Congressman confirms report of heated argument between Netanyahu and US envoy

Congressman confirms report of heated argument between Netanyahu and US envoy
It was like ‘nothing at that level that I’ve seen in all my time,’ says Mike Rogers. Ambassador Shapiro had denied breaking protocol and called the original Israeli article ‘a very silly story’

By Yoel Goldman
September 07, 2012 "Times Of Israel" - -  A report claiming there was a dramatic verbal bust-up between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the US Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro late last month — which was flatly denied this week by Shapiro in a TV interview — was confirmed by a congressman who was present at the meeting, which covered divergent US and Israeli policies on Iran.

The exchange was like “nothing at that level that I’ve seen in all my time,” said Rep. Mike Rogers, a Republican from Michigan.

The State Department would not comment Thursday on the apparent contradiction.

Rogers told a Detroit radio station that the Netanyahu-Shapiro interchange, at the meeting on August 24 in Jerusalem, featured “very tense,” “agitated” and “elevated” exchanges, and that Netanyahu was “at wit’s end” with what the prime minister saw as a lack of US clarity on the Iran issue.

“It was very, very clear that the Israelis had lost their patience with the administration,” Rogers, chairman of the House intelligence committee, was quoted by the Washington Post Thursday as saying.

His account contradicted statements made by US envoy Shapiro, who went on television earlier this week to flatly deny the original report in Yedioth Ahronoth as “a very silly story.”

According to the Yedioth article, Ambassador Shapiro grew enraged by Netanyahu’s remarks about President Barack Obama’s handling of the Iranian threat, broke diplomatic protocol, and snapped at the PM for misrepresenting the US president’s position. “Sparks and lightning were flying,” an unnamed source told the paper.

But in an interview Sunday with Channel 2 News, the ambassador was dismissive when asked about the newspaper’s account of the closed-door meeting.

“The published account of that meeting did not reflect what actually occurred in the meeting,” Shapiro said. “The conversations were entirely friendly and professional. They always are. I always speak respectfully with the prime minister, just as the prime minister always speaks respectfully with me. And that really characterizes all of the dialogue between our governments.”

The envoy continued: “We’re such close allies, we have so many common interests… that we speak together in the most friendly, the most professional way. Even on an occasion that we have a disagreement, that’s how we work together. And that was certainly the case in the (recent) meeting.”

There was no argument, no verbal skirmish, no disagreement, the interviewer persisted? “Sorry to disappoint you,” Shapiro responded.

But Rogers, who was interviewed Tuesday on the Detriot radio program, gave a version of the meeting that reinforced the Yedioth story. He said there were “elevated” exchanges between Netanyahu and Shapiro, adding: “We’ve had sharp exchanges with other heads of state and other things, in intelligence services and other things, but nothing at that level that I’ve seen in all my time, where people were clearly that agitated, clearly that worked up about a particular issue, where there was a very sharp exchange.”

He said that Netanyahu does not believe Obama would attack Iran, and that the prime minister was frustrated that the US has not defined “red lines” for Iran and its nuclear program.

State Department spokesman Edgar Vasquez declined Thursday to address Rogers’ comments, saying only that America’s relationship with Israel remains extremely strong.

Asher Zeiger contributed to this report.

9/11, Bin Laden and the Tyranny of the Corporate Media

9/11, Bin Laden and the Tyranny of the Corporate Media

By Prof. James F. Tracy

This essay originally appeared on September 21, 2001 in my Daily Iowan column, “Firing Line.” The piece uses George Orwell’s 1984 as a basis to suggest how from the very beginning the corporate media played a central role in setting the stage for the prevalent Osama bin Laden-Al Qaeda myth, the related “blowback” thesis vigorously embraced by the progressive-left community, and the assemblage of rearguard actions defending such perspectives and reflexively labeling all accounts conflicting with government pronouncements as “conspiracy theories.”

An expertly orchestrated barrage of 9/11 propaganda in the weeks and months following the attacks had a devastatingly traumatic effect on a majority of the US population while simultaneously rendering many of the most legitimate and important questions to the sidelines. Together these discursive elements have helped to create an environment where, as Orwell envisaged, essential civil liberties have been forsaken and perpetual war has become the norm. -JT

In the age of the concentration camp, castration is more characteristic of social reality than competitiveness. -Theodor Adorno

September 09, 2012 "Information Clearing House" - -  Students in my media theory class couldn’t be reading 1984 at a more opportune time. Orwell’s thesis, articulated shortly after World War II, was a disturbingly prescient scenario of the world geopolitical order in the late 20th century and what it would be like to inhabit that then future world.

The dire anti-utopian predictions were largely informed by Orwell’s activities as an engaged European socialist who, in 1947, believed that the greatest obstacles to human liberation were Soviet and U.S. imperialist conquest and the human inability to collectively imagine a world free from tyranny and bloodshed.

The means of technological communication were central to the project of perpetuating a condition wherein the very soul of individuals was replaced by lockstep allegiance to the state. Protagonist Winston Smith is a peon bureaucrat who refashions the past to be in accord with present edicts of the ruling party’s inner circle.

The higher strata of the social order are lulled into a rabid nationalism rationalized by the Manichean representations of Big Brother, warm paternal protector, and Emanuel Goldstein, Party traitor and embodiment of all evil. The good/evil dichotomy and state of siege prove sufficient in keeping obtuse party members in line, while the more humane must undergo a concerted brainwashing.

The U.S. media function in an entirely similar fashion, particularly with regard to U.S. foreign policy and coverage of the horrific bombings of the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Indeed, it is in what the media have willfully omitted or feigned in such coverage that would have likely made Winston’s role as censor much easier, if not entirely expendable.

In June, a French judge did what the U.S. is now attempting with Osama bin Laden in summoning the former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to the French Hall of Justice for questioning about the 1973 Chilean coup. Kissinger’s track record makes bin Laden look like the Good Humor man, and when Kissinger fled the country the next day, the U.S. media never batted an eye. Does two plus two equal five?

Earlier this year, CNN President of News Gathering Eason Jordan confirmed that the U.S. military’s special Psychological Operations Group (Psy-ops) had personnel working at CNN during the Kosovo conflict. A U.S. Army spokesperson remarked, “Psy-ops personnel, soldiers and officers, have been working in CNN’s headquarters in Atlanta through our program ‘Training with Industry.’ They worked as regular employees of CNN. They helped in the production of news.”

