This is not just about Israel.Can the United States and its European allies peacefully prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons? And if not, would Israel try to do so militarily, even if doing so greatly angered President Barack Obama? Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is in Washington today. These questions could well make or break his premiership and Mr. Obama's presidency.
With increasing vigor and resources, the clerical regime has advanced a massive -- and until 2002 clandestine -- program for producing fissile material. It's a good bet that the Europeans have never really believed that Iran could be deterred from developing a bomb by either engagement or sanctions acceptable to all of the EU's members. Nevertheless, the Europeans have tried, offering generous trade and credit terms while psychologically stroking the Islamic Republic.
Yet as Thérèse Delpech, a leading nonproliferation expert at France's Atomic Energy Commission, warned last October at a Brookings Institution lecture, "We [the Europeans] have negotiated during five years with the Iranians . . . and we came to the conclusion that they are not interested at all in negotiating, but . . . [only] in buying time for their military program." In those five years, she also noted, Tehran never implied that if only the Americans were at the table the clerical regime would be amenable to compromise.
The world's Achilles heel remains oil. OUR Achilles heel remains oil.
WE ARE STILL THE MAIN ENEMY
The eastern province of KSA is a Shia province. The Shia are active in every state around the gulf. The Shia control half of Iraq's oil. The Shia hold the grievances of one and a half millennia in the Persians thousands of P-2 centrifuges, and remain convinced somehow god will correct any military or political and economic imbalances in their favor against a morally weak and corrupt America.
Consider: If Saddam Hussein had had a nuke in 1990, would George H.W. Bush have risked war? Consider as well the near certainty that ultra-Sunni Saudi Arabia will go nuclear in response to a Shiite Persian bomb.And who next? Egypt? Oman? UAE?
That's a nice thought when considering how things are working out right now in Pakistan
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1 comment:
And why, pray tell, does Iran want a bomb?
Deterrence!
Israel has perhaps 150 WMD, including H-bombs.
Can any reasonable person believe that Iran would launch a nuclear rocket against Israel and thereby endure complete destruction as a result?
That such a view has actually gained any traction whatsoever is truly staggering to any rational person.
And that Iran would threaten any other middle-east nation with such a weapon, because the result would be identical due to other middle-east nations' alliances with nuclear powers, is equally preposterous.
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