WarSclerotic

Iran offers to protect Lebanon and Hezbollah defense needs – Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News.

Iran is prepared to cover the defense needs of both Lebanon and the anti-Israel Hezbollah movement, the ISNA news agency reported on Sunday.

“Iran has constantly said that it would be beside the Lebanese army and resistance [Hezbollah] and ready to cover the country’s defense needs,” Iran’s Defense Minister Ahmad Vahidi said at a military fair in Tehran also attended by visiting Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri, according to ISNA.

	Saad Hariri in Tehran on first official state visit, Nov 27, 2010.
	Photo by: AP

Hariri welcomed the Iranian offer and called for a closer cooperation between the two countries’ defence ministries, ISNA said.

Hariri arrived in Tehran on Saturday and is scheduled to meet with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad later Sunday.

As a symbol of Iran’s solidarity with Lebanon, Vahidi presented Hariri an Iran-made machine-gun.

In a meeting earlier Sunday with Vice-President Mohammad Reza Rahimi, the two sides urged a deepening of relations in all fields.

But Hariri’s visit has been overshadowed by Iran’s support for Hezbollah, which leads the opposition against his Western-backed government.

The rift between the two factions has widened after reports that the United Nations-backed tribunal investigating the 2005 assassination of Hariri’s father, former premier Rafik Hariri, was ready to indict Hezbollah members for the murder.

Iranian media quoted Hariri as saying Sunday that he was the leader of the “unity government” and hence represented all political parties and groups in Lebanon.

Kidnapped Iranian: We’re making nukes – Israel News, Ynetnews.

‘Nuclear program expert’ kidnapped by separatist Sunni organization reveals in video: ‘There was workshop on nuclear enrichment for weapons production; 50 people worked around the clock away from security personnel’s eyes’

Roee Nahmias

An employee of the nuclear plant near Isfahan, who was kidnapped by a separatist group in Iran, has revealed the true goals of the Iranian nuclear program – developing nuclear weapons.

A videotape showing the man, Amir Hoseyn Shirani, sharing information about his work was aired Saturday night on the al-Arabiya network.

Shirani was kidnapped a month and a half ago by the Jundullah Sunni Separatist group and has most likely been held in the Baluchistan region. In the tape, Shirani shares details of his role at the nuclear reactor and his participation in a classified workshop where they enriched uranium for the creation of nuclear weapons. Al Arabiya defined Shirani as “an expert on the Iranian nuclear program”. On the tape Shirani admits that he has worked at the secret reactor south-east of the city of Isfahan in Iran for three years. He said that he was hired to work at the facility by one of his relatives, Ahmed Sultani, who was the general manager of the reactor. On tape Shirani says, “During my time at the facility, I understood that there is a workshop working on enriching uranium for the production of nuclear weapons. The workshop was held far from the eyes of security personnel.” He continued to reveal that the same ‘workshop’ held secret meetings, most of which he was present at thanks to his connection to the general manager of the reactor. Shirani described intensive activity at the reactor: “The workshop was held on three separate occasions, each time it was held, 50 people worked continuously around the clock” he noted. While on camera he also provided the names of senior engineers at the reactor. Shirani also spoke of the atmosphere at the secret facility: “those who were part of the project expressed their determination to obtain nuclear weapons. They explained that it must be done because the enemies of Iran – the US and Israel – have nuclear weapons.” He also said that workshop participants used to say that “the neighboring country, Pakistan, has nuclear weapons and so we must also get such weapons. It is inconceivable that we should be inferior to Pakistan.”

The Jundullah organization who took responsibility for Shirani’s kidnapping, operates mainly in the south-east of Iran where it is conducting a stubborn battle against the rule of the Ayatollahs. Jundullah (Soldiers of Allah in Persian) recently claimed that its people were responsible for the July terror attack in which 22 members of the Revolutionary Guards were killed.

As Iran watches Korea.

The North Korean attack last week on South Korea’s Yeonpyeong Island included elements all too familiar to Israelis. But the horrified global reaction was of a very different order.

