the northern half of the border town of Ghajar to UN forces despite the fact that the UN forces are at Hizbullah’s mercy.

In the midst of all these crises, Obama has maintained faith with his two central foreign policy goals: forcing Israel to withdraw to the indefensible 1949 armistice lines and scaling back the US nuclear arsenal with an eye towards unilateral disarmament. That is, as the forces of mayhem and war escalate their threats and aggression, Obama’s central goals remain weakening the US’s most powerful regional ally in the Middle East and rendering the US incompetent to deter or defeat rapidly proliferating rogue states that are at war with the US and its allies.

Having said that, the truth is that in advancing these goals, Obama is not out of step with his predecessors. George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton both enacted drastic cuts in the US conventional and nonconventional arsenals. Clinton and George W. Bush adopted appeasement policies towards North Korea. Indeed, Pyongyang owes its nuclear arsenal to both presidents’ desire to be deceived and do nothing.

Moreover, North Korea’s ability to proliferate nuclear weapons to the likes of Iran, Syria and Venezuela owes in large part to then-secretary of state Condoleezza Rice’s insistence that Israel say nothing about North Korea’s nuclear ties to Iran and Syria in the wake of Israel’s destruction of the North Korean-built and Iranian-financed nuclear reactor in Syria in September 2007.

AS FOR Iran, Obama’s attempt to appease the regime is little different from his predecessors’ policies. The Bush administration refused to confront the fact that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are to a large degree Iranian proxy wars.

The Bush administration refused to acknowledge that Syria and Hizbullah are run by Teheran and that the 2006 war against Israel was nothing more than an expansion of the proxy wars Iran is running in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Obama’s failed “reset” policy towards Russia is also little different from its predecessors’ policies.

Bush did nothing but squawk after Russia invaded US ally Georgia. The Clinton administration set the stage for Vladimir Putin’s KGB state by squandering the US’s massive influence over post-Soviet Russia and allowing Boris Yeltsin and his cronies to transform the country into an impoverished kleptocracy.

Finally, Obama’s obsession with Israeli land giveaways to the PLO was shared by Clinton and by the younger Bush, particularly after 2006.

Rice – who compared Israel to the Jim Crow South – was arguably as hostile towards Israel as Obama.

So is Obama really worse than everyone else or is he just the latest in a line of US presidents who have no idea how to run an effective foreign policy? The short answer is that he is far worse than his predecessors.

A US president’s maneuver room in foreign affairs is always very small. The foreign policy establishment in the Washington is entrenched and uniformly opposed to bending to the will of elected leaders. The elites in the State Department and the CIA and their cronies in academia and policy circles in Washington are also consistently unmoved by reality, which as a rule exposes their policies as ruinous.

The president has two ways to shift the ship of state. First, he can use his bully pulpit. Second, he can appoint people to key positions in the foreign policy bureaucracy.

Since entering office, Obama has used both these powers to ill effect. He has traveled across the world condemning and apologizing for US world leadership. In so doing he has convinced ally and adversary alike that he is not a credible leader; that no one can depend on US security guarantees during his watch; and that it is possible to attack the US, its allies and interests with impunity.

Obama’s call for a nuclear-free world combined with his aggressive stance towards Israel’s purported nuclear arsenal, his bid to disarm the US nuclear arsenal, and his ineffective response to North Korea’s nuclear brinksmanship and Iran’s nuclear project have served to convince nations from the Persian Gulf to South America to the Pacific Rim that they should begin developing nuclear weapons. By calling for nuclear disarmament, he has provoked the greatest wave of nuclear armament in history.

GIVEN HIS own convictions, it is no surprise that all his key foreign policy appointments share his dangerous views. The State Department’s Legal Adviser Harold Koh believes the US should subordinate its laws to an abstract and largely unfounded notion of international law. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy believes terrorists become radicalized because they are poor. She is advised by leftist extremist Rosa Brooks. Attorney-General Eric Holder has decided to open criminal investigations against CIA operatives who interrogated terrorists and to try illegal enemy combatants in civilian courts.