CNN is [among] the most widely circulated means of electronic news in the world. Whether Psy-ops personnel returned to assist in coverage of “911″ is a matter for consideration.

While journalists seldom missed an opportunity to pursue grieving and petrified New Yorkers with vampire-like zeal, they dismissed the story of an Iranian man who, along with German authorities on Sept. 10 made 14 attempts to contact the U.S. State Department and the CIA about a possible attack; he was hung up on.

Nor was it examined in any detail that since August, the World Trade Center has been on “heightened security alert.” Or that a censored ABC videotape purportedly showed an F-16 Fighter trailing the second passenger jet that hit the WTC.

Canadians were shown video footage of Yasser Arafat giving blood on Sept. 12—U.S. viewers were not. And on Sept. 15, thousands went to mark a national day of mourning for victims of the terrorism and to protest plans to deploy massive military action in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Although the events were covered in mainstream media, the calls for peace were conveniently edited out.

Finally, that our elaborate $30 billion per year intelligence and surveillance apparatus had no foreknowledge of the attacks may have been laughable if the circumstances were not so dire. That story has been dismissed and with it government accountability to the families of the 6,300 [sic] missing or deceased and to the remaining U.S. citizenry.

At a time when information is crucial and thousands if not millions more innocent lives may be lost, U.S. journalists are again “stenographers to power” -obsequiously conveying the pronouncements of saber rattling military and government officials screaming quixotic bloodlust at an enemy that remains undefined.

As Hitler, Stalin , and Big Brother well knew, the more poorly defined’ the enemy, the stronger the blind allegiance given the state in fighting it and the greater willingness of the polity in repudiating its own civil liberties. The fear is real, and the enemy this time around isn’t Jews, Gypsies, Formalists, or Eurasians. The new enemy is us.

The Daily Iowan and James F. Tracy, 2012

Netanyahu Can ‘Squeeze’ Obama

Netanyahu Can ‘Squeeze’ Obama

US media and Congress will take his side if he attacks Iran

By Philip Weiss 
September 09, 2012 "Information Clearing House" - -  What is the role of the Israeli government in American political life? Well, apparently we must defer to Netanyahu. "To Attack of Not to Attack" is by Zaki Shalom, a senior research fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies, Tel Aviv University, writing in a journal of the French Institute for International Relations. Breathtaking. Boldface is mine: 

We must take into account that the Prime Minister is raising the bar for threats toward Iran, inter alia, because he recognizes that the current US administration is seeking to prevent an Israeli action before the elections at any price. It would probably be no exaggeration to say that the prime minister is going around with the feeling that the political future of President Obama is to some extent, perhaps even a large extent, in the Prime Minister’s hands. An Israeli action at the present time would almost certainly expose the president to serious criticism for his fecklessness, which forced Israel, a close ally of the United States, to act alone. Various segments in the US administration, especially the Congress, will make demands to support Israel.
All this, when the consequences of an Israeli action for the stagnant US economy are liable to be serious. Under these circumstances, it is not inconceivable that the Prime Minister believes that currently, he can “squeeze” from the president far-reaching commitments in Israel’s favor in exchange for Israeli restraint on Iran. This compensation will presumably be mainly in the areas of defense and the economy. Israel, the prime minister can argue, is prepared to take a strategic risk on the Iranian issue, if it knows that the US administration will support it and will be prepared to give it aid that under normal circumstances, it would not be prepared to give...

The Prime Minister can assume that an Israeli attack prior to the November 2012 elections will make it very difficult for the Obama administration to criticize Israel openly. He can assume with near certainty that as soon as the attack begins, members of Congress, the media, Jewish leaders, and Republican Party leaders will issue statements supporting Israel and even demand that the administration back Israel and defend it. The Obama administration cannot ignore such expressions of support in the period leading up to the elections.

Bruce Wolman, who tipped me off to this article, adds:

It's a win-win for Netanyahu. If he is not serious about attacking Iran, he still gets the max from the USA with his blackmailing. If he is serious, he puts Obama in a box such that he has to rescue the IDF. Netanyahu doesn't even have to decide between the two until the day of the election. He can just keep us all guessing. (However, I can't believe our $300B intelligence services don't know whether Israel is serious or not.)

I disagree that Obama has no choice. He could take on Netanyahu and AIPAC and win. Why? The military has his back on this one. But Obama is not such a risk taker. He is a campaign machine, nothing more. If he has an ideology, it is moderate Republican economic values. If he faced Netanyahu head on, a lot of non-Jewish Americans would support him. There is war fatigue in this country and in the military. But the longer he waits, the more trapped Netanyahu has him. 

If Obama had led on this issue, he could have used it to his political advantage. Obama could easily parry the statements of Republican leaders, and he is not going to get the Christian Zionists to vote for him anyhow. Even many Jews do not want us to go to war with Iran. But Obama won't take this risk, because he doesn't want to upset his Jewish donors. 

Netanyahu traps him with each passing day because the U.S. administration keeps validating Israel's talking points in an effort to appease the Israeli government. That makes it harder for Obama to reverse the rhetoric and not look opportunistic. 

Philip Weiss is Founder and Co-Editor of Mondoweiss.net

This article was originally posted at Mondoweiss

Planned war on Iran and the General who said No!

By wmw_admin on September 11, 2012

Gordon Duff – Press TV August 22, 2012

Today, General Dempsey, Chairman of America’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, the man who flew to Tel Aviv and informed Netanyahu that America wanted no part of his scheming against Iran was the subject of an assassination attempt in Afghanistan.

This wasn’t an act of terrorism or Taliban militants. It was a “mob hit” against someone who failed to kiss the feet of Netanyahu. His response was to unleash killers, not a fact for the public but a fact just the same, one the American military knows very well. Netanyahu has a problem with “hubris.”

The culprits, “militants,” managed to escape undetected from the most sophisticatedly defended real estate on earth, the perimeter of Bagram Air Force Base. Lucky for them they attacked at night, a time when America’s 5th generation night vision, ground radar and other detection systems were mysteriously disabled.

The rocket detection systems, early warning blimps with ground penetrating synthetic aperture radar and the continual coverage by UAV drones using infrared detection, $2 billion in technology on this one perimeter alone, cost the plane of America’s top military commander and wounds were sustained by two crew members.

(See: Two hurt as rocket hits plane of US general in Afghanistan[BELOW])

Dempsey had just left Tel Aviv where he told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the following:

“I may not know about all of [Israel's] capabilities, but I think that it’s a fair characterization to say that they could delay but not destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities.”

