WarSclerotic

US, Not Israel, Primary Target of Nuclear Iran – Inside Israel – CBN News – Christian News 24-7 – CBN.com.

JERUSALEM, Israel — A fundamentally different worldview accounts for reports the U.S. wants the Israeli media to oppose a preemptive military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, a former Israeli ambassador said. 

The thinking is that Israel’s military planning against Iran jeopardizes interests of many of the nations in the world, including the U.S.  That worldview is preventing many from realizing the U.S. would be a nuclear-armed Iran’s primary target.

Over the past few weeks, Israelis have been subject to a pervasive media blitz against a military strike on Iran. This week, a petition urging pilots to refuse orders for a strike against Iran received wide media coverage.

“The prime minister would totally condemn any effort by all political groups, from the far left to the far right, urging Israeli soldiers to disobey orders,” Mark Regev, the prime minister’s spokesman, told CBN News.

But despite all the rhetoric, former Israeli ambassador to Washington, Yoram Ettinger, says the U.S. is in the crosshairs as much as Israel.

“It’s a seemingly unbridgeable gap in worldviews between the Obama administration and Israel whereby the administration does not realize the U.S. and not Israel is the target for a nuclear Iran,” the former ambassador told CBN News.

Ettinger was commenting on an article in Israel Hayom Wednesday alleging that “senior figures in the U.S. administration have been briefing local media outlets in recent weeks against a preemptive Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities in an attempt to sway Israeli public opinion.”

But Ettinger says Iran’s goals go far beyond eliminating Israel.

“Iran is not developing nuclear capabilities to eliminate Israel as a number one target, but rather to advance its historical vision of controlling the Persian Gulf,” he explained.

“Concern over a preemptive attack would be dwarfed by non-preemption, which would reap regional and global havoc, enable Iran to become nuclear and mean the demise of an American presence in the region.”

A nuclear-armed Iran would cause a “meltdown” in neighboring Gulf States and strengthen ties between Iran and Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Mexico, which would bring the danger right to America’s doorstep.

“It would not only provide a tailwind to Islamic terrorism in general, but also to sleeper cells on the U.S. mainland,” he said. And, it would bolster and intensify nuclear proliferation in the Middle East and beyond.

Still, the pressure from Washington continues. According to the Israel Hayom report, a high-level Israeli security source quoted on the Walla! website called the media leaks “a blatant and extreme attempt to directly influence the debate in Israel.”

The report further stated that remarks by U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta at Tuesday’s press conference in Washington included information from closed-door meetings with Israel, which he said should not have been talked about “so publicly in the media.”

“The attitude of the present U.S. administration is [based on] a faulty assumption that Iran is an Israeli rather than primarily and most importantly an American problem,” Ettinger concluded.

Hezbollah’s Nasrallah threatens to kill ‘thousands of Israelis’ if attacked.

Friday, 17 August 2012

Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said his group could strike a limited number of targets in Israel which if hit would lead to mass casualties. (Reuters)

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Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah warned on Friday that his Lebanese Shiite militia would make lives of Israelis “a living hell” if it is attacked, threatening to kill tens of thousands of Israelis by striking specific targets in Israel with what it described as precision-guided rockets.

“There are targets in occupied Palestine (Israel) which could be targeted by a small number of missiles,” Nasrallah said.

“If we are forced to use them to protect our people and our country, we will not hesitate to do so… and that will turn the lives of hundreds of thousands of Zionists into a living hell,” he said in a speech marking Al-Quds (Jerusalem) Day.

Nasrallah warned of “tens of thousands of deaths, and not just 300 to 500 dead,” adding that Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran and Syria, had fixed its targets.

Israel, the only Middle East country outside the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), has never confirmed or denied having nuclear weapons.

“Hitting these targets with a small number of rockets will turn … the lives of hundreds of thousands of Zionists to real hell, and we can talk about tens of thousands of dead,” said Nasrallah.

Nasrallah was speaking on the occasion of Jerusalem Day, marked each year on the last Friday of Ramadan in accordance with a tradition established by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the late supreme leader of Iran.

In case of any Israeli attack on Iran over its controversial nuclear program, “the response will be enormous,” he warned. Any such action would present the Islamic republic with “the opportunity is has been dreaming of” since it was founded in 1979.

