October 21, 2024
“You can cut all the flowers, but you
cannot keep Spring from coming.”
For over a year,
the masters of war in Israel and the United States, abetted by the corporate
media, have buried truth under the rubble of Gaza. The U.S. mainstream media have acted as the hewers of wood and
drawers of water for the empire.
To understand
how we got here, we need to borrow from the 19th century Scottish author,
Walter Scott, who wrote, “Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we
practice to deceive.”
Scott’s
reflection helps in understanding how the media have turned the horrific
suffering of Palestinians and Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza into just
another news story—“acceptable” scrim as we go about our daily lives. It also provides insight into how the Israeli
regime soaked in blood has been portrayed as the victim, the good soldier and
worthy of defense.
Israel is a
veteran of information deception. For a
half-century, they have defined the narrative and controlled the information
environment in order to hide their brutal apartheid occupation and expansionist
goals in Palestine. They have
overwhelmed audiences, particularly in the United States, with information
favorable to Israel’s cause and suppressed that which has challenged their
narrative.
Television
anchors, journalists and the “intelligentsia” in think tanks that dot the
nation’s capital have been conditioned to accept and defend Israel’s political
trope and to swiftly discredit the arguments of those who challenge its
dissembling.
Corporate media
self-censorship, underreporting, airbrushing of atrocities, failing to
contextualize the Palestinian experience under apartheid rule and, most
egregious, ignoring America’s complicity in constructing and maintaining the
Israeli apartheid regime over 76 years, have contributed to an environment that
has encouraged Israel to become increasingly violent.
The worst
journalistic practices were glaring after the Palestinian offensive of 7
October 2023. The mind managers have
allowed Israel to establish the parameters of the message, of what could/ could
not be written and said.
Coverage would
be done Israel’s way—through a military lens.
All foreign news organizations operating in Israel are subject to the
rules of a military censor, with only certain subjects allowed. It is commonplace, for instance, to read or
to hear journalists begin their reports with “Israel said.”
There has also
been little attention paid to Tel Aviv’s refusal to permit foreign journalists
access to Gaza, to the regime’s internal media censorship and bans, and to the
128 Palestinian journalists and media staff in Gaza, who have been targeted and
killed by the Israeli military.
Although the
media gave an inordinate amount of coverage to the now debunked Israeli stories about mass killings, beheaded
babies and allegations of widespread and systematic rape during the October
attack, no such attention has been paid to Israel’s “Hannibal Directive” and
“Dahiya Doctrine.”
On 7 October,
the Israeli military gave its forces permission to execute the Hannibal
Directive. Adopted in 1986, the code of conduct allows soldiers to kill their
own people if they are going to be taken alive by their perceived enemy. A growing body of evidence has revealed that
hundreds of Israelis who died that day were killed, not by Hamas, but by their
own soldiers.
The Dahiya
doctrine became official military policy after Israel’s devastating attack on
Lebanon in 2006. Named after the Dahiya
suburb in Beirut, the doctrine —illegal under international law—calls for the
use of massive, disproportionate force and deliberate targeting of civilians
and civilian infrastructure in future wars.
For far too
long, deceptive narratives have been used and scant attention paid to Israel’s indefensible policies. This is particularly the case regarding U.N.
General Assembly Partition Resolution 181 (1947) that Israel used to declare
statehood and in its colonizing of what was left of historic Palestine.
By eschewing
years of Israeli apartheid rule and the 16-year siege of the Gaza Strip, the
public was left with the impression that the October assault was a random
unprovoked act of violence. They heard
few details of the crushing siege Israel imposed on Gaza when it withdrew in
2005, leaving behind a restrictive disengagement plan retaining exclusive
control over Gaza’s air space, territorial waters, borders, electricity, water
supply and movement of people and goods.
History reveals
that there is a direct link between occupation and violence; that occupied people will use whatever means they
have to be free, including violence.
International
law (Fourth Geneva Convention, 1949) affirms the right of national liberation
movements to resist, to use force against military occupation.
Through a more
nuanced lens, Hamas’s action on 7 October could be seen as a reasonable and
expected reaction to Israel’s violent unending colonizing project.
The media failed
to remember that, like Hamas, the African National Congress was labeled a
terrorist organization by the United States.
And that it was only in 2008, that Nelson Mandela, imprisoned for 27
years for opposing the South African apartheid regime, was removed from the
U.S. terror watchlist—transformed from “terrorist” to a celebrated “beacon for
freedom and democracy.”
