What’s New in U.S.-Israel Plans for Iran’s Nuclear Program?
Politics, Power, and Preventive Action » What’s New in U.S.-Israel Plans for Iran’s Nuclear Program?.
Two days ago, Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, met with his Israeli counterpart, Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz, chief of the Israeli general staff.
Last August, Gen. Dempsey told reporters that an Israeli attack could “clearly delay but probably not destroy Iran’s nuclear program.” He added: “I don’t want to be complicit if they [Israel] choose to do it.” This morning, the New York Times reported something that indicates that last year’s assessment from America’s most senior military official has changed. According to Thom Shanker:
General Dempsey said, he “sensed agreement” that diplomatic initiatives and economic sanctions “were having an effect” on Iran, which is accused of seeking to develop nuclear arms, an accusation it strongly denies.
The Israelis “of course want us to continue to present a credible military threat to support those diplomatic and economic efforts,” General Dempsey said, adding that he told them, “since I was here last year, we have better military options than we did a year ago.”
“That’s because we’ve continued to refine them,” he said. “We’ve continued to develop technology, we’ve continued to train and plan.”
This was a notable statement for three reasons, each of which raises new questions. First, he has stated repeatedly that he is not privy to Israel’s military planning for targeting Iran’s nuclear program, which leads one to ask what new information he received from his Israeli counterparts during his latest visit to contend that military options are better?
Second, Dempsey has asserted that an Israeli strike would “delay the production or the capability of Iran to achieve a nuclear weapon status—probably for a couple of years.” Would a strike now increase the timeline required to produce a bomb by more than “a couple years?” And would that include delaying a potential plutonium-bomb made with reprocessed spent fuel from the Arak heavy water reactor, which Israeli officials and analysts have recently warned is Iran’s “plan B” for a nuclear weapon?
Finally, Dempsey previously claimed that U.S.-Israeli discussions about attacking Iran “does not rise to the level of joint military planning, but we’re closely collaborating.” Does the recent addition of “we” imply that there are now coordinated U.S.-Israeli operational plans for offensive strikes—either kinetic or cyber—against Iran’s nuclear program? This would be a new development, given that U.S. officials have never directly answered the essential question: Will America help Israel attack Iran?
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WarSclerotic 
August 15, 2013 at 8:24 PM
NYT: Iran’s Clerics Remain the Problem
August 15, 2013 at 8:29 PM
Reuters: INSIGHT – Iran’s Arab minority drawn into Middle East unrest
REUTERS – Arab insurgents blew up a gas pipeline in Iran last week and dedicated the attack to their brothers in arms in Syria, highlighting how the Syrian civil war is spreading into a region-wide proxy conflict that could blow back onto Iran.
http://in.reuters.com/article/2013/08/15/iran-arabs-idINDEE97E07E20130815?feedType=RSS&feedName=worldNews
August 15, 2013 at 8:31 PM
Reuters: Turkey plays big in Kurdistan’s energy game
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/15/us-iraq-kurdistan-idUSBRE97E0RC20130815?feedType=RSS&feedName=worldNews
August 15, 2013 at 10:13 PM
I think the “better military options” Dempsey referred to is the large amount of equipment, including refueling aircraft, that the United States recently supplied Israel. At this moment I think that Israel should focus on hardening the iron Dome by bringing the Arrow III online; somehow aid the anti-Hezbollah forces; and make sure that iran is not allowed to turn Syria into a base of operations to attack Israel. Lastly, watch what Obama/Dempsey actually do, not what they say.
August 15, 2013 at 10:45 PM
Lets face it the whole region and possibly europe are about to become a stage for a confrontation between the sunnys and shia and russia china versus nato its past the tipping point.the shit storm is on the radar
August 16, 2013 at 1:48 PM
And this morning its in my mail the unrest in egypt is being sponsored by russia al sisi is a traitor he has sold out egypt to russian influence this is precursor for war i do now belive that the troop and naval deployments and deployment of air power are for a full scale middle east war,i wouldn’t be surpized to see us forces on the ground in Egypt at the same time nato attacks syria and the russians it really has gone too far ,the blocking of a security council resolution on egypt by russia and china last night was the last straw,expect some serious escalation,and russia has accomplished one of its primary objectives access to Israel from too points
August 16, 2013 at 11:52 AM
The following article’s take on the events makes more sense :
Obama’s Jihadist offensive threatens to wreck the Middle-East
http://osnetdaily.com/2013/08/obamas-jihadist-offensive-threatens-to-wreck-the-middle-east/
Exactly two years after the Obama regime launched the Arab spring for the sole purpose of unraveling the existing order in the Middle-East and creating permanent regional chaos in order to kick China and Russia out of the region and impose puppet Islamic regimes on former nation states, the region is currently facing version 2.0 of the same odious recipe. Make no mistake about it: Egypt is now at the cross-hairs of the same meticulously planned globalist destabilization campaign which started wrecking Syria a couple of years ago. While that Syrian campaign appears to have failed so far, the globalists and the Islamists are currently refocusing their efforts on Egypt, as we predicted a while ago in our analysis of Obama’s Muslim brotherhood in Egypt.