Israel and Lebanon are officially in a state of war, and the Jewish state fought a devastating war with Hezbollah in the summer of 2006.

Last month, Israel accused Iran and Hezbollah of planning attacks in “over 20 countries” in remarks just days after a deadly attack in Bulgaria that killed five Israeli tourists and their local bus driver.

Iran denied the charges but Hezbollah refused to comment.

Hezbollah follows the example of its backer in marking Quds Day, a show of support for the Palestinians over the disputed holy city of Jerusalem.

“I tell the Israelis that you have a number of targets, not a large number … that can be hit with precision rockets … which we have,” Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah said in a broadcast speech.

He said he would not name the targets and did not say whether the rockets were newly acquired weapons.

Nasrallah said his group could strike a limited number of targets in Israel which if hit would lead to mass casualties – a possible reference to Israeli nuclear facilities, though he said he did not spell out what he meant.

Israel’s debate over Iran: To strike or not to strike | The Economist.

Aug 17th 2012, 16:21 by The Economist online | JERUSALEM

 

WITH the weekend in sight, Israelis are congratulating each other: there has not been a war here this week after all. Seven days ago, they were less sanguine.

But the more circumspect among them are keeping their congratulations low-key. They know that next week could be just as tense and worrying. As could the weeks after that. Although economic sanctions are starting to pinch, Iran’s nuclear programme spins on. And despite increasingly strident American admonishments, Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, remains resolutely determined to stop it, by force if necessary.

This weirdest of weeks began with an unequivocal headline in the weekend edition of Israel’s largest-circulation newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth. “Netanyahu and Barak are resolved to attack Iran in the autumn”, it read. Inside the paper, and in Haaretz, the country’s leading left-leaning paper, the defence minister, Ehud Barak, explained in chilling detail why he and Mr Netanyahu were resolved to attack even though the preponderance of opinion in the defence establishment opposes unilateral Israeli action.

Ten days earlier Mr Netanyahu had appeared on prime-time television to remind the nation that, as in every democracy, the final decision on war was the elected government’s to make, and the army’s obediently to carry out. He had not yet decided, he said. But he would not shrink from the decision. The prime minister also held a series of unattributable briefings with key opinion-makers arguing the case for a last-resort Israeli attack.

That was the backdrop to Mr Barak’s public assertions in last’s weekend press that despite all the rational, political, military, strategic arguments which could be marshaled against a unilateral Israeli strike on Iran– Israel might have to strike nevertheless. Basically, Mr Barak contended, Israel could not afford to rely on American commitment to preventing Iran attaining a nuclear bomb: “Ronald Reagan did not want to see a nuclear Pakistan, but Pakistan did go nuclear. Bill Clinton did not want to see a nuclear North Korea, but North Korea went nuclear.”

Moreover, America was far more likely to act, Mr Barak argued, if it felt Israel was on the brink of exercising its own, albeit more modest, option of military action. That option, Mr Barak believes, will soon disappear as Iran comes closer to producing weapon-grade uranium and buries its nuclear facilities deeper under the ground. “If Israel forgoes the chance to act and it becomes clear that it no longer has the power to act, the likelihood of an American action will decrease… We cannot wait to discover one morning that we relied on the Americans but were fooled because the Americans didn’t act in the end…. Israel will do what it has to do.”

Unlike Mr Netanyahu, Mr Barak is not suspected of favouring the Republican contender to the Democratic incumbent in America’s upcoming presidential election. That made his weekend interviews sound all the more credible, and all the more ominous. People naturally set to sweeping out their air-raid shelters and queueing to upgrade their gas masks at civil defence stations.

Israeli defence sources let it be known meanwhile, that recent intelligence material, familiar to the Americans, showed that Iran had advanced much farther and faster in its nuclear programme than America had previously thought. This produced—as was presumably intended—more apocalyptic headlines in the Israeli media, which were duly relayed across the Atlantic.

The atmosphere has been somewhat cooled by a rare and stern public appearance by America’s chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Martin Dempsey, at the Pentagon on August 14th. He dwelt on the huge disparity between his country’s strike capacity and Israel’s. In Jerusalem his message seemed clear: “Don’t do it! If it becomes necessary, we will do it and do it much more effectively”. But the point of contention between the two countries remains unresolved: who decides when it becomes necessary?