The concocted
myth of the noble Israeli, circumspect warrior and “civilized aggressor” do not
correspond with the images coming from Gaza and Lebanon. Logic, however, has been turned on its head
as the people of Palestine are told to accept that they—the colonized and
oppressed—have no right to defend themselves and are to blame for the carnage
done by the Israeli colonizer.
English
novelist, George Orwell (1903-1950), was correct when he keenly observed that
“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder
respectable, and do give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
Within the
corporate media bubble, U.S. scribes have employed political language promotive
of Israel. National liberation movements
fighting against Israeli genocide and U.S. hegemony are labeled terrorists
“backed” by Iran. Whereas, Washington’s
“backing” of the genocidal fanatics in Tel Aviv is “helping” an ally. Political leadership in Iran is characterized
as a “regime,” while Israel is led by a democratic “government.”
Like terrorism,
the term “proxy” is also used repeatedly to characterize allies of Iran. Hamas,
Hezbollah in Lebanon and Ansar Allah in Yemen are falsely represented as
vassals of Tehran, that they are not indigenous, but foreign impositions
without a mass base of support in their own countries.
Israel’s
oppressive presence in the West Bank is portrayed as “defensive,” while Jewish
colonizers, protected by its military, ransack and help themselves to
Palestinian homes, property and bank accounts.
According to the Palestinian health ministry, at least 716 Palestinians,
including 160 children, have been killed by Israeli army and illegal colonizer
attacks in the occupied West Bank since 7 October 2023.
After a year of
war, Israel has proven that it is not a democracy, it is an apartheid entity;
it is not a promised land, it is a settler-colonial project; it is not a nation
under siege, it an aggressor; it is not defending itself, it is conducting a
genocidal war in Gaza.
Although there
have been a number of significant reports on the reality in Gaza, the media has
given little, if any, attention to them.
We have been kept largely in the dark. They include:
* Brown University, Watson Institute, “United
States Spending on Israel’s Military Operations and Related U.S. Operations in
the Region, October 7, 2023-September
30, 2024.
* Watson Institute, “The Human Toll: Indirect
Deaths from War in Gaza and the West
Bank, October 7, 2023 Forward.”
* Gaza Health Care Letters, 2 October 2024
Open Letter to President Joe Biden and
Vice President Kamala Harris, signed by 99 physicians and other medical
professionals who have served in Gaza this past year.
According to the
Watson Institute, the Biden administration has spent $22.76 billion financing
the genocide in Gaza. In their 2 October letter, one of many addressed to the
White House, health care workers reported that 62,413 people in Gaza have died
of starvation and the death toll is likely greater than 118,908.
It is dangerous
and costly to keep “we the people” in the dark.
We need to think back on the lies that led us into wars in Vietnam,
Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.
Poignantly, the
cautionary words of our discredited 37th president, Richard M. Nixon, are
eerily relevant today: “Fundamental to our way of life,” he said on 22 November
1972, “is the belief that when information which properly belongs to the public
is systematically withheld by those in power, the people soon become ignorant
of their own affairs, distrustful of those who manage them, and
—eventually—incapable of determining their own destinies.”
It is
disingenuous to attempt to convince the public that the assassination of
resistance leaders opposed to U.S.-Israeli hegemony in Palestine and in the
region will end their struggle for freedom. The tangled web of deception driven
by Washington, Tel Aviv and the corporate media will not turn back the
resisters.
As they have proven
for more than seven decades, they are the masters of their own judgments,
decisions and actions.
José Goulão
In countless comments and opinions
that proliferate regarding the current situation in the Palestinian territories
known as Israel, there is the conviction that the only problem is Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In other words, once he resigns or is fired, the
crisis will be resolved and everything will return to the Lord’s peace with the
continuation of the methodical ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.
Pure deception, pious illusion.
Nothing will be the same again in the so-called “Jewish State”.
The deduction is objective and
results from the inevitable reality that would one day have to arrive: the
terrible ideological and religious existential battle that takes place within
Zionism – the racist and supremacist doctrine on which the State of Israel is
based – between the secular and religious fundamentalists; or “between the law
of the people” and “God’s law”, in the meaningful yet simplistic words of a
participant in one of the recent gigantic demonstrations in Tel Aviv.