Dempsey then told waiting reporters:

“We compare intelligence, we discuss regional implications, and we’ve admitted to each other that our clocks are turning at different rates, we have to understand the Israelis; they live with a constant suspicion with which we do not have to deal.”

There are those close to President Obama who don’t accept the attack on Dempsey at face value, with a public admission by the Taliban of complicity. Such statements, which would certainly cost dearly in reprisals by the US, are most often found on Internet sites lacking a credible connection to any Islamic source.

To some Americans, the attack appears to be a reprisal against Dempsey who, out of coincidence, cited the motive in his own appraisal of Israel’s judgment, their “constant suspicion.”

News agencies buried the failed attack, knowing Dempsey is hated by Netanyahu and respected by the Taliban as both “truthful and fair.”

Netanyahu longs for the days when General Myers held Dempsey’s job, under Bush (43), both flawed and narcissistic, predictable puppets, the perfect fodder for Netanyahu’s machinations.

Only two weeks ago, Presidential hopeful, Mitt Romney, returned from a trip overseas, coming back to America with $60 million dollars collected in Israel and Britain while accompanied by Casino boss Sheldon Adelson who’s Las Vegas and China organizations have long been reputed to be the center of worldwide organized crime.

The business, gambling, drugs, prostitution, money laundering and now war, is seeking its own president and war on Iran is the only issue driving the American campaign.

Romney, as a state governor, was, if anything, to the “left” of President Obama. Romney’s support of government health care and widespread gun controls run totally opposite to the core constituency of the Republican Party, the weapons lobby and the medical racketeers.

Romney has found, however, that, though it is illegal for any American candidate to accept money overseas, while overseas, from overseas, at home from those who are citizens of other countries, he feels himself above the law, in the sweet and motherly arms of the Israeli controlled American media.

Now drowning in illegal cash, much from London bankers, his most interesting catch was the private dinner he shared with the Tel Aviv “blood diamond” smugglers who donated up to $25 million dollars in one night.

Key to his financial successes is his lifelong history of working closely with organized crime. His investment company, Bain, was funded initially by cash infusion from El Salvador death squads many years ago. These investors are still at his side despite charges of mass murder and corruption.

Bain Capital is Romney’s money laundering and tax avoidance company with thousands of secret bank accounts in “safe havens” around the world, invisible billions, hidden transactions, unseen profits and unseen “clients.”

Now Romney has found the “mother of all causes,” selling the promise of an American war, fought by Americans, financed by Americans, American dead, American blood, American collapse, a war demanded by, not Jews of the world but by organized crime groups operating through Israel’s Likudist party, dominated by the Koch Brothers, American gasoline speculators, Sheldon Adelson, whose reputation would fill volumes and Rupert Murdoch, whose spy organization is now proven to have blackmailed three consecutive British government, well proven, and likely to have been even more successful in the United States, Germany, Canada, Australia and a dozen other nations.

Most embarrassing to both Russia and the United States has been the ability of criminal organizations to secure sanctions against Iran when both nations are burdened by official reports stating with comprehensive clarity that Iran has no nuclear program.

Even more embarrassing for Russia, who refused to veto sanctions as they did with Iran’s ally Syria, is the fact that Iran’s peaceful nuclear program is built, in near entirety on Russian technology, a Russian nuclear reactor and 3000 Russian technicians.

Statements by Obama directly contradict America’s National Intelligence Estimate. The estimate stated that Iran has no nuclear program. Russia’s Putin has similarly ignored, not just his own intelligence agencies but the fact that Russia is actually building Iran’s reactor and has 3000 technicians in Iran, all of whom probably are not entirely deaf and blind.

Obama has no rational claim to ignorance. His behavior is like that of the playground, all the other children are eating dirt, he feels he has to do the same. In this case, however, when known falsehoods likely to end in a destructive war are agreed to out of fear of retaliation by a former furniture salesman (Netanyahu) or gambling boss, the real importance of the presidency comes into doubt.

A problem no one will mention, is the behavior of Putin in Tel Aviv, backing Netanyahu’s claims of Iran’s violation of voluntary agreements based on no facts other than the statements of one of the world best known pathological liars. What does the failed furniture salesman from Philadelphia have on Uncle Vladimir?

Neither leader has dealt with the simple fact, Iran has the right to build anything it wants for any reason it wishes.

Similarly, the United States, under Bush, both withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972 and withdrew from participation in the International Criminal Court at The Hague.

The latter, the withdrawal from the court, is a veritable admission of complicity in war crimes with key U.S. officials facing indictment and arrest across the globe.

Were one to be honest, the entire Bush administration is under a privileged form of “house arrest” as is Britain’s Tony Blair. All face criminal proceedings and continually make plans to travel but end up cancelling, sometimes out of public outcry for justice or to actually avoid arrest.

Despite his pronouncements, even with an election upcoming and the need to parrot childish threats in order to please the Israeli press a prerequisite, Obama has made it clear he will not attack Iran. It is time the public realizes that by opposing war and running against Romney, an agent of a hostile foreign power and longtime organized crime affiliate, the president and those around him are at great risk.

The carefully choreographed and very public attempt on the life of General Dempsey is a greeting card from the Adelson/Romney/Netanyahu camp.

Several appropriate responses, RSVPs as it were, come to mind, some partially fatal. Is an American president really the leader of the free world, as we so often say, if any “two bit thug” can dictate policy?

Despite that position, Obama controls well over 80% of the Jewish vote in the United States where, as pointed out in an earlier article, studies have shown only 4% of Jewish voters in America feel Iran is any threat to Israel.

A critical part of understanding organized crime requires the study of its origins, particularly in America, during the 19th century.

While London, from the earliest days of what America had believed to be freedom from British rule, in actuality ran America’s economy, and was, itself, subjected to rule by continental bankers.

Britain, the colonizer of the world was, itself, no more than a client of the Bauer/Rothschild group who underwrote the British pound.

The real criminal groups running American politics developed from among the immigrant gangs that settled America’s cities. There were German, Irish, Italian and Jewish gangs. All that survive now are the remnants of the Mafia, the Jewish gangs who now run Washington and Wall Street and the new threats from Kosovo and Albania, the latest round of criminal immigration into America.