In all these cases and countless others, Obama’s senior appointees are implementing policies that are even more radical and dangerous than the radical and dangerous policies of the Washington policy establishment. Not only are they weakening the US and its allies, they are demoralizing public servants who are dedicated to defending their country by signaling clearly that the Obama administration will leave them high and dry in a crisis.

When a Republican occupies the White House, his foreign policies are routinely criticized and constrained by the liberal media. Radical Democratic presidents like Woodrow Wilson have seen their foreign policies reined in by Republican Congresses.

Given the threats Obama’s radical policies are provoking, it can only be hoped that through hearings and other means, the Republicans in the Senate and the House of Representatives will take an active role in curbing his policies. If they are successful, the American people and the international community will owe them a debt of gratitude.

Editor’s Notes: Running out of time.

By DAVID HOROVITZ
11/26/2010 15:18

Sanctions on Iran are starting to bite, but not hard enough yet to force the regime to rethink its nuclear drive. Where does that leave Israel?

In July 2007, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ordered the dissolution of the Management and Planning Organization of Iran, a 60-year-old, largely independent government body that had been responsible for much of the country’s economic oversight.

The MPO used to prepare the national budget, draw up longterm development plans and oversee their implementation.

It worked on a province-byprovince basis and was, according to expert accounts, a highly competent system of national economic management.

Ahmadinejad tore it down the better to directly control his country’s economy. He set up his own budgetary planning body and centralized additional economic powers under his authority.

The result has been dismal – Neanderthal management, as it was summed up to me by one of several experts with whom I’ve spoken in recent days.

While Ahmadinejad is still emphatically secondary to Iran’s supreme spiritual leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in terms of overall power, he is undoubtedly a key economic player, and his policies are lousy.

His insistence on maintaining an overvalued rial, apparently for reasons of national prestige, is harming exports.

His low interest rate policies have caused heavy damage to the nation’s banking system.

Unemployment is officially hovering in the 13 percent range and inflation at about 10%, though unofficial estimates suggest the true figures in both cases may be twice as bad. Unsustainably high subsidies mean, for instance, that Iran is among the cheapest places on earth to fill up your car with gas – just five or six dollars a tank. And because those levels of subsidy simply cannot be maintained, the president is replacing them with cash handouts, which in turn are proving ever-more expensive and hard to sustain.

All this is unfolding in a climate of intensifying, though far from hermetic, international sanctions. No Western oil companies are active in Iran, there is inadequate technical assistance to maintain extraction, and oil and gas production are down. Financial sanctions have sent the cost of doing business soaring, and exports are being hit.

What is striking about Ahmadinejad’s economic leadership, according to the various experts with whom I’ve spoken, is that he is not strategically confronting those sanctions, not managing the resources at his disposal to most effectively minimize their impact.

US Defense Secretary Robert Gates made headlines 10 days ago when, in a direct riposte to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s demands for a “credible threat of military action” to back up the sanctions effort, he argued that military strikes could only offer a “short-term solution” that would merely render Iran’s nuclear drive “deeper and more covert.”

Less noticed here was Gates’s assessment that the sanctions have “bitten much harder” than the Iranian leadership had anticipated and his striking revelation that “We even have some evidence that Khamenei now is beginning to wonder if Ahmadinejad is lying to him about the impact of the sanctions on the economy, and whether he is getting the straight scoop in terms of how much trouble the economy really is in.”

The experts I’ve spoken to all agree that the sanctions are indeed starting to hurt. Recent measures are said to have significantly affected the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the all-powerful military conglomerate which, via its various tentacles, reportedly controls as much as a third of the Iranian economy. As well as overseeing the nuclear program, missile defense and national security, the IRGC is also responsible for building the oil industry’s infrastructure, for mining activities vital to the nuclear program, telecommunications, even farming, employing a vast work force.

And its room for economic and commercial maneuver is said to be increasingly constrained.

Israel is understood to have been impressed by the extent of EU sanctions enforcement.

Russia’s decision not to go through with the sale of S-300 missile defense systems is also recognized as a significant shift.

When a regime that uses cash to grease the wheels and stay in power is facing dwindling financial reserves and is presiding over an inefficient, mismanaged economy, the consequences are clear. It has to rely increasingly on coercion. And it is losing popularity.

