WarSclerotic

DEBKA.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Tehran has finally met international demands and “leveled” on its forbidden uranium enrichment process – but only as a calculated provocation.

Sunday, Jan. 24, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad admitted that Iran was now able to enrich uranium up to 20% grade. He was clearly crowing, telling President Barack Obama and the six powers – who engaged Iran in five months of fruitless negotiations to halt its drive for a nuclear weapon – that the Islamic Republic had trumped their card. He had also outmaneuvered his opponents at home.

A retrospective look at seven years of Iran’s nuclear development shows that the nuclear diplomatic strategy pursued by spiritual ruler Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has paid off. Its built-in assumptions were that America is a paper tiger and would never dare confront Iran militarily or even diplomatically, and that Israel, reined in by the US, would never venture to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities on its own.

Since his election as first-term president in 2005, Ahmadinejad has spiced this strategy with added zest, pugnacity and brass, which is why Khamenei was so keen on him winning a second term in the June 2009 election by hook or by crook. Together with the Revolutionary Guards, he has backed the president through thick and thin ever since.

(Details about the internal opposition to his tactics in next article).

For Iranians involved in the nuclear program, the cocky president is an icon. They credit his tenacity and bravado in the face of international and domestic opposition for bringing the program to the point where Tehran can build a nuclear weapon at any time it chooses. Had Ahmadinejad not persevered in walking on the edge and braving all odds, they say, Iran’s uranium enrichment processing, missile projects and nuclear infrastructure would still be in their infancy.

Effrontery is the name of the game

Effrontery continued to be the name of the game when Ahmadinejad beamingly informed Iranian journalists Sunday: “We will soon give good news on Iran’s 20 percent enriched uranium.” The news about Iran’s “scientific progress” will mark Iran’s celebrations of the Islamic Revolution victory from February 1-11.

He knows that he has not only saved Iran from having to give up uranium enrichment but also trumped the Six-Power proposal to export low-grade enriched uranium for reprocessing overseas. By dragging out its reply to this proposal, Tehran has won precious time for raising it own enrichment process to a level a bare weeks short of 90 percent military grade.

Iran already has the technology for weaponizing nuclear materials; it has experimented with nuclear triggers and in February 2010 will have reached the point where it is able construct a nuclear weapon and test it, should it so decide. All this has been achieved under the noses of the policy-makers and intelligence analysts who doggedly insist that Iran’s military nuclearization is three years, some say, five years, in the future.

The estimate which DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s sources have stuck to since September 2008, that Iran will be capable of constructing a nuclear weapon by February 2010, has withstood the passage of time most of all.

This accuracy was not reached by pure analysis but by using the compass of Iranian president’s own scheduling data, which proved to be the single constant factor guiding Iran’s nuclear program.

Israel must decide on military action by May at a stretch

As this program advanced, governments in the US and other Western countries changed and bureaucracies continually adjusted their estimates to policy requirements. Those policies were built around the impression that there was plenty of time for decision-making and maneuvers between Washington and Jerusalem to prevent Israel resorting to military action against Iran’s nuclear momentum.

During those years, Tehran never swerved from its two-track march along the enriched uranium and plutonium paths towards a nuclear weapon.

Tehran has arrived at its goal leaving the US in the dust.

President Obama’s engagement strategy has failed together with its tactics for preventing an Israeli strike against Iran. DEBKA-Net-Weekly military sources estimate that Ahmadinejad’s announcement has brought an Israeli decision forward by a whole year. Instead of the end of 2011, the Netanyahu government must decide by May 2010 whether or not to take up its military option for destroying or crippling Iran’s nuclear weapons capabilities. The schedule is tight indeed because it means that any attack must take place by early summer of this year – or not at all.

Since Tehran is fully conscious of this timeline and has made its preparations accordingly, the Middle East and Persian Gulf regions are in for a hectic period.

Israel slams Iran as world recalls Holocaust | Reuters.

OSWIECIM, Poland (Reuters) – Israel’s leaders, with Iran on their minds, vowed never again to allow the “hand of evil” to kill Jews as the world marked International Holocaust Memorial Day on Wednesday.

