I've read in a few different places that the U.S. has been working with companies to make faulty equipment and supplying it to the Iranians. If this is correct, I'm glad that the effort is yielding some good results. Now that this has been brought to light, where do you think the Iranians will look for there new parts? If Russia is serious about sanctions and keeping Iran nuclear free, then I don't believe that they would be fueling up the reactors (today?). China is always a possibility, their need for oil outweighs their fear of a U.S. reprisal that wont ever actually happen.

Uh, does anyone remember the notorious failed assessment of 2007 loudly trumpetiing that the Iranians had ceased development of nuke weapon capability since 2003? Is Drezner so weak between the ears that he can cherry-pick the Obama Administration's "positive" assessment that the nuke development, which the saboteurs of the Bush Administration in the CIA said was not proceeding, is now "delayed" for another year?

I'm an ex-FSO Arabist and can see through these shallow bromides with no problem. How do I sign up for Dan's "assistant?"

By the calendar, if we believe news reports about what the Obama administration has persuaded the Israeli government is the case, the danger of an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear sites has been pushed back from June of next year to August of next year.

Maybe this is significant, maybe not. I thought the Goldberg piece was interesting, though. Whatever his own mistakes on WMD-related issues may have been in the past, he set out to give an impression of Israeli attitudes toward the Iranian nuclear issue. This is information we need to know.

Having said that, I have a few other thoughts:

1. Goldberg's piece is all about Israel's interests. The problem I see with that resides in the word "all." Of course Goldberg set out to write primarily about the Israeli perspective, and that's fine. One might have expected, though, one of the American sources for this story to have mentioned something about American interests with respect to Iran. Apart from what little Goldberg says himself, the closest thing to acknowledgement that American interests might go beyond Israeli worries and passions comes from Shimon Peres.

2. The Green Movement in Iran did not happen for Goldberg's article. It gets a perfunctory mention at the beginning; after that, an upheaval that had the Iranian government defending its legitimacy against domestic critics with grievances that had nothing to do with either America or Israel just vanishes. This is oddly consistent with the Obama administration's deer-in-the-headlights reaction in the days and weeks after the events of June, 2009. If the Green Movement didn't produce "regime change" now, what was it good for? But if one wants to divert a hostile regime from pursuing a weapons program that would put
it at odds with most other governments, dismissing so the other things that government might have to worry about seems, well, a little unsophisticated.

3. The status of the Iranian nuclear program is assumed by sources quoted in this piece to be consistent with intelligence estimates by the same people who have thought Iran was close to a bomb before. They were wrong before. It may well be that eventually they will be right -- but if the urgency of action is in
fact a prime driver of Israeli thinking, surely the grounds for that urgency deserve a bit more examination than Goldberg gives them.

4. I thought it was interesting that Goldberg devotes much space in this piece to Netanyahu's relationship with his father, quotes Peres extensively after noting that he is the only member of Israel's founding generation still in office... and does not dwell at all on the influence of that generation on Israel's current leadership. In the Israeli view, Peres and his associates
accomplished big things when they were young -- often through their military exploits -- and Israel's current leaders have accomplished... the Lebanon war and Operation Cast Lead. I have no doubt at all that talk in Israel about Shoah and apocalypse and all the rest of it is perfectly sincere, and under other circumstances I tend to roll my eyes at long-distance psychoanalysis. But, according to Goldberg, Israeli thinking is heavily influenced by history, and one key Israeli leader is described as dependent on his father for approval. Israel has more recent history than the Holocaust, and everyone else in the
Israeli government has a father, too. It is possible to imagine a successful air assault on Iran's nuclear program as clean, surgical, heroic -- '56-like, '67-like. That fact may have more influence on this group of Israelis than we suspect.

5. Israeli domestic politics don't show up in Goldberg's article. That's a significant omission, since the Netanyahu government's accommodation with the Israeli settler lobby is key to its continuance in power. That Israeli leaders are sincere in their concern about a threat from Iran does not mean they won't
use that threat as an excuse to avoid confronting the settlement issue and risking the domestic political ruptures such a confrontation would produce. Once again, these are Israeli problems. I'd like to keep them from becoming American ones.

6. Finally, Goldberg persuaded me of something the Obama administration also appears to believe: we need to keep a closer eye on the Israeli government than I had previously thought necessary. The risk that some Israeli leaders might substitute their judgement for that of the American government on a matter touching on crucial American interests appears to be greater than I had thought.

What a fascinating modern age we live in.

Honest question, why? Especially when we know that they have a record of lying to the public and getting away with it.

* http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/08/20/goldberg/index.html

* http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/08/12/goldberg/index.html

Allowing for the possibility that covert sabotage is slowing the Iranian nuclear program, how much time can be bought?

I suggest that the President has accepted the reality of a nuclear Iran, but that he doesn't want to publicize that particular conclusion -- now that's "horrible optics."

1. The US national interest in the region centers around oil. So does Iran's. Iran wants local domination, which will undoubtedly turn out to be some sort of oil monopoly by intimidation. One good way of intimidating the oil states is to nuke Israel. The US absolutely cannot tolerate Iranian oil monopoly, nor the ability it confers to blackmail the West, including Europe.

2. Israeli attitudes to Iran are also deeply influence by the experiences of the Eastern (Mizrachi) Jews who came to Israel, especially from Iran. These, mostly Sephardi, Jews have strong personal memories of life under Islam. Tens of thousands of Jews fled Iran when the 1979 Revolution took over. This is probably as influential as the holocaust in forming Israeli opinion. Perhaps more so.

3. Once Iran gets nuclear weapons, they will have them for 100 years. If they don't use them, they will improve what they have.

4. As long as Shia Islam keeps on getting tons of oil money every year, they will continue to be expansionist and neo-Imperialistic. One way to stop the flow of money is to invent new energy technology, which would impoverish Iran. The other is to use the military to seize the oil fields.

5. Imagine 150 countries, each with missiles and nuclear warheads. Stop it now or stop it later.

sikis
pornolar