Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Israeli Generals and Intel Officials Oppose Attack on Iran

WASHINGTON, Aug 13, 2010 (IPS) - Pro-Israeli journalist Jeffrey
Goldberg's article in "The Atlantic" magazine was evidently aimed at
showing why the Barack Obama administration should worry that it risks
an attack by the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on
Iran in the coming months unless it takes a much more menacing line
toward Iran's nuclear programme.
But the article provides new evidence that senior figures in the
Israeli intelligence and military leadership oppose such a strike
against Iran and believe that Netanyahu's apocalyptic rhetoric about
an Iranian nuclear threat as an "existential threat" is unnecessary
and self-defeating.
Although not reported by Goldberg, Israeli military and intelligence
figures began to express their opposition to such rhetoric on Iran in
the early 1990s, and Netanyahu acted to end such talk when he became
prime minister in 1996.
The Goldberg article also reveals extreme Israeli sensitivity to any
move by Obama to publicly demand that Israel desist from such a
strike, reflecting the reality that the Israeli government could not
go ahead with any strike without being assured of U.S. direct
involvement in the war with Iran.
Goldberg argues that a likely scenario some months in the future is
that Israeli officials will call their U.S. counterparts to inform
them that Israeli planes are already on their way to bomb Iranian
nuclear sites.
The Israelis would explain that they had "no choice", he writes,
because "a nuclear Iran poses the gravest threat since Hitler to the
physical survival of the Jewish people."
He claims the "consensus" among present and past Israeli leaders is
that the chances are better than 50/50 that Israel "will launch a
strike by next July", based on interviews with 40 such Israeli
decision-makers.
Goldberg is best known for hewing to the neoconservative line in his
reporting on Iraq, particularly in his insistence that that Saddam
Hussein had extensive ties with al Qaeda.
Goldberg quotes an Israeli official familiar with Netanyahu's thinking
as saying, "In World War II, the Jews had no power to stop Hitler from
annihilating us. Six million were slaughtered. Today, six million Jews
live in Israel, and someone is threatening them with annihilation."
In his interview with Goldberg for this article, however, Netanyahu
does not argue that Iran might use nuclear weapons against Israel.
Instead he argues that Hezbollah and Hamas would be able to "fire
rockets and engage in other terror activities while enjoying a nuclear
umbrella".
But Israel relies on conventional forces - not nuclear deterrence -
against Hezbollah and Hamas, making that argument entirely specious.
Goldberg reports that other Israeli leaders, including defence
minister Ehud Barack, acknowledge the real problem with the
possibility of a nuclear Iran is that it would gradually erode
Israel's ability to retain its most talented people.
But that problem is mostly self-inflicted. Goldberg concedes that
Israeli generals with whom he talked "worry that talk of an
'existential threat' is itself a kind of existential threat to the
Zionist project, which was meant to preclude such threats against the
Jewish people."
A number of sources told Goldberg, moreover, that Gabi Ashkenazi, the
Israeli army chief of staff, doubts "the usefulness of an attack".
Top Israeli intelligence officials and others responsible for policy
toward Iran have long argued, in fact, that the kind of apocalyptic
rhetoric that Netanyahu has embraced in recent years is self-
defeating.
Security correspondent Ronen Bergman reported in Yediot Ahronot,
Israel's most popular newspaper, in July 2009 that former chief of
military intelligence Major General Aharon Zeevi Farkash said the
Israeli public perception of the Iranian nuclear threat had been
"distorted".
Farkash and other military intelligence and Mossad officials believe
Iran's main motive for seeking a nuclear weapons capability was not to
threaten Israel but to "deter U.S. intervention and efforts at regime
change", according to Bergman.
The use of blatantly distorted rhetoric about Iran as a threat to
Israel - and Israeli intelligence officials' disagreement with it -
goes back to the early 1990s, when the Labour Party government in
Israel began a campaign to portray Iran's missile and nuclear
programmes as an "existential threat" to Israel, as Trita Parsi
revealed in his 2007 book "Treacherous Alliance".
An internal Israeli inter-ministerial committee formed in 1994 to make
recommendations on dealing with Iran concluded that Israeli rhetoric
had been "self-defeating", because it had actually made Iran more
afraid of Israel, and more hostile toward it, Parsi writes.
Ironically, it was Netanyahu who decided to stop using such rhetoric
after becoming prime minister the first time in mid-1996. Mossad
director of intelligence Uzi Arad convinced him that Israel had a
choice between making itself Iran's enemy or allowing Iran to focus on
threats from other states.
Netanyahu even sought Kazakh and Russian mediation between Iran and
Israel.
But he reversed that policy when he became convinced that Tehran was
seeking a rapprochement with Washington, which Israeli leaders feared
would result in reduced U.S. support for Israel, according to Parsi's
account. As a result, Netanyahu reverted to the extreme rhetoric of
his predecessors.
That episode suggests that Netanyahu is perfectly capable of grasping
the intelligence community's more nuanced analysis of Iran, contrary
to his public stance that the Iranian threat is the same as that from
Hitler's Germany.
Netanyahu administration officials used Goldberg to convey the message
to the Americans that they didn't believe Obama would launch an attack
on Iran, and therefore Israel would have to do so.
But Israel clearly cannot afford to risk a war with Iran without the
assurance that the United States being committed to participate in it.
That is why the Israeli lobby in Washington and its allies argue that
Obama should support an Israeli strike, which would mean that he would
have to attack Iran with full force if it retaliates against such an
Israeli strike.
The knowledge that Israel could not attack Iran without U.S. consent
makes Israeli officials extremely sensitive about the possibility that
Obama would explicitly reject an Israeli strike
Goldberg reports that "several Israeli officials" told him they were
worried that U.S. intelligence might learn about Israeli plans to
strike Iran "hours" before the scheduled launch.
The officials told Goldberg that if Obama were to say, "We know what
you're doing. Stop immediately," Israel might have to back down.
Goldberg alludes only vaguely to the possibility that the threat of an
attack on Iran is a strategy designed to manipulate both Iran and the
United States. In a March 2009 article in The Atlantic online,
however, he was more straightforward, conceding that the Netanyahu
threat to strike Iran if the United States failed to stop the Iranian
nuclear programme could be a "tremendous bluff".