Speaking at the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz, liberated by Soviet Red Army troops 65 years ago, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said a strong Israeli state was the only guarantee for the security of his people.

In Berlin, Israeli President Shimon Peres told the German parliament Iran posed a threat to the whole world and lashed out at its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who denies the Holocaust and has called for the destruction of the Jewish state.

“From this site, I vow as the leader of the Jewish state that we will never again allow the hand of evil to destroy the life of our people and the life of our state. Never again,” Netanyahu said at the Auschwitz ceremony.

“We will not allow the deniers of the Holocaust… to erase or distort the memory (of what happened),” he said, in a clear reference to Ahmadinejad’s denial of the Nazis’ genocide.

Poland’s president and prime minister, the education ministers from nearly 30 nations, including Russia, and about 150 camp survivors attended the commemoration. In subzero temperatures, young Israelis placed candles on top of the crematoria nearby where the Nazis’ victims were gassed.

Up to 1.5 million people, mostly Jews, perished at Auschwitz, located near the village of Oswiecim in southern Poland, before Soviet troops liberated it on January 27, 1945.

Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest and most notorious of the Nazi death camps. Others operated by the Germans on occupied Polish territory included Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka.

BEWARE DICTATORS

Like Netanyahu, Peres stressed the need for vigilance.

“Never again ignore blood-thirsty dictators, hiding behind demagogical masks, who utter murderous slogans,” he told the German lawmakers in a speech delivered in Hebrew.

“The threats to annihilate a people and a nation are voiced in the shadow of weapons of mass destruction, which are held by irresponsible hands, by irrational thinking and in an untruthful language,” said Peres.

Western nations and Israel suspect Iran of trying to build nuclear weapons, a charge Tehran denies.

Peres, 86, recalled how his grandfather was burned to death in a Belarus synagogue that the Nazis locked from the outside.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who declined a Polish invitation to attend Wednesday’s ceremony, warned in a message read out at the Auschwitz commemoration by Russia’s education minister Alexei Fursenko of attempts to rewrite history by downplaying the role of the Red Army.

Russians are immensely proud of their country’s role in defeating Hitler’s Germany at huge human cost. The Auschwitz ceremony was widely shown in Russian state media and Russian Jewish groups organized memorial services across the country.

The theme of the Auschwitz commemoration was the education of young people about the Holocaust.

“This place determined who I am today, aged nearly 90. I still have one mission — to pass on to the next generation knowledge of what happened here,” August Kowalczyk, one of very few of the camp prisoners to escape, told reporters at the site.

“The need for teaching about Auschwitz is greater than ever before,” Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, 87, a Catholic survivor of Auschwitz and now the Polish government’s special envoy for relations with Germany, said at the ceremony.

Poland was home to Europe’s largest Jewish community before World War Two. The vast majority perished in the Nazi camps.

ANTI-SEMITISM

Jewish groups have voiced concern about what they see as a rise in anti-Semitism and xenophobia in some European countries and have called for more education about the Holocaust.

Earlier this week, they angrily criticized a Polish Catholic bishop after he was quoted as saying Jews had expropriated the Holocaust as a propaganda weapon. Roma, homosexuals and other groups were also systematically murdered there by the Nazis.

Speaking to the Italian parliament in Rome on Wednesday, Nobel Peace Prize winner and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel attacked wartime Pope Pius XII for his “silence” during the Nazis’ mass killings of Jews.

German-born Pope Benedict has annoyed Jews by defending the actions of his wartime predecessor.

(Additional reporting by Philip Pullella in Rome and Erik Kirschbaum in Berlin and Moscow bureau; Writing by Gareth Jones; Editing by Charles Dick)

Russia state arms trader has no comment on Iran deal | Reuters.

By Dmitry Solovyov

MOSCOW, Jan 28 (Reuters) – Russia’s state arms trader on Thursday declined to say whether it would go ahead with a deal to sell S-300 anti-aircraft systems to Iran, a sore point in Moscow’s relations with the United States and Israel.

“I just don’t quite understand why supplies of the S-300 system to Iran trouble you so much,” the head of Rosoboronexport, Anatoly Isaikin, replied after being repeatedly asked about the deal at a news briefing.