Israel’s president, Shimon Peres, says it should be the Americans. He went on television on August 16th to assure Israelis that they can rely on President Obama. In a direct—and constitutionally questionable—interference in policymaking, the 89-year-old president warned against a unilateral Israeli strike. The prime minister’s office lashed back at him: “He has forgotten what his job is”, officials there said.

As the week wound down and the tension eased, the “they’re just bluffing” punditry got into gear again, in Israel and in Washington, DC. Western intelligence sources do not think the Israelis are bluffing, but nor do they think there is much more than a one in five likelihood of a strike this year. Yet unless the Iranians return pretty soon to the negotiating table with a good deal more seriousness than before, those odds could begin to fall quite quickly.

Why Israel shrugs at retaliation after attack on Iran – CSMonitor.com.

The threat of a simultaneous war with Iran’s proxies – Hezbollah, Syria, and Gaza militants – is a key consideration for Israel as it weighs an attack on Iran. But Iran’s allies may not be as keen about going to war for the ayatollahs as Tehran would like, and the Israelis know it.

In this Aug. 7 photo provided by the Syrian official news agency SANA, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, right, meets with Saeed Jalili, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, in Damascus. Op-ed contributors Daniel Nisman and Avi Nave write: Mr. Jalili’s visit ‘was meant to remind the Israelis that Iran’s proxies on Israel’s northern doorstep remain ready and willing to plunge the region into chaos if Israel strikes Iran’s nuclear facilities.’
(SANA/AP/file)

By Daniel Nisman and Avi Nave
posted August 17, 2012 at 10:04 am EDT

Tel Aviv

Last week Iran sent a high-level envoy, Saeed Jalili, on a particularly controversial public-relations tour to Lebanon and Syria, the most explosive corner of the region. After ruffling feathers during a Beirut stopover, Mr. Jalili traveled to Damascus to meet with President Bashar al- Assad, where he declared the ties between Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah to be an “axis of resistance.”

Jalili is an iconic figure, whose position as the head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council also affords him the role of chief negotiator for Iran’s contentious nuclear program. Amidst a deadlock in negotiations and a rehashing of threatening rhetoric, Jalili’s visit was meant to remind the Israelis that Iran’s proxies on Israel’s northern doorstep remain ready and willing to plunge the region into chaos if Israel strikes Iran’s nuclear facilities.

It appears however, that Iran’s allies in the eastern Mediterranean may not be as keen about going to war for the ayatollahs as Tehran would like – and the Israelis know it.

The threat of a simultaneous war with Hezbollah, Syria, and Gaza militants is the primary concern for the Israeli security establishment as it weighs a strike on Iran. Dubbed “the long arm of Iran” at the Israel Defense ForcesI headquarters, Hezbollah in Lebanon is said to possess more than 70,000 missiles that can strike as far south as Israel’s nuclear reactor near the city of Dimona – nearly 140 miles from the Lebanese border.

Combine this arsenal with the more than 10,000 rockets and missiles in the Gaza Strip and with Mr. Assad’s chemical weapons, and the threat to Israel’s home front is the most formidable since the 1973 Yom Kippur War when Egypt and Syria attacked Israel.

And yet, Israeli leaders seem content to shrug off this threat. On two recent occasions, Defense Minister Ehud Barak boldly estimated that Israel would sustain 300 to 500 casualties in a conflict with Iran and its proxies. Such an estimate suggests that Mr. Barak himself does not believe that Israeli cities will bear the full brunt of Iran’s “long arm” as a consequence to a strike.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also dismissed the danger of regional conflict by stating that these threats to the home front are “dwarfed” by a nuclear Iran.

Judging from their statements, Hezbollah leaders aren’t so sure they want to enter into a conflict with Israel at Iran’s behest. In February 2012, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said, “I tell you that the Iranian leadership will not ask Hezbollah to do anything. On that day, we will sit, think and decide what we will do.”

Mr. Nasrallah’s hesitation is understandable. Entering into broad conflict with Israel would result in even greater destruction to Lebanon than in the 2006 Lebanon war. This time, Hezbollah would be unable to replenish its stockpiles or rebuild destroyed villages so easily. Nasrallah’s guarantor in Damascus is on his last legs, while his primary bankrollers in Tehran have already cut funding to the group as a result of sanctions and diversion of resources to Syria.

