.
.
.
Given this reality, the same rule and standard applies to Iranian military commanders, coveting the role of war hawk, and the support of the Supreme Leader for the sake of promotion and influence.
Or they are Mossad agents, or agents of London.
Sayyari and CIA Saddam: both make similar speeches.
I do not believe in Iranian military commanders making "CIA Saddam" like threats during hostile situations...."Mother of all wars".........etc....they do not add to the solution of problems related to male ego, racism, empire, greed, and criminal megalomania.
_________________________________
After Dempsey Warning, Israel May Curb War Threat
President Barack Obama’s explicit warning that he will not
accept a
unilateral Israeli attack against Iran may force Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu to step back from his ostensible threat of war.
Netanyahu had hoped that the Obama administration could be put under
domestic political pressure during the election campaign to shift its
policy on Iran to the much more confrontational stance that Netanyahu
and Defense Minister Ehud Barak have been demanding.
But that political pressure has not materialized, and Obama has gone
further than ever before in warning Netanyahu not to expect U.S. backing
in any war with Iran. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin
Dempsey told reporters in Britain Aug. 30 that an Israeli strike would
be ineffective and then said, “I don’t want to be complicit if they [the
Israelis] choose to do it.”
It was the first time that a senior U.S. official had made such an
explicit public statement indicating the administration’s unwillingness
to be a party to a war provoked by a unilateral Israeli attack.
Dempsey had conveyed such a warning during meetings with Israeli
leaders last January, as IPS reported Feb. 1, but a series of moves by
the administration over the next several months, including the adoption
of Israeli demands during two rounds of negotiations with Iran on the
nuclear issue in May and June, appeared to represent a retreat from that
private warning.
Dempsey’s warning was followed by an as-yet unconfirmed report by Time
magazine that the Pentagon has decided to sharply cut back on its
participation in the largest-ever joint military exercise with Israel
designed to test the two countries’ missile-defense systems in late
October.
Originally scheduled for last spring, the exercise was delayed in
January following an earlier round of Israeli saber-rattling and the
apparent Israeli assassination of an Iranian scientist, which had
further increased tensions between Netanyahu and President Obama.
Former Israeli national security adviser Giora
Eiland suggested
in an interview with Reuters Tuesday that the Dempsey statement had
changed the political and policy calculus in Jerusalem. “Israeli leaders
cannot do anything in the face of a very explicit ‘no’ from the U.S.
president,” Eiland said. “So they are exploring what space is left to
operate.”
Eiland explained that Netanyahu had previously maintained that the
U.S. “might not like [an Israeli attack] but they will accept it the day
after. However, such a public, bold statement meant the situation had
to be reassessed.”
Netanyahu and Barak have never explicitly threatened to attack Iran
but have instead used news leaks and other means to create the
impression that they are seriously considering a unilateral airstrike.
The Netanyahu campaign, aimed at leveraging a shift in U.S. policy
toward confrontation with Iran, appeared to climax during the first two
weeks of August amid a torrent of stories in the Israeli press
suggesting that Netanyahu and Barak were getting closer to a decision on
war.
An unnamed senior official — almost certainly Barak — indicated in an
interview that the Israeli leader would reconsider the unilateral
military option if Obama were to adopt the Israeli red line — in effect
an ultimatum to Iran to end all enrichment or face war.
As Eiland suggests, however, Netanyahu may no longer feel that he is
in a position to make such a demand when he meets Obama later this
month. Not only has Obama drawn a clear line against unilateral Israeli
action, but the Republican Party and its presidential candidate Mitt
Romney have failed to signal that Obama’s rejection of Netanyahu’s
belligerence on Iran will be a central issue in the presidential
campaign.
Although the party platform said the threshold for military action
should be Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapons “capability” rather
than the construction of an actual weapon, Romney did not embrace the
threat to go to war unless Iran agrees to shut down its nuclear program,
as Netanyahu would have hoped.
That omission appeared to reflect the growing influence in his
campaign of the “realist” faction of the Republican Party that opposed
the radical post-9/11 trajectory of George W. Bush’s first presidential
term in office and reasserted itself in the second term.
The party’s marquee speaker on foreign policy was not a
neoconservative but former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, whom the
neoconservatives viewed with disdain, not least because of her effort
to begin diplomatic engagement with Iran.
Rice mentioned Iran only in connection with its crackdown against
dissidents during her prime-time speech.
Until recently, prominent neoconservatives, such as Dan Senor,
Elliott Abrams, and Eric Edelman, as well as aggressive pro-Israel
nationalists such as former U.N. ambassador John Bolton, had appeared
dominant among Romney’s foreign policy advisers.
The fact that the billionaire casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, a strong
supporter of Netanyahu and the Israeli far right, has pledged up to $100
million to support the Republican campaign seemed to assure them of the
upper hand on Israel and Iran.
But neoconservatives may have lost influence to the realists as a
result of Romney’s ill-fated trip in July to Britain, Israel, and Poland
— all neoconservative favorites — as well as recent polling showing
ever-growing war-weariness, if not isolationism, among both Republicans
and the all-important independents in the electorate.
On the convention’s eve, Lee Smith, a neoconservative scribe based at
The Weekly Standard, published an article at
TabletMag.com entitled “Why
Romney Won’t Strike Iran.”
One of Romney’s senior advisers, former CIA chief Gen. Michael
Hayden, has even partially echoed Dempsey, telling the Israeli newspaper
Haaretz Thursday that an Israeli raid against Iran’s nuclear
facilities would likely be counterproductive.
Both Hayden’s and Dempsey’s remarks about the futility or
counterproductivity of an Israeli attack on Iran echoed those of a broad
range of Israel’s national-security elite, including President Shimon
Peres and the former chiefs of Israel’s intelligence agencies and armed
forces, who, provoked by Netanyahu’s and Barak’s war talk, have come out
more strongly than ever against the idea.
In addition to publicly casting doubt on whether an attack would be
effective, many of the national-security critics have warned that a
unilateral strike could seriously damage relations with the U.S.
That argument, which resonates strongly in Israeli politics, was
given much greater weight by Dempsey’s warning last week.
Further eroding Israeli tolerance of Netanyahu’s talk of war was a
blog post on The Atlantic 7
Reasons Why Israel Should Not Attack Iran’s Nuclear Facilities.”
magazine’s website by Jeffrey Goldberg, an influential advocate of
Israeli interests who has helped propagate the notion that Israel would
indeed act unilaterally in the past. As the Netanyahu campaign reached
its climax last month, Goldberg offered “
Goldberg worried that an Israeli “strike could be a disaster for the
U.S.-Israel relationship,” especially if Iran retaliated against U.S.
targets. “Americans are tired of the Middle East, and I’m not sure how
they would feel if they believed that Israeli action brought harm to
Americans,” he wrote.
(Inter Press Service)