On the face of it, what happened between the Koreas greatly resembled what we here have experienced almost routinely at times – out-of-the-blue, unprovoked shelling of civilians by apparently inscrutable and fanatical enemy forces.

Israelis – North and South – have found themselves targeted by rockets, mortars and sniper fire so frequently that we’ve learned to take such incidents almost in our stride. So has the rest of the world. Often Kassams, Grads and other assorted projectiles lobbed into Israel from Gaza and Lebanon fail to get so much as a mention in foreign news outlets.

The Korean confrontation, however, appeared to shake the world, to the extent of triggering a downward slide in leading stock markets. Governments outdid each other in censuring Pyongyang’s aggression. In our case, the widespread reaction is to generally downplay Arab aggression, fault the victim (Israel) and warn Israel not to retaliate.

This double standard is particularly unfortunate given the similarities of the two situations. Both South Korea and Israel face implacable enemies with tyrannical regimes, ostensibly impervious to Western reasoning and not readily predictable. In both instances the danger of nuclear weapons looms large.

JUST BEFORE last week’s onslaught, North Korea showed off 2,000 uranium-enrichment centrifuges and the initial construction of a 100-megawatt light-water reactor to visiting American scientists. Concomitantly, Israel is menaced by Iranian efforts to amass nuclear prowess.

Indeed, North Korea reportedly exports nuclear knowhow and ballistic missile technology to both Iran and Syria. The Syrian reactor destroyed by Israel in 2007 was constructed according to North Korean blueprints.

Pyongyang’s finger stirs many a Mideastern plot.

Both North Korea and its Mideastern associates are testing the limits of world tolerance, attempting to gauge how far they can go with impunity. It’s no stretch to suggest that Teheran and Damascus carefully monitor every nuance of Washington’s response to Pyongyang’s actions.

They must have derived satisfaction following Pyongyang’s boasting about its expanded nuclear program, when US special envoy for North Korea Stephen Bosworth declared that “This is not a crisis.”

It needs be remembered that despite heavy sanctions, the number and scale of North Korean provocations has only increased of late. North Korea tests nuclear devices and ballistic missiles, and last March one of its submarines sank a South Korean naval vessel.

North Korea is Iran’s role model for bamboozling the US and getting away with it. Yet Washington, merely sending an aircraft carrier into the area, looks set to let Kim Jong Il continue to get away with quite a bit, as long as he doesn’t overly embarrass it with barefaced gamechanging.

The Obama administration has ways of underscoring unmistakably vigorous messages both to Pyongyang and to Teheran. A feeble American reply in East Asia would dangerously embolden West Asia’s ayatollahs.

If Kim can thumb his nose at Obama, so can Ahmadinejad. And Ahmadinejad is watching attentively.

In fact, most analysts agree that, for all his bravado, Kim is less likely to cross the Rubicon and instigate war than are rogue Islamic regimes vowing to erase Israel off the map. Nuclear weapons in Iranian hands would make this an exceedingly more insecure world than do such weapons in North Korean possession.

This is America’s foremost challenge – even if, disconcertingly, it sometimes sounds as though the greatest danger to world peace stems from apartment construction in some east Jerusalem Jewish neighborhoods.

FOR ISRAEL, South Korea is the model we must strenuously avoid emulating. South Korea is a blackmailed nation, compelled to take it on the chin from its northern sister lest it inflame a dreadful – perhaps nuclear – confrontation.

Israel cannot afford a nuclear Iran, which would change the regional balance of power at a stroke, embolden Teheran to pursue its expansionist ambitions and impose South Korean-style constraints upon our self-defense. We can tolerate constraints immeasurably less than Seoul, whose population isn’t threatened with outright physical annihilation.

Winning the face-off against Iran requires intensified US-led international sanctions, backed by a credible threat of military action; the more credible that threat, the less likely it would have to be realized. Similar US-led resolution in the case of North Korea would send an important signal to Iran.