Further, entering into a conflict with Israel would likely severely damage Nasrallah’s private militia, benefitting his sectarian rivals by stripping him of the only warranty of his political hegemony in Lebanon.

Next door in Syria, Assad faces similar concerns. A conflict with Israel could compromise his military advantage over an increasingly powerful rebel army, including the chemical weapons stockpiles so necessary in securing the protection of Alawite enclaves as the civil war intensifies.

Meanwhile, Iran’s relationship with militant groups in the Gaza Strip has witnessed a dramatic shift in the midst of the Arab Spring. As Mahmoud al-Zahar, a senior leader of Hamas in Gaza, put it in March, “If Israel attacks us, we will respond. If they don’t, we will not get involved in any regional conflict” – though an Iranian report had him directly contradicting that statement and promising to retaliate “with utmost power.”

Regardless of how the Iranian media may present Mr. Zahar, Hamas seems to be returning to its Sunni loyalties, cozying up to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, and away from Iran. Further, the trauma from the 2009 armed conflict with Israel in Gaza, known as Operation Cast Lead, continues to keep rockets off the Hamas launching pad. The sole mission of a  300-strong guerrilla force employed by Hamas is to impede rocket attacks by smaller splinter groups. Such attacks have recently flared.

Despite the weakened state of Iran’s proxies, an Israeli strike on the ayatollah’s nuclear program will not be without consequence. Hezbollah and splinter Gaza militant groups are likely to attack Israel in a display of their solidarity, albeit only in a limited effort. Judging from past flare-ups, these groups understand Israel’s red lines, knowing exactly what ranges and what rates in which to fire their rockets while avoiding drawing the Israel into a confrontation which could compromise their grip on power.

Netanyahu seems willing to go down in history as the prime minister who saved Isrel from a nuclear Iran. And he’s counting on minimal retaliation from Iran’s proxies if Israel strikes first. But as Barbara Tuchman, the World War I historian, once said, “war is the unfolding of miscalculations.”

Daniel Nisman is an intelligence manager at Max Security Solutions, a risk consulting firm based in Tel Aviv. You can follow him on Twitter @dannynis. Avi Nave is a political consultant based in Tel Aviv. A version of this op-ed appeared in Israel Hayom.

It’s business as usual, Israelis say, as they get in line for gas masks | The Times of Israel.

Feverish media speculation about an attack on Iran has penetrated Israelis’ highly developed shell of apathy. But they’re lining up for protective kits without undue stress — like Americans doing the Christmas shopping early

Israeli postal workers distribute gas masks to residents of Jerusalem this week (photo credit: Noam Moskowitz/Flash90)

In a small shopping mall in southern Jerusalem, the effects of a recent flurry of apocalyptic media reports were visible a few steps from the Delta underwear store and a Chinese massage stand: A crush of more than 100 people waiting for a harried postal worker to hand them a brown cardboard box with a gas mask inside.

Authorities have been urging Israelis to pick up gas masks for several months, with little apparent effect; two weeks ago, residents coming to the distribution point at the Hadar Mall did not have to stand on line at all. On Thursday, however, a crowd of Jerusalemites – Arabs, Jews, a few men in black hats, the elderly, parents with young children – clutched yellow number stubs and waited for more than an hour to get the kits that are meant to protect them in case of a chemical or biological attack.

Daniel Hasson, a resident of the nearby neighborhood of Talpiot, carried his small daughter as he waited. The crowd, he said, was partially due to “hype in the media.”

“I’m standing in line to get a gas mask because I have to, but I have nothing against the Iranian or Syrian people,” Hasson said.

“Israelis want to make sure that they have what they need and they don’t want to wait for the last minute, because if things get serious the crowds will be too big,” he said. “It’s like avoiding the rush by getting your Christmas shopping done in August.”

The drip of stories hinting at impending war with Iran has continued for several years but reached an unprecedented pitch in the past week. The new reports appeared to be coming from the highest echelons of the government. A long prime-time report aired Friday night on Channel 2, the country’s most widely watched station, made it seem that an Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities was imminent. A front-page interview the same day in Haaretz with an unidentified senior official who was clearly Ehud Barak, the defense minister, delivered the same message.