With the full cooperation of FBI Director Hoover, tasked with protecting America from criminal organizations, the government stood aside while every aspect of American life, every necessity from water to electricity to medicine, leaving nothing out, came under assault by criminal groups grown fat on profiteering from war, narcotics and, during the Prohibition years, the sale of illegal alcohol.

For decades, America’s media has been tasked with blaming all ills on Italian Americans and corrupt trade unions while America has been little but a colony of key European banking families who created wars, suppressed technologies, manipulated currencies, raised and crushed stock markets and national economies and, in the end, became as a hydra, the multi-headed beast of Greek mythology, ruling all.

What drew Adelson, Romney and even Putin to Israel at this critical time as the world sits on the brink of nuclear war over Syria is simple. We are again reminded of Putin’s visit to Israel.

No Israeli citizen was spoken to, no public concerns were addressed, no, a visit to Israel is a visit to the “safe haven” for worldwide organized crime that controls and manages the vast and endless wealth of the Russian continent as easily as it runs Britain or dances its Washingtonian puppets into discarding laws and traditions and becoming a surrogate bully, not for a nation but for an international criminal conspiracy.

The language of politics must be replaced with the language of crime as the solutions to what are misconstrued as political problems are and have long been responses to the depredations of criminal organizations.

It isn’t as though Iran were the only target, simply the public target where control of the United Nations Security Council can be exercised, a demonstration of the raw power of evil.

The mistake made by so many is to use principles of geopolitics to describe the world condition, the continual entropy, the centralization of wealth and the rapid deterioration of human rights as wars rage without end.

Even the educated classes, searching for patterns and rationales to explain how 2000 trillion dollars represented by “derivative debt” could encumber all the world’s currencies, a staggering amount created by an unseen hand through a process none have yet been able to describe.

Debt, or as it is known in criminal circles as “loan sharking,” is the business of the world. Controlling currencies was not enough, thus controlled governments, bribed, threatened, blackmailed and bought looked away while the wealth and hope of a hundred generations was stolen overnight, a few lines of text, a few entries on computers and generations of our progeny are changed, in that moment, from citizens of the world to “useless eaters,” as Henry Kissinger would describe them.

Armies may march, air forces may bomb, drones may attack but none of this is war or politics, nor has it been for centuries. This is where we went awry. We chose to play chess while our opponents simply put a pistol on the table and emptied our pockets.

America is living this today, as it looks on an upcoming election. The very few can escape the packaged news, scripted in Hollywood or Washington or Tel Aviv, our political life is a theatrical production, a comic tragedy without the Shakespearean irony.

This is a government that Sheldon Adelson, the man who believes he will be America’s real next president, believes he can take to war, a systematic conquest of the Middle East and Central Asia, done for the criminal elements some call Israel, done, quite simply, to prove the power of evil over good.

Gordon Duff is a Marine Vietnam veteran, a combat infantryman, and Senior Editor at Veterans Today. His career has included extensive experience in international banking along with such diverse areas as consulting on counter insurgency, defense technologies or acting as diplomatic representative for UN humanitarian and economic development efforts. Gordon Duff has traveled to over 80 nations. His articles are published around the world and translated into a number of languages. He is regularly on TV and radio, a popular and sometimes controversial guest.

Source

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*Two hurt as rocket hits plane of US general in Afghanistan - sparking fears over security leaks

By ANTHONY BOND

PUBLISHED: 10:13 GMT, 21 August 2012 |

Target: Two insurgent rockets struck the vast Bagram air field, pictured, overnight

A rocket fired on a U.S. airbase in Afghanistan early today damaged the aircraft of America's top military officer and wounded two maintenance crew.

Two insurgent rockets struck the vast Bagram air field overnight, with one causing damage to the C-17 used by General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, who later left the base using another plane.

Shrapnel from the rocket struck the door of the plane while it was parked on the runway, with two American maintenance crew suffering minor injuries in the attack, Dempsey's spokesman Colonel Dave Lapan said.

The rockets posed no threat to the safety of Dempsey or his staff, who were asleep in their quarters at the time of the incident in the early hours of the morning, officers said.

A spokesman for NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) described the rocket hitting the general's plane as simply a lucky shot.

'It was a C-17 that looked just like every other C-17 on the tarmac,' he told AFP.

'Indirect fire is not unusual at Bagram and there is absolutely no indication that this was an attack specfically targeting that plane,' the spokesman said.

Dempsey had been visiting Kabul to meet commanders of the NATO-led force and Afghan top brass amid a surge in assaults by Afghan security personnel on their international colleagues.

More...

Former Marine detained by FBI for psychiatric testing after anti-government Facebook posts

A total of 10 soldiers, mostly Americans, have lost their lives at the hands of their Afghan allies in the past two weeks, and the attacks have caused almost one in every four coalition deaths in the war so far this month.

The total of 40 deaths so far this year amount to 13 percent of all international coalition fatalities in 2012.

The assaults have confounded the international force, which has touted its partnership with Afghan troops as the key to withdrawing its combat troops over the next two years.

Scroll down for video

President Barack Obama, who spoke to Dempsey before the attack by phone while he was in Kabul, said Monday the United States was watching the rise in insider attacks with 'deep concern', telling a White House news conference: 'Obviously, we have to do more.'

NATO and American officers have suggested the Afghan government has failed to come to grips with the problem but Dempsey said he came away 'reassured' after discussions with his Afghan counterpart, General Shir Mohammad Karimi.

'I am reassured that the Afghan leaders, military and civilian, understand how important this moment is,' Dempsey said.

Taliban insurgents have taken credit for the so-called green-on-blue assaults while NATO officers say an internal review showed only about 10 percent of them were the result of infiltration.

NATO has blamed the incidents on a mixture of cultural differences, personal vendettas and propaganda by Islamist militants.

The attacks are unprecedented in US military history and they have spawned so much mistrust that foreign troops have been ordered to be armed at all times, even within bases, officers said.

Afghan authorities have adopted more rigorous vetting of recruits and NATO has bolstered counter-intelligence but the measures have failed to stem the problem.

NATO has about 130,000 soldiers fighting an insurgency by Taliban Islamists, but they are due to pull out in 2014 and now work increasingly with the Afghans they are training to take over.

Dempsey, on the first leg of a trip to Afghanistan and Iraq, said the insider violence would not alter the timetable for withdrawal or the coalition's emphasis on cooperating with Afghan recruits.