Russia is under intense Western pressure to distance itself from Iran in the dispute over Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, but Moscow has refused to block the delivery of the S-300 system.

In Jerusalem, an Israeli official told Reuters Russia had yet to ship the S-300’s “main systems” — such as radars and interceptor missiles — to Iran.

Analysts say the S-300 could help Iran thwart any attempt by Israel or the United States to bomb its nuclear facilities from the air.

Isaikin said journalists must be guided by statements made by other Russian officials last year. “From my part, I just want to say I have nothing to add to these statements.”

He added that Rosoboronexport’s weapons exports this year would be no lower than last year’s $7.4 billion, and that its portfolio of current export orders exceeded $34 billion.

Isaikin said the state arms trader’s exports had increased by more than 2.4 times between 2001 and 2009. Main buyers in previous years have been Vietnam and China, and Middle Eastern orders have increased recently.

The truck-mounted S-300PMU1, known in the West as the SA-20, can shoot down cruise missiles and aircraft. It has a range of 150 km (90 miles) and travels at more than two km per second.

Washington has sought pledges from Russia for tougher sanctions against Iran over its nuclear energy programme, which the West suspects is intended to produce nuclear weapons. Tehran denies any such intention.

Israel, which is thought to have the Middle East’s only atomic arsenal, has hinted it could attack Iran in an effort to stop it obtaining nuclear weapons.

Iran has threatened to retaliate for any attack by firing medium-range missiles at Israel. (Additional reporting by Dan Williams in Jerusalem; writing by Amie Ferris-Rotman; editing by Andrew Roche)

DEBKAfile, Political Analysis, Espionage, Terrorism, Security.

Tags: Iran Germany Israel Intelligence

Iran exacts a price for this friendship

“Two German diplomats using fictitious names of Yogi and Ingo were arrested” last month during clashes at the Ashura festival, an unnamed Iranian deputy intelligence minister said Wednesday, Jan. 27.

The announcement followed shortly after Israeli president Shimon Peres told the Reichstag in Berlin that he was sure Germany would come to Israel’s aid if it came under attack from a nuclear-armed Iran.
A day earlier, Chancellor Angela Merkel standing alongside the Israeli president said time was up for Iran and February would see new and tougher UN Security Council sanctions.

These events marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
debkafile reports that, in keeping with its new rapid strike policy for any hostile US or Israeli action – developed in conjunction with Syria and Hizballah and first exposed by debkafile file on Jan. 26 – Tehran hit back at Berlin Wednesday. Iranian state television quoted a top official as accusing “two diplomats using fictitious names” of a hand in organizing the Ashura riots in which at least eight people died.
The report which hinted at the two having worked under cover for German BND intelligence, did not say whether they were still in detention.
In Berlin, foreign ministry spokesman Andreas Peschke said he was unaware of any German diplomats having been detained in Iran and rejected any Berlin involvement in the protests.

The Iranian deputy intelligence minister was also quoted as reporting that a close advisor of main opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi was arrested and made “confessions.”

He said: “Available evidence and this person’s confessions show that he was connected through a point man to the intelligence service of a European country and was releasing confidential information.”
A few days after the Shiite commemoration, Iranian officials revealed they had detained a Swedish diplomat for 24 hours on the day of Ashura.

Iran’s purported detention of two German diplomats or agents would spark a major crisis between the two countries, recalling the rupture of the mid-90s when Iranian covert agents were arrested in Germany.

DEBKAfile, Political Analysis, Espionage, Terrorism, Security.

Joint German-Israeli government session

Israel’s president, prime minister and foreign minister are visiting Berlin, Warsaw and Budapest this week, apparently impervious to the European Union foreign ministers’ decision in Brussels Monday, Jan. 25, to back away from sanctions for Iran’s nuclear program outside the UN Security Council.