Adding to the perceived dangers is the unraveling of Syria, home to a considerable stockpile of chemical weapons and an unknown but clearly growing number of jihadi groups who might be inclined to use them. Taken together, those fears appear to have penetrated Israelis’ highly developed shell of apathy and cynicism and spurred them to action — even if that action has not been to dig graves in parks, as they famously did before the Six Day War, but rather just to drive to an air-conditioned mall and wait on line for kits that most seem to assume they will never use and which won’t particularly help them if they do.

Earlier this week, the official in charge of gas mask distribution told Channel 10 TV that there had been a “100 percent increase” in the number of masks being handed out. A spokesperson for the Israeli military said Thursday that 4.2 million kits had been distributed since 2010, covering 45 percent of Israel’s population. When the project ends 57 percent of Israelis will have kits, the military said.

Building engineers have also reported a sharp spike in requests for bomb shelter inspections.

On Tuesday, a neighbor emailed retired physician Robert Goldstein, 63, to suggest they make sure their apartment building’s bomb shelter was in order. “That sparked my interest,” Goldstein said. Anecdotal evidence indicates that similar conversations – about emergency food stocks, or about finally disposing of the neighbors’ castaway furniture that has cluttered the communal shelter for years – have been taking place with some frequency in homes across the country in the last week or two.

Though he believes there will be no strike against Iran before the US elections in November, Goldstein arrived half an hour before the distribution station opened Thursday to take a number. He joined a crowd that was certainly large and impatient but showed no obvious signs of undue stress.

Israelis crowd a gas mask distribution point at a shopping mall Thursday (photo credit: Times of Israel/Matti Friedman)

“Israelis are very tough and resilient people. The Jewish people has a long history of withstanding whatever the world dishes out,” he said.

Sam Wolff, 26, was pushing his son in a stroller. He arrived after the distribution center opened at 11 a.m., took a number, and discovered there were more than 100 people ahead of him in line.

Coming to a mall to pick up a gas mask because of fears of imminent  war, he suggested, was the kind of thing Israelis were used to doing.

“This is just part of life – nothing’s out of the ordinary,” he said. “It’s just something to deal with, like we deal with everything else.”

Israel Hayom | The nuclear triangle: Israel, the US, and Iran.

Israel Hayom | Eilat mayor: We’re a city living under the threat of rockets.

Israel Hayom | Unilateral action — a test of sovereignty.

Israel Hayom | Will America act against Iran?.

Dore Gold

In the internal debate in Israel over the subject of Iran, it is generally assumed by many that at the end of the day the U.S. will destroy the nuclear infrastructure of Iran when it becomes clear that sanctions and negotiations have failed. But is that a reliable assumption? True, President Barack Obama made clear last March during his address at AIPAC that he would use “all elements of American power to pressure Iran and prevent it from acquiring a nuclear weapon.” However, with the exception of the 2003 Iraq War, which was launched in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the historical precedents indicate that the U.S. has not used military force in the past to stop rogue states from developing nuclear weapons.

Writing in Haaretz on August 8, Israel’s former ambassador to the U.S., Salai Meridor, warns that it cannot be assumed that Washington will act in the Iranian case as well. He correctly noted that in the past, the U.S. in fact condemned the 1981 attack on the Iraqi nuclear reactor and it refused to take military action against the Syrian nuclear program. He doesn’t completely rule out the possibility that the U.S. will act, but he points out that it is not at all certain, for when past administrations were faced with making a decision and the moment of truth was reached, they chose to accept the nuclearization of rogue states over starting a war.

The case of North Korea stands out as an instance in which the U.S. would not take action against a dangerous rogue state that was developing a nuclear weapons capability. In March 1994, North Korea blocked inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) from inspecting its nuclear reactor at Yongbyon. By June, it appeared that the North Koreans were about to take the spent fuel rods from the reactor and extract enough weapons-grade plutonium for five or six bombs.

The U.N. imposed economic sanctions on North Korea. President Clinton wrote in his memoirs that he was determined to stop North Korea from developing a nuclear arsenal, “even at the risk of war.” The Pentagon planned to destroy the Yongbyon reactor, but ultimately pulled back from its threats. Just like today, high-level U.S. officials said that all options are on the table — but that was as far as they went. Negotiations were launched with North Korea that led to the signing of the “Agreed Framework,” which the North Koreans violated within a few years. It would become clear that Washington had not pushed hard enough.