The “law of the people” is the
fallacy on which the State of Israel has historically relied, from its founding
as a Western colony in Palestine to ensuring imperial control throughout the
Middle East. A fallacy in which Zionism itself propagandistically lived in the
initial phase after its birth, at the end of the 19th century and beginning of
the 20th century, when the official founder of the doctrine, the Austrian and
Ashkenazic Jew Theodor Herzl, proclaimed it as a secular system and of European
political inspiration (which today is called liberal); and whose mobilizing
tasks were “the return (of the Jews) to the Promised Land” because Palestine
was nothing more than “a land without people for a people without land”.
This is, from the beginning, the
fatal contradiction of Zionism: between the secular propaganda that prevailed
mythologically as unique until 1925; and the authentic and, in fact, original
essence of the expansionist doctrine, its religious and fundamentalist
character exposed by the biblical concept of “Promised Land” and the consequent
occupation of a “land without people” or, in quantitatively more objective
terms, an abusively populated territory by barbarians and uncivilized people.
In truth, Zionism was born immediately contaminated by religious inevitability,
only tactically hidden.
All the first heads of government
since the founding of the State of Israel have embodied this inconsistent
duality, claiming to be secular in politics and religious in personal life, an
ambiguity essential to guarantee the façade of respect for the norms of Western
democracies, such as the separation between Church and State, essential for the
attempt to give credibility to the already tired proclamation as “the only
democracy in the Middle East”. Or, as Prime Minister Netanyahu guarantees
today, while carrying out the bloody final solution for the Palestinians, to
ensure “the defense of Western civilization” in the region.
It deserves a brief reflection on
the fact that these Israeli political leaders, overwhelmingly Ashkenazi and
settlers, because they are of European origin, are careful to declare
themselves religious. This is the only premise that undoubtedly guarantees
their Judaism because the Semitism of many of these Europeans is probably
residual or null. Otherwise, if they disdained the personal religious factor,
we would then be faced with yet another trace of the caricature of
anti-Semitism imposed as the official version and which serves Israel to accuse
the rest of the world of being anti-Semitic. Therefore, the founding fathers
themselves would not be Semites or religious, immediately falsifying the Jewish
character of the new State and denouncing in plain sight its exclusive and
artificial role as a colony of Western powers in the Middle East.
Beginning of the end of “secular
Zionism”
The founding fallacy of Zionism has
survived many decades since the establishment of the State while the continued
colonization of Arab territories was developing, an illegal process only
possible thanks to the tolerance and complicity of the UN, the United States
and the countries involved in European integration: first in the territories
allocated to the Arab population through the sharing agreement approved in 1948
by the United Nations; from 1967 and the so-called Six-Day War, in the
Palestinian regions of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem occupied at that
time, allowing the installation of settlements in vast areas stolen by the
Zionist regime from the original population. They are now home to almost
700,000 fanatical fundamentalist Jews from all over the world, the overwhelming
majority without any ethnic roots in Palestine.
This brutal and massive demographic
violence, always with the character of ethnic cleansing, as it was written,
mortally wounded the fallacy of secular Zionism. Real, fascist, fiercely racist
and segregationist Zionism, which has the expulsion of all Palestinians on the
horizon, has taken power over the most recent decades and intends to remain
there eternally “by the will of God”, respected and fulfilled through “prophets
” self-taught and terrorists who consider themselves mandated by him to
guarantee their vigilante role on Earth by applying the terrifying mythology of
the Old Testament to the letter.
Netanyahu is just another leader in
this process of transforming the character of the State, even though the role
of head of government played almost exclusively over the last 30 years has
given him a natural prominence, although overestimated in relation to his real
weight in the fundamentalist environment. nun who today administers Israel. He
inherited the mission from his father, Benzion Netanyahu, in turn personal
secretary and one of the main ideological disciples of Volodymir Jabotinsky,
the Ukrainian who was a collaborator of Mussolini and in 1925 had caused the
great schism between the secular Zionism opportunistically proclaimed at birth
and that designated “ revisionist Zionism” founded by him. This variant of
extremist colonialism under “Hebrew” cover inspires the political-religious
fanaticism that prevails in the current government and aims to create a
theocracy – the primacy of the “Law of God”. Maintaining, of course, the
mission of defending Western civilization in the Middle East. It is no small
matter that this fanatical tendency has enormous representation within the
World Jewish Congress and is supported without practical restrictions by the
United States regime and the non-democratic bodies that define European Union
policies.