General Al-Sisi, the rising star of the Egyptian military command, is well aware of the urgent need to act swiftly and decisively in order to crush Obama’s Muslim brotherhood in its desperate bid to regain control on Egypt so Obama’s banking handlers will be able to loot the country undisturbed. Obviously the Anglo-French Eurogarchs and secretary of state John Kerry (graduate of the satanic order of Skull & Bones) are determined to defend their Islamist assets in Cairo to the bitter end. Sisi’s move during Thursday morning to throw the Islamists out of the squares was met with a coordinated campaign of hysterical rants about a “humanitarian catastrophe” and a “brutal massacre” emanating from Islamist sources and echoed by the controlled corporate media in the west , quite reminiscent of Syria’s early clashes with the same Islamists two years ago, which was portrayed as “crackdown on peaceful protesters” (in reality the whole thing was provocateured by Muslim Brotherhood violent operatives and foreign mercenaries).
Nevertheless, General Sisi remains unimpressed with Obama’s attempts to ‘give him a Mubarak’. According to this report Sisi even refused to take phone calls from Obama and rejected all of Obama’s attempts to bully him into submission. Obama retaliated by getting the radical preacher Qardawi of Qatar’s Al-Jazeera infamy to issue a call for Jihad against the Egyptian interim government and by publicly condemning Sisi’s war on Obama’s pet Islamic terrorists in Cairo. Joint drills between the US army and the Egyptian army were cancelled and threats to cut “foreign aid” were uttered. This is not expected to make an impression on the new Egyptian leadership who managed to take advantage on the situation by kicking Soros puppet Mohammed El-Baradei out of the government, as they are backed by the financial muscle of Saudi Arabia and its sibling gulf monarchies – they are all eager to make a jailbreak out of the American sphere of influence which the “Arab spring” of 2011 aimed to preserve (but failed).
These monarchies represent Wahhabi Islam,which despite its reactionary nature is at odds with the globalist controlled Muslim brotherhood (modeled after European secret societies and mimicking the same clandestine command structure). The brotherhood is often thought of as Sunni , and its complicity with Obama’s destabilization of the Allawite regime in Syria (Iran’s ally) supposedly proves it, yet the Fascist Mullah regime in Iran is deeply upset about the brotherhood’s defeat (Iran hoped to mold the brotherhood in its own image by offering lucrative financial assets. This was one of the reasons for the military coup by Sisi) . The same goes for international socialists, who are theoretically supposed to share the interests of their cherished Assad regime in Syria (whom the Soviets created at the time, and who has expressed great joy at the Brotherhood’s downfall), yet they support the Muslim Brotherhood nevertheless. This apparent contradiction makes sense only once the dots are connected and the Islamists, Bolsheviks and Obamabots are understood as different segments of the same Trojan horse depicted in the picture above, a horse which threatens to stomp western civilization with a total anarchist breakdown.
The Obama game plan is to bring about the double headed hydra of the allied Caliphate – a transnational Sunni-Shiite chimera, dividing the world into war-zones, intensive like world-war fronts, driven by religious zeal,commanding millions of fanatic Jihadists and enabled by means of nuclear weapons. Such a Caliphate would eventually be unleashed at Russia’s southern flank in order to wreck the oil rich Caucasus region, while projecting its terrorist power against China in the east and Europe in the west. Given this scenario, the notion that Obama has any intention to neutralize the Iranian nuclear threat would be a laughable mistake. It’s up to Israel to do this job one way or the other, or else to accept an apocalyptic nuclear arms race in the Middle-East.
The coveted price in Egypt is the Suez canal , long destined for re-colonization by the crumbling Franco-Anglo-American entente. It is therefore no wonder that the entente’s Muslim brotherhood operatives have repeatedly threatened and tried to carry out terrorist attacks on the canal, thereby shooting their own country in the foot and destabilizing world economy while boosting petroleum prices – another major goal of the petrodollar\bankster complex of Wallstreet and the city of London. The Sinai peninsula east of the canal is currently a raging battle field between the Islamists on one side and a Joint Egyptian-Israeli counter-terrorism operation on the other side. Like Egypt, Israel is slowly trying to break free of the American yoke, among other things by getting China to construct a railroad from the Eilat port at the red sea to Mediterranean ports in western Israel, thereby creating a viable alternative to the Suez canal. The globalists , of course, are having none of this, as we’ve shown in an article during the previous round of hostilities back in April: The CIA’s rocket racket . The Obama regime is a wounded beast right now , and therefore extremely dangerous to everyone, desperate to accomplish its mad goals at all cost. It remains to be seen whether Obama and his handlers could be stopped at the last moment. If not, the world is facing further deterioration towards global war.