The weakness of the “Agreed Framework” was revealed in December 2002, when North Korea removed the IAEA seals from the containers with the spent fuel rods and began to produce plutonium from them. In the months that followed, the Bush administration took no firm action. North Korea then expelled the IAEA inspectors and announced early 2003 it was withdrawing from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Four years later on Oct. 8, 2006, the North Koreans conducted their first underground test of an atomic bomb.

As a result, the U.N. Security Council adopted a tough resolution on North Korea , but the U.S. did not take any measures to eliminate North Korea’s nuclear infrastructure. Six-party negotiations began leading to another agreement in 2007 that was similar to the “Agreed Framework” of 1994. For its part, North Korea was clearly unimpressed with the Western reaction to its atomic test. Thus it conducted a second nuclear test on May 25, 2009, when President Obama was already in office.

Why has the U.S. not taken more forceful action against rogue states crossing the nuclear threshold? First, there is the issue of intelligence. Even a superpower like the U.S., may not have a sufficiently clear intelligence picture that would allow it to detect that a state like North Korea, which is isolated from the world, is about to conduct a nuclear test. This is also a problem for the American intelligence agencies in a country like Iran.

Indeed, just two years ago, Robert M. Gates, who was then the defense secretary, was quoted saying about the Iranians: “If their policy is to go to the threshold but not to assemble a nuclear weapon, how do you tell that they have not assembled? I don’t actually know how you would verify that.” Gates comments were important. He was a former head of the CIA and has a keen understanding of the real limits of intelligence.

The problem that Gates describes explains why it is hard to move against states developing nuclear weapons if you don’t know they are actually taking the last steps towards a bomb. In his memoirs, former Vice President Dick Cheney adds that since the Iraq War, the U.S. intelligence community is afraid of repeating the same error of relying on false intelligence, thereby affecting its decision-making even when it has “solid” information, as was the case with Syria.

According to President Bush’s account, while CIA Director Mike Hayden said that he had “high confidence” that the Syrians were building a nuclear reactor, since he could not find the facility for the weaponization of the plutonium that the reactor generated, he only had “low confidence” that the Syrians had a nuclear weapons program. Bush concluded that the U.S. could not operate against the Syrians with such a murky intelligence picture. According to foreign sources, Israel had to strike instead.

Thus, U.S. decision-makers understandably demand a level of certainty that intelligence agencies cannot always supply. Before acting, Obama will want to know how definite the information is that Iran has enriched uranium to weapons grade, has assembled a nuclear warhead, and is mounting it on a Shahab-3 missile.

A second limitation influencing the U.S. is the United Nations Security Council and the American dependence on multilateral approval. President Obama justified American military involvement in Libya to Congress by repeatedly saying that he had U.N. authorization. Following administration policy, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 7, that in the case of Syria, before the U.S. could get militarily involved, “our goal would be to seek international permission.” Since that time the Russian and Chinese have proven that they are willing to block a consensus in the Security Council over a resolution calling for stopping the bloodshed in the Syrian uprising.

Given this international environment, the chances the U.S. would receive United Nations authorization to take action against Iran’s nuclear program are virtually nil. The U.S. would have to act outside of the U.N., which it has done in a number of notable cases, like Kosovo, under President Clinton. In the case of the Obama administration that would require a sharp break in past policy.

Finally, it must be remembered that the U.S. is a superpower with global commitments. That means it has conflicting priorities, which constrain its ability to take on missions against rogue states that are in the last phase of assembling nuclear weapons. The Bush administration was focused on Iraq and Afghanistan, which undoubtedly affected its approach to North Korea — and later Syria. Perhaps, in the near future, the Obama administration will be involved in supporting an international intervention against the Assad regime in Syria, and will not be focused on the Iranian issue.

Then there is the issue of America’s forward-deployed forces around the world. During the Clinton administration it was understood that a strike on North Korea could lead to a retaliatory attack against U.S. ground forces along the Demilitarized Zone protecting South Korea. In the debate over whether the U.S. should take out Syria’s nuclear reactor, the risks of Syrian retaliation against U.S. forces in Iraq was raised. Thus while the U.S. unquestionably has the military power to prevent the acquisition of nuclear weapons by the world’s most dangerous states, or organizations, repeatedly successive administrations have been reluctant to use their vast military capabilities for that purpose because of the international circumstances they have faced.

Hezbollah chief : We can change the face of Israel | Ya Libnan | World News Live from Lebanon.