Voices that foresee the catastrophe
Ehud Barak, one of the most
experienced Israeli politicians, prime minister of a government at the
beginning of the century that practiced a savage repression of the so-called
Second Palestinian Intifada and was the last head of the Labor Party as an influential
political organization, has a relevant opinion about the ongoing events. “Under
the cover of war,” he says, “a governmental and constitutional coup is taking
place without a shot being fired; If the coup is not stopped it will turn
Israel into a dictatorship within weeks – Netanyahu and his government are
murdering democracy.” The path proposed by the now “centrist” leader is to
“close the country through large-scale civil disobedience 24 hours a day, seven
days a week”.
A much more incisive and advanced
opinion, and also alarming, comes from General Moshe Yalon, former Chief of
Staff of the Armed Forces and former Minister of Defense:
“An angry, eschatological cult is
laying down the law in Tel Aviv, the headquarters of the genocidal and colonial
construction of the settler community; This process is completed with a huge
vigilante militia, or interconnected militias of hundreds of thousands of
colonists armed to the teeth, uncontrollable and prepared for anything, even
attacking the military and the State.”
A “former Mossad director” quoted by
the newspaper “Haaretz” even questions the future of the so-called “Jewish
State” saying that if it takes the form of “a racist and violent State it will
not be able to survive; and it’s probably already too late.”
“A Mein Kampf in reverse”
When following the globalist media
network, it will be said that the current Israeli government is made up only of
Prime Minister Netanyahu and the Minister of Finance, Bezalel Smotrich, and the
Minister of Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, these two benevolently considered as “
far-right” when, in practice, they are nothing more than Nazi terrorists.
Smotrich is a settler head of the
National Religious Party who denies the existence of the Palestinian people,
“composed of sub-humans”. On his record he has several accusations of terrorist
attacks, including against Zionist authorities.
Itamar Ben-Gvir is the son of an
Iraqi Kurdish Jew who was part of the terrorist group Irgun, a founding branch
of the Israeli army born in the ranks of Mussolini and historically led by
former prime minister Menahem Begin. He heads the Otzmar Yehdiut organization,
equally “extreme right” and heir to the banned Kach movement of the fascist
icon Meir Kahane, an American terrorist born in New York, where he committed
several attacks for which he was sentenced to one year in prison, which he
served in a hotel. He then settled in Israel to fight for the expulsion of all
Palestinians from Palestine, was arrested at least 60 times for terrorist
attacks and was elected a member of the Knesset (Parliament).
Voices that foresee the catastrophe
Ehud Barak, one of the most
experienced Israeli politicians, prime minister of a government at the
beginning of the century that practiced a savage repression of the so-called
Second Palestinian Intifada and was the last head of the Labor Party as an influential
political organization, has a relevant opinion about the ongoing events. “Under
the cover of war,” he says, “a governmental and constitutional coup is taking
place without a shot being fired; If the coup is not stopped it will turn
Israel into a dictatorship within weeks – Netanyahu and his government are
murdering democracy.” The path proposed by the now “centrist” leader is to
“close the country through large-scale civil disobedience 24 hours a day, seven
days a week”.
A much more incisive and advanced
opinion, and also alarming, comes from General Moshe Yalon, former Chief of
Staff of the Armed Forces and former Minister of Defense:
“An angry, eschatological cult is
laying down the law in Tel Aviv, the headquarters of the genocidal and colonial
construction of the settler community; This process is completed with a huge
vigilante militia, or interconnected militias of hundreds of thousands of
colonists armed to the teeth, uncontrollable and prepared for anything, even
attacking the military and the State.”
A “former Mossad director” quoted by
the newspaper “Haaretz” even questions the future of the so-called “Jewish
State” saying that if it takes the form of “a racist and violent State it will
not be able to survive; and it’s probably already too late.”
“A Mein Kampf in reverse”
When following the globalist media
network, it will be said that the current Israeli government is made up only of
Prime Minister Netanyahu and the Minister of Finance, Bezalel Smotrich, and the
Minister of Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, these two benevolently considered as “
far-right” when, in practice, they are nothing more than Nazi terrorists.
Smotrich is a settler head of the
National Religious Party who denies the existence of the Palestinian people,
“composed of sub-humans”. On his record he has several accusations of terrorist
attacks, including against Zionist authorities.