But the growing number of attacks is likely to add to pressure in NATO nations for an early exit from the increasingly unpopular conflict, now nearly 11 years old and America's longest war.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2191379/Two-hurt-rocket-hits-America-s-military-officer-s-plane-Afghanistan.html#ixzz26BxESFp6

Cairo airport allows gun-toting Briton to catch connecting flight

By wmw_admin on September 9, 2012

Press TV – September 9, 2012

Officials at Cairo International Airport have surprisingly allowed a British man carrying four bags full of weapons to get on an airliner bound for the Yemeni capital Sana’a.

Metal detectors and X-ray scanners at the airport showed that the Briton had a large quantity of armaments, ranging from sniper rifles to ammunition, in his luggage, the Aden Press news website reported.

Although the security forces were immediately notified about the contents of the bags, the foreign national was simply allowed to pass through the departure lounge and get on an Egypt Air passenger plane.

When asked why the British man was allowed to leave Cairo International Airport even though Egyptian security forces knew he had firearms in his baggage, airport officials said the Briton was allowed to pass since he was only going through the transit hall after arriving on a flight from Copenhagen.

Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has taken advantage of the weakness of the Yemeni central government during about a year and eight months of anti-government demonstrations to expand their presence in the impoverished country.

Al-Qaeda loyalists have carried out a spate of deadly attacks against Yemeni security forces since Ali Abdullah Saleh’s successor, President Abdrabuh Mansur Hadi, came to power in February 2012.

In May, the Yemeni military launched an all-out offensive and retook a string of towns in the southern province of Abyan where al-Qaeda loyalists had established themselves.

MP/HGL

DAVID HOROVITZ-BOMBING IRAN: The most fateful decision of all

THE TIMES OF ISRAEL
http://www.timesofisrael.com/the-most-fateful-decision-of-all-iran-israel-air-strike-nuclear/

Analysis

The most fateful decision of allFrom their very different vantage points, the US and Iran seem to have concluded that Israel is not about to strike the Islamic Republic’s nuclear sites. Some insiders devoutly hope that’s accurate; others insist an attack is vital

By DAVID HOROVITZ August 28, 2012, 4:47 pm

Hear that frantic whispering noise beneath the hum of the air-conditioners in this sweltering Israeli summer? That’s the sound of many Israeli insiders repeating over and over and over: Don’t do it. Don’t do it. Don’t do it.

“If I were an Iranian, I would be very fearful of the next 12 weeks,” Efraim Halevy, the wise and wily former Mossad chief observed in an Israel Radio interview early this month. Well, what some Israelis in the know are saying amounts to, “Never mind the Iranians, it’s the Israelis who need to be fearful. And we are. We’re terrified. We’re terrified our leaders are drawing us into disaster.”

But there’s another sound, too — other voices just as frantic. Do it, they urge. Do it, before it’s too late. Confound the cynics who say that you, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, can’t make a decision at the best of times and are given to panic at the worst. Remember, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, that those who snipe at you are lesser men, cynics and cowards. Trust your judgment. This is the eve of ’67 again. The imperative is to act.

When Halevy spoke, there were actually about 14 weeks until the US presidential elections. Now there are about 10. Ten weeks before America votes. Ten weeks before the skies cloud over, and complex, distant air strikes become still more complex. Ten weeks. Count them down.

Fear and loathing

For more than a year, Israelis have been exposed to the deeply dismaying sight of members of the elected political leadership doing battle with a series of the country’s most experienced and credible former security chiefs over the fateful question of whether Israel should go it alone and strike at Iran’s nuclear facilities. On an issue so sensitive and so central to the Jewish state’s well-being that one might reasonably expect all discussion to be conducted far from the public eye, assessments and accusations and personal critiques have instead been hurled around, again and again and again, in full view.

But former Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin’s bleak depiction of Netanyahu and Barak as a pair of “messianists,” who cannot be trusted to lead the state, sounds mild compared to the fearful assessments offered by some behind the cloak of anonymity. Former Mossad head Meir Dagan’s repeated lunges into the spotlight, to declare that only an idiot would consider a resort to solo Israeli military action at this stage, sound like mild rebukes when compared to the bitter epithets being hurled in private.

Yuval Diskin (photo credit: Kobi Gideon/ Flash90)

Behind-the-scenes, the degree of concern being expressed by some insider experts about a possible Israeli strike at Iran this fall is greater than anything that has been aired publicly to date. To these people, Netanyahu and Barak are deemed to be capable — through a mixture of obstinacy, narrow political objectives, misguided ideology, ego and more — of creating the circumstances in which a nuclear Iran really could become unstoppable. By launching an operation to stop Iran, they fear, Israel may end up liberating the Islamic Republic to cast off all constraints and break out to the bomb.

Some of these professionals — technocrats whose job it is to give non-ideological assessments — are smarting as seldom before. Some speak of the unprecedented disdain they and their colleagues face from Israel’s leadership duo — who, they lament, seek to discredit as tantamount to treachery their professional opposition to an Israeli resort to force at this stage. They say the leadership duo has avoided serious cabinet discussion of Iran in order to prevent the technocrats from effectively presenting their assessments. The experts say they are being told that they are not merely misguided, but that they cannot see the bigger picture, that they’ve forgotten the limits of their roles, that they are scaremongers and ass-coverers, that they have partisan political motivations, that they are undermining the national interest, even that they are serving foreign interests.

It is not that they are categorically opposed to Israeli military intervention in Iran, some of these insiders stress. It is, rather, that they are categorically opposed to Israeli military intervention in Iran now. They consider Iran’s nuclear weapons drive to be an immensely grave threat. But they are convinced that Israel action at this stage would be premature and counterproductive, and that Israeli action at any stage may not be necessary. They have been known to use the word “suicidal” to describe the idea of Israeli action now in the absence of clear US-Israel understandings.

Lost in the bitter public debate of recent months, they stress, is the fact — an undisputed fact, they insist — that were Iran to decide today to go for the bomb, it remains some 18 months away. And Iran has taken no such decision, they say.

Battered as narrow-minded and partisan, they are not above leveling political accusations of their own. Some consider Netanyahu’s obsession with Iran to be a consequence of his failure and irrelevance as prime minister in all other major fields. The peace process is going nowhere, he offers nothing as Islamist politics rises regionwide, he is failing in social and economic fields. Where else can he position himself as a purportedly necessary prime minister, they snipe, apart from on Iran?