German foreign minister Guido Westerwelle signed off on the motion, the day before Israeli president Shimon Peres’ Hebrew address to the German parliament in Berlin.
debkafile: The Netanyahu government clings to the anchor of supposed international sanctions for halting Iran’s advance on a nuclear weapon. Monday, before traveling to Poland, prime minister Netanyahu said at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial museum:  “Today there are new Jew haters with new reasons to destroy the Jewish people. This is a test for humanity, and we will see in the coming weeks how the international community will stop the evil before it spreads.”
Well, he had his answer than same afternoon, yet this eloquence vanished on the plane trips to Europe.
None of the Israeli travelers have commented on the decision by the European foreign ministers to dump the sanctions option in the laps of Russia and China, knowing their vetoes are committed in advance and that both stand out for more diplomatic engagement plus concessions to Tehran.  The EU foreign ministers stated: “With Iran, [sanctions] will work out only if all the UN Security Council permanent members agree.” Every one of those ministers was fully aware that this proposition was a fantasy.

If Israel counted on Washington staying the course, there too there are signs of cold feet. The Obama has reduced the target of possible unilateral measures to the Revolutionary Guards Corps which is responsible for Iran’s nuclear program, in order to avoid harming the Iranian people.

As debkafile has stressed before, the Revolutionary Guards have umpteen mostly criminal ways of beating sanctions: They run a vast network of straw companies worldwide and move money around through international crime, smuggling, terror and drug conduits out of America’s reach rather than the banking system.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi are undoubtedly Israel’s best friends on the European continent, but they too conduct a dual policy on Iran. They sternly denounce Iran, while at the same time hundreds of German and Italian companies do business with the Islamic Republic, some even selling components for its missile and nuclear programs. Indeed, German and Italian firms are in tight competition over the Iranian market, with the latter reportedly gaining the edge this year.
No German transaction with Iran has been cancelled under Israeli pressure contrary to reports to this effect.
The most realistic European leader is French president Nicolas Sarkozy who Tuesday, Jan. 26, called for new and different steps to be pursued to halt Iran’s dash for a nuclear bomb. Still, French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner did not hold out against his colleagues consensus in Brussels.

AFP: Iran leader predicts destruction of Israel.

Khamenei made the remark during a meeting with Mauritanian President Mohammed Ould Abdel Aziz in Tehran

Iran leader predicts destruction of Israel

(AFP) – 4 hours ago

TEHRAN — Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is confident Islamic nations will one day watch the destruction of arch-foe Israel, his website Wednesday quoted him as saying.

Khamenei made the remark during a meeting with Mauritanian President Mohammed Ould Abdel Aziz in Tehran, the website said.

The all-powerful Iranian leader also said that Israel’s continued “pressure to erase Palestine from the world of Islamic nations” will fail.

“Surely, the day will come when the nations of the region will witness the destruction of the Zionist regime… when the destruction happens will depend on how the Islamic nations approach the issue,” Khamenei told Aziz, who arrived in Tehran on Monday.

“The Zionist regime, by continuing to use pressure, blockades and committing genocide, wants to erase Palestine… but it will not succeed.”

Praising Mauritania for cutting its ties with Israel, Khamenei said the “Zionist regime is a great danger to the world of Islam as it was thinking of expanding its influence and grip on the region every day.”

Iranian officials, including Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have earned the wrath of Israel and Western powers for their repeated anti-Israel comments.

Relations between the two nations have deteriorated particularly under Ahmadinejad who has often said that Israel is “doomed to be wiped off the map” and has termed the Holocaust a “myth”.

Israel shut down its embassy in Nouakchott following Mauritania’s decision in January 2009 to suspend diplomatic ties with the Jewish state a decade after they were launched.

Mauritania was one of only three Arab nations that had formal diplomatic ties with Israel, apart from Egypt and Jordan.

Copyright © 2010 AFP. All rights reserved.

DEBKA.

Hizballah elite units

According to the planning Iran’s war leaders developed in recent weeks in conjunction with Syria and its Lebanese Shiite proxy, Hizballah elite units would respond to a possible Israeli attack on its nuclear facilities by sweeping south across the border and taking hold of swathes of northern Israel. This would be in pursuance of the classical IDF doctrine of taking the war into enemy territory and assume that, at the same time, Israeli armored columns and infantry divisions would head north to hit Hizballah strongholds in southern and central Lebanon and blaze a path to Damascus.
According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s military sources, Tehran favors retaliation-by-invasion in preference to the missile blitz of population centers which Hizballah unleashed in 2006 – both in terms of military gains and because it would put Israel’s back to the wall in a way it has not experienced since the Yom Kippur War of October 1973.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards instructors at especially established facilities near Tehran are already well advanced in training a cadre of 5,000 Hizballah fighters in special operations and urban combat tactics to standards equivalent to those current in similar US and Israeli military forces.
At the outset of the course, the group was split up into five battalions, each given a specific northern Israeli sector for capture with details of its topography and population for close study.
(See attached map for the territories assigned to each Hizballah battalion).