Itamar Ben-Gvir is the son of an
Iraqi Kurdish Jew who was part of the terrorist group Irgun, a founding branch
of the Israeli army born in the ranks of Mussolini and historically led by
former prime minister Menahem Begin. He heads the Otzmar Yehdiut organization,
equally “extreme right” and heir to the banned Kach movement of the fascist
icon Meir Kahane, an American terrorist born in New York, where he committed
several attacks for which he was sentenced to one year in prison, which he
served in a hotel. He then settled in Israel to fight for the expulsion of all
Palestinians from Palestine, was arrested at least 60 times for terrorist
attacks and was elected a member of the Knesset (Parliament).
Scott Ritter
Anti-aircraft guns guarding Natanz Nuclear Facility, Iran. (Hamed Saber/Wikimedia Commons)
October 20, 2024
The outbreak of
conflict between Iran and Israel appears to have changed Iran’s stance against
possessing a nuclear weapon as Israel is poised to strike after Teheran’s
retaliation with two major attacks of drones and ballistic and cruise missiles.
Iran has issued
at least three statements through official channels since April that has opened
the door to the possibility of religious edicts against Iran acquiring nuclear
weapons being rescinded.
The
circumstances which Iran has said must exist to justify this reversal appear to
have now been met.
No mere threats,
these statements issued by Teheran should be viewed as declaratory policy
indicating Iran has already made the decision to obtain a nuclear weapon; that
the means to do so are already in place and that this decision can be
implemented in a matter of days once the final political order is given.
The religious
fatwa against possessing nuclear weapons was issued in October 2003 by Iran’s
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. It reads:
“We believe that adding to nuclear weapons and other
types of weapons of mass destruction, such as chemical weapons and biological
weapons, are a serious threat to humanity…[w]e consider the use of these
weapons to be haram (forbidden), and the effort to protect mankind from this
great disaster is everyone’s duty.”
However, the
Shia faith holds that fatwas are not inherently permanent, and Islamic jurists
can reinterpret the scripture in accord with the needs of time.
Shortly after
Iran launched Operation True Promise against Israel in April, Ahmad Haghtalab,
an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander responsible for the
security for Iran’s nuclear sites, declared:
“If [Israel] wants to exploit the threat of
attacking our country’s nuclear centers as a tool to put pressure on Iran, it
is possible and conceivable to revise the Islamic Republic of Iran’s nuclear
doctrine and policies to deviate from previously declared considerations.”
In May, Kamal
Kharrazi, a former foreign minister who advises the Supreme Leader, declared:
“We [Iran] have no decision to build a nuclear bomb, but should Iran’s
existence be threatened, there will be no choice but to change our military
doctrine.”
And earlier this
month Iranian lawmakers called for a review of Iran’s defense doctrine to
consider adopting nuclear weapons as the risk of escalation with Israel
continues to grow. The legislators noted that the Supreme Leader can reconsider
the fatwa against nuclear weapons on the grounds that the circumstances have
changed.
These
statements, seen together, constitute a form of declaratory policy which, given
the sources involved, imply that a political decision has already been made to
build a nuclear bomb once the national security criterion has been met.
Has the
Capability
Iran has for
some time now possessed the ability to manufacture and weaponize nuclear
explosive devices. Using highly enriched uranium, Iran could construct in a
matter of days a simple gun-type weapon that could be used in a ballistic
missile warhead.
In June Iran
informed the IAEA that it was installing some 1,400 advanced centrifuges at its
Fordow facility. Based upon calculations derived from Iran’s on-hand stockpile
of 60 percent enriched uranium hexaflouride (the feedstock used in
centrifuge-based enrichment), Iran could produce enough highly enriched uranium
(i.e., above 90 percent) to manufacture 3-5 uranium-baed weapons in days.
All that is
needed is the political will to do so. It appears that Iran has crossed this
threshold, meaning that the calculus behind any Israeli and/or U.S. attack on
Iran has been forever changed.
Iran has made no
bones about this new reality. In February, the former chief of the Atomic
Energy Organization, Ali-Akbar Salehi, stated that Iran has crossed “all the
scientific and technological nuclear thresholds” to build a nuclear bomb,
noting that Iran had accumulated all the necessary components for a nuclear
weapon, minus the highly enriched uranium.
Two weeks later,
Javad Karimi Ghodousi, a member of the Iranian parliament’s National Security
Commission, declared that if the supreme leader “issues permission, we would be
a week away from testing the first [nuclear bomb]“, later adding that Iran “needs
half a day or maximum a week to build a nuclear warhead.”