As for Barak, here one encounters disillusionment. Barak was meant to be the responsible adult. Barak, the former chief of staff with his decades of defense expertise, could be relied upon to climb down the ladder before the war rhetoric got out of control. Barak was perceived by the Americans as the non-ideological, dependable interlocutor. But Barak, the head of a splinter party with no following, reasonably believes he might not be in office a year from today. And he has proved incapable, his insider critics say now, of separating personal political interests and narrow tactical considerations from the wider national interest. The Americans, they claim, have quite given up on him.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, in Netanyahu’s office in Jerusalem, in July (photo credit: Ohad Zwigenberg/POOL/FLASH90)

But there are other insiders, too — others, who empathize with Netanyahu’s parallels between the Iranian threat and the Holocaust, and some who go further. Germany had to gear up, gradually and protractedly, for the manufacture of mass murder. With Iran, if unchecked, genocide for the Jewish state could be attempted with the press of a button. No time then for a Churchill to shake us all out of our lethargy, slowly make up for lost time, and turn back the tide.

Yes, these insiders say, there are powerful arguments in favor of doing nothing — hoping the sanctions work, or the Iranians give ground in diplomatic channels, or sabotage has a deeper impact, or the regime is ousted or, when all else fails, America does have the will to utilize its military might. But how realistic are any of those hopes, they ask? What have sanctions and diplomacy done for us so far? How profoundly have the Stuxnet-style viruses and disappearing scientists set back the program? Does the Iranian regime look remotely wobbly? And can we really, truly, existentially expect — because our lives could depend upon it — that second-term-Obama or first-term-Romney would send in the bombers?

Can we expect that confidently enough to let our own opportunity to send in the bombers pass unused, our engines cold, our arms folded? The mighty Jewish state placing its destiny in the hands of, either, an untried president heading a parochial, unpredictable party, or a familiar president who didn’t even take a stand against the regime when the Iranian people were trying to rise up against it three years ago?

Trusting Obama

Where the insiders who support and those who oppose an imminent Israeli military strike on Iran agree is that Netanyahu’s temptation to order it stems in large part from his conviction that a re-elected Obama cannot be fully trusted to use force if all else fails to stop Iran, and that a president Romney might be still less likely to do so.

Before November’s presidential elections, by contrast, however reluctant he might be, Obama, in Netanyahu’s assessment, simply could not politically refrain from supporting Israel in the potentially messy aftermath of an Israeli strike.

Insiders say Barak has told Netanyahu that Israel’s window of opportunity for action — for seriously impacting the Iranian program — closes at the end of the year. The former IDF Military Intelligence chief and Osirak pilot Amos Yadlin (who I should stress is not one of the anonymous insiders quoted in this article) tends to disagree, as do others, assessing that Israel would have a little more time. But Barak is Netanyahu’s font of Iranian wisdom. So if Israel is to avoid subcontracting its security, as Barak puts it, even to the best of its friends, Netanyahu may feel it’s a case of act now or forever hold your peace.

Everything you have heard about the personal hostility between Obama and Netanyahu is true, and then some, according to the insiders from both the pro- and anti-strike camps. The prime minister thinks the president is unreliable and misguided on matters Israeli, Middle Eastern and Islamist. Holding to “a policy to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon,” as Obama put it in his AIPAC speech in March, is not the same as vowing explicitly to use whatever tools are needed, up to and including force, in order to guarantee that Iran does not gain a nuclear weapons capability.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Barack Obama, the Oval Office, May 2011. (photo credit: Avi Ohayon/Government Press Office/FLASH90)

The president, for his part, thinks the prime minister is arrogant, manipulative and indecisive, the insiders from both camps agree. He feels that Netanyahu, who had the temerity to publicly lecture him in the Oval Office last year about Israel’s territorial red lines, has consistently sought to undermine him in the pro-Israel community in America — whether directly or through wealthy and influential American Jewish figures. He regards Netanyahu’s address to the 2012 AIPAC conference as a slap in the face, publicly blowing off the president’s appeal a day earlier to give diplomacy and sanctions more time. He considers that the enthusiastic welcome for Mitt Romney here last month strayed beyond the polite, correct hosting of a presidential candidate.

The problem with the Netanyahu overview, the don’t-strike-now insiders say, is that attacking Iran at this stage would be strategically counter-productive, to put it mildly. It would see Israel perceived globally as an impatient, over-hasty aggressor. It would unify the Iranian public around their regime’s nuclear goal. It would ostensibly legitimize accelerated Iranian progress — here would be proof of Iran’s need for a nuclear counterweight to regional aggressor Israel. It would infuriate Obama, who has pledged to take care of the crisis. It would spark a regional nuclear arms race, wiping out Israel’s military advantages. It would put Israel’s nuclear program on the international agenda; can those guys be trusted with the bomb? It would destroy the international sanctions effort, however imperfect that may be, and likely destroy the prospect of international force being employed to stop the Iranians. But it would not destroy the Iranian program, since Iran — unlike Saddam after Osirak in 1981, or Syria after its Korean reactor was smashed in 2007 — has the knowledge and the wherewithal to rebuild.

The counter argument to those critiques, says the better-strike-soon camp, is that a decade’s evidence suggests that nobody else has the will to stop the Iranians, and if we don’t act soon, it will be too late for us to thwart them either. That there are no guarantees the Americans would recognize an Iranian breakout to the bomb in time, and no guarantees that, if it did, even a president who wanted to act would have the necessary support to do so. And, yes, it is already, sadly, dismally, too late for Israel to smash their entire program, but the air force can certainly delay it — and earn another few years’ grace in which the regime might fall. If not, if Israel has to strike again, so be it. And since sanctions haven’t worked, the collapse of the sanctions regime is hardly the end of the world, though it probably could be revived over time. And a regional arms race is inevitable if Israel doesn’t act, since this entire region is terrified of a nuclear Iran.

Overplaying their hand?

Even the anti-strike insiders don’t claim that Obama can be relied upon 100 percent to take care of Iran. Not necessarily. Not all of them.

If there is a brazen escalation by Iran of its nuclear program — a breakout to the bomb — many in the don’t-strike-now camp believe the international community would see it, and many believe Obama would use force to thwart it.

But if the current situation persists into 2013, with sanctions continuing to fail, diplomatic overtures going nowhere, and Iran continuing to make headway with enrichment and other aspects of the program, even those in the don’t strike-now camp are not certain that a re-elected Obama, or a president Romney for that matter, would declare that the time had come for a resort to force. Some of these insiders think, however, that Israel would still be capable of meaningful military intervention in 2013, and that it would be able to act then with greater international legitimacy and support, without alienating the US and without destroying the sanctions effort — keeping the pressure on Iran, that is, even after an attack.