As yet, however, the international squeeze is far from universal and the sanctions are not devastating.

There is concern at China’s capacity to fill any vacuum and meet any need created by other countries’ suspension of commercial partnerships. There is dismay that India is still providing a highly significant proportion of Iran’s refined oil requirements.

And there is widespread agreement, uniting Israel and the other key international players pushing the sanctions effort, that for all the economic distress, there is absolutely no sign at present of Iran changing course.

To the central question, Will Iran abandon its nuclear weapons drive as a result of sanctions?, the answer for now is an emphatic no. To the subordinate question, Will Iran slow or suspend its nuclear weapons drive as a result of sanctions?, the answer for now is sadly no as well.

As Netanyahu told the Jewish Federations’ General Assembly in New Orleans, “We have yet to see any signs that the tyrants of Teheran are reconsidering their pursuit of nuclear weapons.”

IT GETS worse.

Fiendish computer viruses might be wreaking all kinds of havoc within the Iranian nuclear program. Centrifuge operations might be stalling intermittently. Bizarre accidents might continue to occur.

Nevertheless, should the Iranians choose to do so, the experts believe that, within six months, they could “break out” and become a member of the nuclear club. That is not to say that, within six months, they could definitely weaponize – fashion a nuclear warhead and fit it to an effective delivery system.

Rather, they could enrich their stocks of low-enriched uranium to create a nuclear device and test it – a test that would be immediately picked up by international monitors and hailed by Iran as proof that it had now gone beyond the point of no return.

Will Iran choose to do so? Nobody claims to have a definitive answer to that question.

But there is widespread dismay at Iran’s apparent sense of emboldenment, and I encountered no little criticism of the role of the United States – under both president George W. Bush and President Barack Obama – in encouraging that Iranian confidence.

Time and again, I was told that the Iranian regime is pragmatic. That it is not suicidal.

That among the prime motivations for its nuclear quest is the desire to ensure that it will not be vulnerable to what happened in Iraq – to its speedy demise at the hands of outside interventionist forces. That when it truly feared the US was heading its way, between 2003 and 2005, it froze its nuclear program.

But Iran has watched trifling North Korea – throwing its weight around again this week – ignore warnings of international hellfire and expose the US as a paper tiger. And it delighted in the fact that Obama recognized Ahmadinejad’s election victory 17 months ago, essentially legitimizing a regime that the US hadn’t recognized for the previous three decades, and doing so precisely when the Iranian people were staging their most determined effort to date to break free of it.

The bottom line: Two years ago, the Iranians were wondering whether the US and/or Israel might seek to intervene militarily to stop them. Now, they believe that the US is out of the equation.

Israel thinks so too. The view here is that opposition in the US to a military strike at Iran extends far beyond the Democratic administration and deep into Republican ranks as well. The US doesn’t want to attack, I was told, and that includes much of the political Right. Gates’s thinking – that military intervention would only unify the Iranian people behind their currently unpopular government and its nuclear quest, and that it could not cause a long-term collapse of the program – is supplement by the wider regional argument that it will bring Shi’ite and Sunni Muslims closer together in opposition to the West, legitimize Iran’s claims that the West cannot be trusted and must be confronted, and spark much-intensified nuclear weapons programs throughout the Middle East.

The US wants to build deterrence, I was told. The US wants to replicate the conditions of mutual assured destruction that kept America and the Soviet Union just the right side of sanity during the Cold War. The trouble is, this is not the Cold War, and the Islamists are not the Communists.

SO WHERE does that leave Israel? The short answer is ambivalent. The slightly longer answer is extraordinarily worried, and ambivalent.

Israel mistrusts the Iranians more than the Americans do, maybe because it understands them better. It still believes in the potential for sanctions to force at least a suspension of the nuclear program if the regime feels its hold on power is disintegrating. But it knows that, as things stand, Iran is closing in on the bomb faster than the sanctions are forcing a rethink.

Israel regards a nuclear Iran, under this regime, as a monumental threat, a catastrophe, a devastating change. An Iran unbound would be an extreme danger to us, to the region, to the world. Iran regards itself as one of the world’s great nations, and certainly as the rightful leader of the Islamic world, and a nuclear capacity would give the regime far greater capacity to advance its ambitions.