A simple
gun-type nuclear weapon would not need to be tested — the “Little Boy“ device
dropped on Hiroshima by the U.S. on Aug. 6, 1945 was a gun-type device that was
deemed so reliable that it could be used operationally without any prior
testing.
Iran would need
between 75 and 120 pounds of highly enriched uranium per gun-type device (the
more sophisticated the design, the less material would be needed). Regardless,
the payload of the Fatah-1 solid-fueled hypersonic missile, which was used in
the Oct. 1 attack on Israel, is some 900 pounds—more than enough capacity to
carry a gun-type uranium weapon.
Given the fact
that the ballistic missile shield covering Israel was unable to intercept the
Fatah-1 missile, if Iran were to build, deploy, and employ a nuclear-armed
Fatah-1 missile against Israel, there is a near 100 percent certainty that it
would hit its target.
Iran would need
3-5 nuclear weapons of this type to completely destroy Israel’s ability to
function as a modern industrial nation.
Consequences of
Pulling Out of Iran Nuclear Deal
This situation
came about after President Donald Trump in 2017 withdrew the U.S. from the
Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — the JCPOA, better known as the Iran
nuclear deal. The driving factor behind the negotiation of the JCPOA, which
took place under President Barack Obama, was to shut down Iran’s pathway to a
nuclear weapon. As Obama said,
“Put simply, under this deal, there is a permanent
prohibition on Iran ever having a nuclear weapons program and a permanent
inspections regime that goes beyond any previous inspection regime in Iran.
This deal provides the IAEA the means to make sure Iran isn’t doing so, both
through JCPOA-specific verification tools, some of which last up to 25 years,
and through the Additional Protocol that lasts indefinitely. In addition, Iran
made commitments in this deal that include prohibitions on key research and development
activities that it would need to design and construct a nuclear weapon. Those
commitments have no end date.”
Early on in his
administration, in June 2021, after Trump had already pulled the U.S. out of
the deal, President Joe Biden declared that Iran would “never get a nuclear
weapon on my watch.”
The director of
U.S. National Intelligence said in a statement released Oct. 11 that, “We
assess that the Supreme Leader has not made a decision to resume the nuclear
weapons program that Iran suspended in 2003.”
In the aftermath
of Trump’s precipitous decision to withdraw from the JCPOA, Iran took actions
which underscored that it no longer felt constrained by any JCPOA limits.
Iran has
expanded its nuclear program by installing advanced centrifuge cascades used to
enrich uranium and scaled back International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
monitoring of its nuclear program. In short, Iran has positioned itself to
produce a nuclear weapon on short order.
While the ODNI
currently believes that the Supreme Leader has not made the political decision
to do so, an assessment published in July contains a telling omission from past
assessments of Iran’s nuclear capabilities.
The February
2024 ODNI assessment noted that, “Iran is not currently undertaking the key
nuclear weapons-development activities necessary to produce a testable nuclear
device.”
However, this
statement went missing from the July 2024 assessment, a clear indication that
the U.S. intelligence community, due in large part to the reduction in IAEA
inspection activity, lacks the insight into critical technical aspects of
Iran’s nuclear-related industries.
Senator Lindsey
Graham, after reading the classified version of the July 2024 ODNI report on
Iran, said he was “very worried” that “Iran will in the coming weeks or months
possess a nuclear weapon.”
What Confronts
the US & Israel
This is the
situation confronting Israel and the United States as they decide on an Israeli
retaliation against Iran for the Oct. 1 missile attack.
Iran has
indicated that any attack against its nuclear or oil and gas production
capabilities would be viewed as existential in nature. That could trigger the
reversal of the fatwa and the deployment of nuclear weapons within days of such
a decision being made.
President Joe
Biden told reporters on Friday that he knows when and where Israel will strike
but refused to say. Leaked U.S. intelligence documents in recent days showed
the limits of U.S. knowledge of exactly what Israel plans to do.
The United
States and nuclear-power Israel have long said that a nuclear-armed Iran was a
red line which could not be crossed without severe consequences, namely massive
military intervention designed to destroy Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.
That line has
been crossed — Iran is a de facto nuclear power, even if it hasn’t taken the
final steps to complete the construction of a nuclear bomb.
The consequences
of attacking Iran could prove fatal to the attackers and possibly the whole
region.
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