Clearly, the Americans have chosen not to force a showdown with Iran. They’ve not said to the Iranians, ‘Here’s our best and final offer; if you reject it you’ll face the consequences.’ They’ve indicated a disillusionment with the negotiations, but they’ve not pushed a confrontation. That will come after the presidential elections — in February or the spring, say some insiders. Or not, say others.

Incidentally, some of the don’t-strike-now insiders speak of indications that Iran is waiting until after the US elections to negotiate meaningfully. It wants to be sure who’s president, they argue. It might then be willing to be forthcoming, knowing that the US could be more forthcoming, too. Others believe Iran is intransigent and will continue to be so.

Amos Yadlin last week called on Obama to assuage Israeli concerns about his commitment to use force if needed by coming to Israel and speaking in the Knesset. Israeli sources quoted in Hebrew TV reports have posited that an Obama-Netanyahu meeting after the UN General Assembly in late September might enable the US president to offer the prime minister the reassurance he apparently needs in order to refrain from sending in the IAF.

But insiders in both the pro- and anti camps say there would be zero prospect of Obama quickly adding in an Israel trip in the weeks before the elections even if he did want to offer further reassurance. And they say that the president was trying assiduously to provide precisely such reassurance in any case. For the past six months.

The US really didn’t understand the gravity of the issue until fairly late in the day, they say. It took the administration a long time to believe that Netanyahu and Barak were seriously contemplating a strike. And then it believed that Barak would ultimately be persuaded to hold Israeli fire — that it could win him over and create a wedge between him and Netanyahu.

There was a big debate in the administration, some insiders claim: Should we bother with Netanyahu? It wasn’t even clear to the Americans what it was that the prime minister wanted from them. Was he seeking a green light for Israeli action? A guarantee that the US would stand by Israel if Netanyahu did act? Clearer reassurance that the US would act itself if all else fails? In the climate of mistrust, they found Netanyahu very difficult to read. They couldn’t even be sure whether the issue was Iran or bringing down Obama. With Barak, they thought it was Iran. With Netanyahu?

But eventually, the president did give the order to reassure Israel — to provide the ladder for Barak to walk down, with Netanyahu reluctantly following.

Amid the incessant visits to and fro by top US and Israeli officials, the insiders say with understandable vagueness, the US has helped boost Israeli offensive and defensive capabilities; it has deepened operational cooperation and intelligence sharing; it has publicly reaffirmed Israel’s right to act if needed; it has made overt that the US president will prevent the nuclearization of Iran; it has not only stated clearly that all options are on the table, but has also given Israel tangible proof that all options are being prepared, including operations in the Gulf. It has shared sufficient details of its war plans for Israel to recognize their credibility.

But Barak did not budge.

In the past two weeks, some in the don’t-strike-now camp see indications that Barak might now be ready to climb down. This, despite the interview a man identified as “the decision maker” who was clearly Barak gave to Haaretz two weeks ago, in which he declared that (a) “If Iran’s nuclearization is not halted now, before long we’ll find ourselves in a Middle East that has all gone nuclear”; (b) “Iran could soon enter the immunity zone. And when that happens, it means putting a matter that is vital to our survival in the hands of the United States. Israel cannot allow this to happen”; (c) “there are moments in the life of a nation in which the imperative to live is the imperative to act. So it was on the eve of the Six-Day War. So it was in 1948. And it may be so now, too”; (d) “we mustn’t listen to those who in every situation prefer inaction to action”; and (e) “The sword hanging over our neck today is a lot sharper than the sword that hung over our neck before the Six-Day War.”

Those same anti-strike insiders, however, also see signs that the Obama administration has now lost patience with Netanyahu, and has concluded that the prime minister and the defense minister have overplayed their hand. The former American ambassador to Israel, Martin Indyk, gave public expression to this sentiment in an Army Radio interview last Thursday: Israel’s talk of attacking Iran was “a classic case of crying wolf,” he said. “The US has done everything it could to reassure Israel and doesn’t have anything more in its quiver… So it thinks [when it hears talk of an Israeli strike on Iran], ‘Here we go again. There’s nothing else we can do. We’ll learn to live with it.’”

The administration is betting, the anti-strike insiders say, that a critical mass of opposition has been reached to unilateral Israeli action this fall that will now compel Netanyahu to abandon the idea. The accumulation of opposition — by the ex-security chiefs like Dagan and Diskin; serving security chiefs including chief of the General Staff Benny Gantz; opposition leader Shaul Mofaz (however discredited by his constant zig-zagging); and President Shimon Peres (despite his opposition to the Israeli strike on Osirak 31 years ago), backed up by former president Yitzhak Navon — is now deemed to be simply too widespread and overwhelming to defy.

US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, left, and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey give a news conference at the Pentagon on June 29, 2012. (photo credit: Evan Vucci/AP)

And of course the Americans themselves are doing their best, and have been for months, to further discredit an Israeli strike. In March, a senior unnamed American intelligence official told Channel 2′s reliable diplomatic correspondent Udi Segal that Israel’s leaders seem to be drastically underestimating the likely near-apocalyptic repercussions of an Israeli strike. Leon Panetta, speaking off-the-cuff three months earlier, had said almost the same, albeit without the hyperbole. In the last few days, though, the Americans have stepped up the challenge, with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, making wearily, almost derisively clear, twice, that he doesn’t think Israel could stop the Iranians if it tried.

The Iranians, for their part, are openly derisive. Israel doesn’t have the guts, they gloat. It’s all talk, they sneer.

Might Netanyahu and Barak nonetheless follow through on their threats? As of last week, they were still allowing them to be aired.

Ten weeks to go…

And what of the Iranians?

Nobody, but nobody, among the Israeli experts doubts that Iran has a clear aspiration to attain nuclear weapons. But thus far, whether for strategic, political, religious and/or ideological reasons, the Iranians are hedging, some say.

Iran wants the wherewithal to break out to nuclear weapons quickly, when it decides to do so. But it has not taken that decision. In fact, say some, the Iranians have taken a decision not to accelerate into the end zone for now, by constraining what their scientists and technicians work on.