With its own oil reserves depleting, it would also be more capable of imposing itself on weaker oil-producing neighbors; its evident interest in muscling-in on Bahrain is a mild harbinger of what might follow.

Netanyahu has placed Israel at the forefront of the international chorus of alarm, in contrast to Ariel Sharon, who preferred to work behind-the-scenes in alerting the international community to the scale of the danger.

Netanyahu has drawn parallels between the ayatollahs and the Nazis, and rightly notes that we did not gather the majority of the Jewish nation to this historic sliver of land after the horrors of the Holocaust only to be rendered vulnerable again, 70 years later, to another regime’s genocidal ambitions.

And yet there are many highly influential voices in Israel that urge a return to the lower profile. Let’s put ourselves in the background again, they say. Don’t lead the global struggle, or we’ll turn ourselves into the first target.

Some of these men of influence claim, like Gates, to detect cracks in the regime, including between Khamenei and Ahmadinejad.

They see the first faint signs that Iranian public thinking on the nuclear issue is becoming more nuanced as the economy sinks. There is still overwhelming support for Iran’s right to nuclear energy, but not necessarily, if this is the economic cost, for its need for nuclear weaponry.

These Israeli voices argue that, since the regime seeks the bomb primarily to ensure its survival rather than primarily to destroy Israel, then – however implausible this sounds – the challenge for the international community, in the upside down world of diplomacy, is to construct a framework in which the regime would feel that by backing down on nukes it would be “enhancing its survivability.”

As things stand, to get into regime’s head, it regards defying international will as giving it more power and leverage, while capitulating to pressure would likely presage more demands, more concessions and ultimately its demise. This echoes the Gates approach: “The only long-term solution to avoiding an Iranian nuclear-weapons capability is for the Iranians to decide it’s not in their interest.”

FOR NOW, the widely (though not universally) held assessment here is that the regime would likely not fire at Israel if it got the bomb, and would not supply a non-state actor either, for fear of bringing the entire international community violently down upon its head. And while the preparation of all necessary potential military measures is deemed essential, Israeli military intervention is not currently regarded as advisable.

The Washington-based Politico website reported on Wednesday, indeed, that “Some Israeli officials say the country’s fingers are off the hair-trigger that would launch a strike on the Iranian nuclear program” and referred to “the apparent willingness of the Israelis to postpone a demand for confrontation by months – at least.”

Echoing former US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s somewhat incoherent talk of things we know, things we don’t know, things we know we don’t know, and things we don’t know we don’t know, Israel thinks it doesn’t know where a not-insignificant proportion of the Iranian nuclear program is located. And Israel worries that there are other facilities that it doesn’t know it doesn’t know about.

In a best-case scenario, if Israel destroyed the majority of the Iranian nuclear program – the part it knows it knows about – Iran has the expertise and the capacity to rebuild, and would be back where it is today in three to five years.

Politico quoted Yossi Kuperwasser, the deputy director-general of Moshe Ya’alon’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, to underline the contention that Israeli fingers are off the hair-trigger for now: “Everybody understands that you have to give some time for the sanctions to bear their full fruit.”

Indeed Ya’alon himself, along with fellow septet ministers Dan Meridor and Ehud Barak, not to mention Netanyahu, have all publicly indicated that they support giving sanctions more time, while The Jerusalem Post reported last month that Avigdor Lieberman’s Foreign Ministry is even preparing policy options for the “day after” Iran passes the nuclear threshold, in a “first admission that the government is giving serious thought to adjusting to a reality where Israel is no longer, according to foreign sources, the sole nuclear power in the region.”

For his part, the current chief of staff, Lt.- Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, it is believed, cautions against military intervention as things stand.

Whatever their thinking, it is a safe bet that the entire Israeli leadership would be mightily relieved if they were spared the fateful decision. If, that is, the sanctions regime were ratcheted up further and more widely imposed, if the Iranian economy nosedived further, and if the Iranian regime – or a desperate Iranian public – concluded that the country was being devastated by its pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Iran: Bushehr nuclear power plant has been fueled up – Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News.