Macabre puttane pennivendole, "opinionisti" disposti a vendersi per 
mistificare e mentire quanto basta a preparare il terreno alle guerre 
che devasteranno paesi e inghiottiranno migliaia di innocenti se ne 
troveranno sempre.
Ma se essi sono gli esecutori i mandanti sono quelli che forniscono loro 
le armi: l'accesso ai media.
Sarei curioso di sapere chi possiede The Atlantic.


lo sentivo che la gallina era pronta a deporre l'ovetto quotidiano per
il blog calunniatorio.

amaryllide ha scritto:

Tu devi avere una incoscia tendenza al masochismo.
Con tutte le sberle che già ricevi perché ne vuoi anche da me?

amaryllide ha scritto:

Davvero una lancinante pirlata da collezione.
Grazie della segnalazione. Forwardo io.
Tb (bieco illuminista)
-- 
Dead men may not talk, but they also don't lie.  [Chuck Hawks]

 Grazie della segnalazione. Forwardo io.
Diavolo di un amaryllide, ora capisco la tua strategia: attaccare me per 
acquistare ascendente su bagarozzo & C.
Del resto il poveretto è talmente disperato che ti lustrerebbe le scarpe 
se gli dessi una mano a contenermi.  Qui addirittura ti ringrazia.
Diabolico.

 Diavolo di un amaryllide
te l'ho già detto di guardare sempre la posta quando mi rispondi, che
non si può parlare davanti ai "sionisti"?


Ho letto il messaggio.
Purtroppo in questo momento non ho sottomano il vocabolario per cercare 
il superlativo di diabolico: sono in dubbio tra diabolicissimo e 
vaffanculo, con una leggera preferenza per il secondo termine.