Capturing and holding Galilee towns of Nahariya and Shlomi

1^st Battalion:
This unit will break through the Naqura-Rosh Haniqra border pass and sweep south along seven kilometers to seize Nahariya, the Israeli Mediterranean city of 55,000 – or parts thereof.
UN peacekeepers have their headquarters at Naqura, the other side of Rosh Haniqra, and Israel defenses there are lax, so no military or geographic obstacles to this Hizballah drive are anticipated. This battalion will capture a large number of Israeli hostages for use as live shields against an Israeli counter-attack
A small group of 150 fighters, trained by Revolutionary Guards marines, will also try and reach the coast by swift boats. They are already standing by in Lebanon.
2^nd Battalion:
This unit is assigned to capture the northern Israeli town of Shlomi, 300 meters southeast of the Naqura border pass and home to 6,500 inhabitants. Holding this town and its environs will give Hizballah control of a key road hub and stand in the path of Israeli reinforcements heading for Nahariya through routes 89 and 899 from key Israeli bases in the Galilee and Upper Galilee regions to the east. (See map).
3^rd Battalion:
Driving further south than any other Hizballah unit, this battalion must reach the three Israeli-Arab villages of B’ina, Deir al-Asad and Majd el-Krum, which are located north of the town of Carmiel and alongside Israel’s Route 85 which connects Acre on the Mediterranean with Safad in the central Galilee mountains.

An Arab-Israeli uprising to hamper Israeli military movements

Iranian war planners want Hizballah to control the three Israeli-Arab locations for two advantages:
One: To acquire a commanding position for stirring up the disaffected Israeli-Arab villages and towns of Lower Galilee and Wadi Ara to the south into a full-blown uprising. The incoming combat force will be backed up by clandestine Hizballah cells which for some years have established, armed and funded the underground “Galilee Liberation Battalions” in Sakhnin, Araba and Deir Hana, by means of drug smugglers.
Hizballah’s West Bank cells have been active for some time in the Wadi Ara region, through which National Route 65 connects central Israel to the North.
Two: To gain fire control of Acre-Safed Route 85 from positions in occupied Arab villages and so have a shield ready for the Hizballah units holding Nahariya and Shlomi, and seriously impede the passage of Israeli forces from bases in the center of the country to relieve these northern towns. The Israeli Air Force will be constrained from attacking the areas held by Hizballah by the presence of large civilian populations.
4^th Battalion:
This battalion will push southeast into the Kadesh Valley, on the rim of which the Makia and Yiftah kibbutzim and Makia moshav are clustered. Capture of these locations would afford Hizballah fire coverage of Israel’s northernmost region, the Galilee Panhandle.
5^th Battalion:
Hizballah’s Strategic Reserve.
The Tehran-Hizballah war strategy is all but ready for any contingency. The obvious trigger would be an Israeli military operation against Iran’s nuclear facilities, but once all the elements are in place, they could be activated by any other pretext conjured up in Tehran or Damascus.
Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah is straining at the leash to attack Israel however the crisis over Iran’s nuclear program turns out.
Sunday, January 17, he said: “I promise you, in view of all the threats you hear today… that should a new war with the Zionists erupt, we [the Lebanese resistance movement] will crush the enemy, come out victorious, and change the face of the region.
“God willing, Israel, the occupation, hegemony, and arrogance are in the process of disappearing!”
Nasrallah was not alone in anticipating a troubled year for the Middle East.