• Published 15:22 27.11.10
• Latest update 15:22 27.11.10

Iran: Bushehr nuclear power plant has been fueled up

‘We hope the Bushehr power plant will be connected to the country’s national power grid within the next one or two months,’ says Iranian vice president.

By The Associated Press Tags: Israel news Iran Iran nuclear Bushehr Iran sanctions

Iran’s nuclear chief said Saturday the country’s first nuclear power plant has been loaded up with fuel required for it to go on line, an incremental step bringing Iran closer to nuclear-generated electricity.

	A reactor at the Bushehr nuclear power plant in Iran on August 21, 2010.
	Photo by: AP

Vice President Ali Akbar Salehi said it will take another month or two before the 1,000-megawatt light-water reactor at Bushehr begins pumping electricity to Iranian cities.

Bushehr is not part of Iran’s nuclear program that is a serious concern to the West, which suspects Tehran of trying to produce an atomic bomb. Iran has been slapped with four rounds of UN sanctions because of its refusal to halt uranium enrichment, a potential pathway to weapons making that is the source of the contention with the West.

Iran denies the charges, saying its nuclear program is geared toward generating electricity and nuclear medical radioisotopes needed to treat patients.

“We sealed the lid of the reactor without any propaganda and fuss,” Salehi was quoted as saying by the Fars semi-official news agency. “All fuel assemblies have been loaded into the core of the reactor.”

The fueling up started in August. Now that it’s completed, Salehi said all that remains to be done is to wait for the water inside the reactor’s core to gradually reach a desired temperature, after which a series of tests need to be carried out.

“We hope the Bushehr power plant will be connected to the country’s national power grid within the next one or two months,” Salehi added.

Iran began loading the Russian-built Bushehr with low-enriched uranium fuel in August. At the time, Salehi said the fueling up would take place over two weeks and that the plant could produce electricity by late November.

However, last month he announced a delay in Bushehr’s start up, saying it was the result of a small leak in a storage pool where the plant’s fuel was being held – and not a computer worm that was found on the laptops of several plant employees.

Iranian officials say they have vigorously battled the Stuxnet computer worm, which they suspect is part of a covert plot by the West to damage Iran’s nuclear program.

Salehi again insisted this week that the computer worm has not affected Iran’s nuclear program.

FoxNews.com – Mystery Surrounds Cyber Missile That Crippled Iran’s Nuclear Weapons Ambitions.

U.S. military: Engagement on Iran must be realistic – Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News.

U.S. Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff Mullen prefers dialogue with Iran, believing that a military strike would only delay, not halt, its nuclear plans.

By Reuters

The United States needs to be realistic about its efforts to engage Iran, whose leaders are lying about Tehran’s nuclear program and are on a path to building nuclear weapons, the top U.S. military officer said.

Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in comments released on Friday that the U.S. military has been thinking about military options on Iran “for a significant period of time” but added that diplomacy remained the focus of U.S. efforts.

	U.S. Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen.
	Photo by: AP

“I still think it’s important we focus on the dialogue, we focus on the engagement, but also do it in a realistic way that looks at whether Iran is actually going to tell the truth, actually engage and actually do anything,” Mullen said in an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria due to air on Sunday.

Iran has agreed to meet with a representative of the six big powers over its uranium enrichment drive, but diplomats and analysts see little chance of a breakthrough in the long-running dispute.

Still, U.S. officials, including Mullen, have warned that a military strike will only delay, not halt, Iran’s nuclear program and say convincing Tehran to abandon its nuclear program is the only viable long-term solution.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates went further last week, warning a strike would also unite the divided country and saying sanctions were biting harder than expected.

The West believes that Iran aims to use its uranium enrichment program to build atomic weapons, which Iran denies. Both Israel and the United States have said all options remain on the table to deal with its nuclear ambitions, a position Mullen reaffirmed to CNN.

Asked whether he believed Tehran’s vows that its nuclear program was for peaceful purposes, Mullen said: “I don’t believe it for a second.”

“In fact, the information and intelligence that I’ve seen speak very specifically to the contrary,” he said.

“Iran is still very much on a path to be able to develop nuclear weapons, including weaponizing them, putting them on a missile and being able to use them.”