Syria may step in even without an Israeli attack

Political insider Tzahi Hanegbi, chairman of the Knesset Security and Foreign Relations Committee said earlier this month: “Since it is obvious that the Obama administration is not going to solve the Iranian nuclear issue, 2010 will be a fateful year in the history of Israel.”
Our analysts took him to mean that Israel would have to deal with the Iranian nuclear threat itself while appreciating that the cost might be heavy.
A senior US official, speaking on condition of confidentiality, chipped in by leaking this comment to the Kuwait newspaper Al-Rai: “If Syria allows surface-to-air missiles SA-2 to go through to Hizballah in Lebanon, war will break out and Tel Aviv will hit Damascus directly.”
This official was confirming the perception that more than one trigger existed for a possible outbreak of hostilities and Syria would probably be involved. Israel is determined as a top priority to prevent the SA-2 reaching Hizballah’s hands.
Following reports that Syria has ignored the Israeli warning and begun training Hizballah crews in Damascus in the use of the SA-2 missiles, the US official added: “A possible military attack by Hizbollah on Israel will be met with a damaging attack on Lebanon. Israel made the mistake of not striking Syria once before in 2006, but if Hizballah goes back to the offensive, Damascus will not be spared again.”

Der Spiegel: Iran could produce nuclear bomb this year – Haaretz – Israel News.

Iran is serious about developing a nuclear bomb and has the ability to produce a primitive, truck-sized version of the bomb this year, the German magaziner Der Spiegel reported on Monday.

An intelligence dossier obtained by Der Spiegel shows that there is a secret military branch of Iran’s nuclear research program that answers to Tehran’s ministry of defense, according to the report.

Officials who have read this document – which is currently under review by the U.S., Germany and Israel – claim that it shows that their nuclear program aimed at producing a bomb is well advanced.

The officials said to Der Spiegel that the truck-sized bomb which they are capable of producing will have to be compressed to a size that would fit into a nuclear warhead for the strategic threat potential they desire.

Der Spiegel also wrote that Israel and the West were alarmed by the dossier’s revelations, as Iran could reach the compressed level of a nuclear bomb between 2012 and 2014.

Tehran has consistently denied that it is enriching uranium for weapons, claiming it is exclusively dedicated to the peaceful use of nuclear technology.

The Associated Press

JERUSALEM —

Israel’s prime minister has called on the international community to band together against enemies calling for the destruction of the Jewish state.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s comments were clearly directed at Iran.

He spoke Monday at a ceremony held at Israel’s national Holocaust memorial where the blueprints of the notorious Auschwitz death camp were unveiled.

Netanyahu said the lesson of the Holocaust is to “stop bad things when they are small.”

He said: “There is new Jew-hatred in our midst. There are new calls for the extermination of the Jewish state.”

Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has repeatedly questioned the Holocaust and called for Israel to be “wiped off the map.” Israel also fears Iran is developing nuclear weapons.

via Nation & World | Netanyahu says world must learn from Holocaust | Seattle Times Newspaper.

Syria, Hizballah preparing for war with Israel.

Pan-Arab newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat reported on Monday that Syria has begun calling up reserve military forces in anticipation of a full-scale war with Israel.

Officials in Syria and from Lebanon’s Hizballah terrorist militia have been saying for the past week that they are being threatened by Israeli military maneuvers along the Israel-Lebanon border, and expect the Israeli army to launch a surprise attack on Hizballah positions in Lebanon.

According to UN Resolution 1701 that ended the 2006 Lebanon War, Hizballah is not supposed to have any positions in southern Lebanon, but the international peacekeeping force on the ground there has not enforced those terms.

On Saturday, Israeli cabinet minister Yossi Peled, a former commander of Israel’s Northern Command, said at an event in Beersheva that “we are heading for another round [of battle with Hizbullah] in the north.”

Over the weekend, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office clarified that Israel is not looking for another war on its northern border, and the current chief of Northern Command, Maj.-Gen. Gadi Eizenkot said that Arab reports of tension along the border are unfounded.

“Reports in the media about tension in the North is a virtual reality that has no grounds in reality,” said Eizenkot during a ceremony at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv. He warned, however, that if the Arabs start something, Israel will respond with disproportionate force.

Also at the weekend, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner acknowledged that Israel is very unlikely to initiate another armed conflict, but warned that Iranian agents might try to escalate the situation on the Israel-Lebanon border in order to divert attention from Iran’s nuclear program.