The Iranians are running a sizable and growing enrichment effort, all the insiders say. And they have kept in place the team necessary to take that effort to the next level. They are also expending ever greater energy on long-range delivery capability. And they are investing heavily in “hardening” the project against attack — so that a one-time attack would not kill off the program in the way a single strike halted Iraq in 1981 and Syria in 2007. But they have not ventured into that 18-month break out period.

Some insiders believe Iran knows it can’t encroach on that period without this being recognized very quickly, and that it holds back because it fears this might unleash an American response.

Last week, the air force commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards asserted that Iran would “welcome” an Israeli strike. It would give Tehran the opportunity to be rid of Israel forever, said Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh. The Israeli technocrats don’t all believe Iran is happily contemplating an Israeli strike. But Iran is not petrified of an Israeli attack, they say, and broadly, it could withstand one. Not so, an American attack — because a single American strike would be more damaging than an Israeli strike, because the Americans could return to hit again and again, and because the Americans would not limit themselves to a strike at nuclear targets.

The Americans would go about an attack, the Israeli experts say, in an entirely different — and dramatically more substantive manner — than Israel could. The US has made this clear to Israel — another reason for its frustration at Israel’s lack of faith. And it is clear to Iran too. If the Americans act, they go after the air defenses, the missiles, the Revolutionary Guards. They make sure that Iran can’t retaliate.

If Israel strikes, Iran rebuilds and promptly moves into the 18-month breakout period, the don’t-act-now Israeli insiders say. Whatever damage Israel thus has done has no lasting value. In fact, it boomerangs. The sanctions are off, the inspectors are gone, the legitimacy is there. Iran crosses the Rubicon.

That’s dramatic but wrong-headed, says the better-strike-soon camp. An Israeli attack might spell harsh short-term consequences — including the 500 dead that Barak has posited — but it delays the program; it forces an Iranian rethink; it destroys the sense of fait accompli — that the Iranian bomb is inevitable; it staves off the untenable remaking of our region in Iran’s favor.

About those 18 months

How firm is that 18 months? If everything went smoothly, Iran might be able to shave off a couple of months, at most. Unforeseen delays might add another six months.

But there’s a lot of confusion about the period, the experts all say. Israeli experts were saying 18 months to an Iranian bomb in 2006, and in 2008, and in 2010. Were they wrong? No. Iran has progressed a great deal in that period. But Iran has yet to make the accelerated, 18-month push to the bomb. So what’s changed is how things would look over those 18 months, the experts say. Things like, whether Iran would have a better or worse missile delivery system. Things like Iran’s capacity to withstand attack. Things like how many bombs Iran could build in those 18 months.

Some of the technocrats say these factors hold the key to Iran’s decision-making process.

In the better-strike-soon camp, the assessment is that Iran will give the order to plunge forward when it thinks it will be able to build enough bombs — whatever “enough” may mean — in the 18 months, and when it believes itself to be sufficiently protected against attack. So the time for action is now.

In the don’t-strike-now camp, some believe that the Iranians have lost confidence in their ability to do things in secret, and that the US constantly reinforces this sense of lost confidence by indicating that it can see what Iran is up to — thanks to the intelligence work of the US, the Israelis, the Canadians, the Brits, the Germans…

Iran keeps getting reminders that it is penetrated, that it is transparent, these experts say. So, encroaching into the 18 months becomes a still bigger strategic gamble. They might be playing into their adversaries’ hands. The Iranians are saying to themselves, can we do this in secret? No. Can we act quickly and successfully? No. Can we be sure that it won’t be just Israel that attacks? No.

File photo of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visiting the uranium enrichment facility at Natanz. (photo credit: AP/Iranian President’s office, File)

Signs that the Iranians are accelerating toward a bomb would be quite clear, the don’t-strike-now experts say. One would be if Iran began enriching uranium beyond 20%. (Evidence of a recent minor enrichment beyond 20% was what the experts call a normal fluke). Another would be if they stepped up efforts to produce a warhead. They have the basic design and some elements, but they’d need to accommodate the enriched uranium inside a warhead, or in the interim, in some kind of a device that would enable a test.

But this kind of process unfolded in Pakistan and North Korea, the better-act-now camp counters. Threats and promises notwithstanding, there was no military intervention in either case. And anyone who thinks the dangers posed by a nuclear Iran are remotely comparable to those the world faces from nuclear Pakistan and North Korea, noted Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman on Friday, “doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” Where does Liberman stand on the imperative or otherwise for action? “We should have struck in 2001,” he said Friday.

The bottom line

The insiders in the don’t-strike-now camp speculate that the US has it about right in gauging Israeli intentions: that Netanyahu and Barak won’t act before the US elections. Something that seemed to Netanyahu and Barak to be politically doable in the past has now become extraordinarily risky, some of the insiders say.

The damage done, these technocrats say, has already been enormous: People taking money out of the country; parents taking their children out of the country. Israelis looking for alternate citizenships; investors looking for alternate investments. Worse still, Israel under Netanyahu has “taken ownership” of the Iranian nuclear crisis, when it’s the international community that needs to feel the onus to act. There are plenty of people in the West who want Israel to strike at Iran, some of the insiders say — and those people are not friends of Israel.

All wrong, say those in the better-strike-soon camp. Israel waited a decade for someone else to step up. Now it has no choice. Netanyahu the indecisive is capable of being coldly decisive on this issue alone — the Iranian threat being the danger he feels he was fated to handle, the reason that circumstances contrived to make him prime minister, now.

Benjamin Netanyahu eulogized his father Benzion in April as a man who knew “how to identify danger in time,” and was prepared to “face reality head on” and “draw the necessary conclusions.” In the case of the insufficiently influential father, the danger that the Jewish leadership failed to face was the Holocaust. In the case of the son, the prime minister of a regional superpower, the danger he has the capacity to recognize, and to thwart, is a would-be genocidal, almost-nuclear Iran. “As prime minister of Israel, I will never let my people live under the shadow of annihilation,” Netanyahu told AIPAC in March.

Israeli F-15I fighter jets are refueled by a Boeing 707 during an air show at the graduation ceremony of Israeli pilots in Hatzerim air force base in the Negev desert, near the southern city of Beersheva, in June. (photo credit: Tsafrir Abayov/Flash90)

Now is not the time for Israel to strike at Iran, the former chief of the General Staff, Gabi Ashkenazi, opined last Thursday, completing the complement of most-recent security chiefs inveighing against an attack. “This threat that emerges in the east, and all the darkening on that horizon – we aren’t there yet.”

But allowing Israel’s window of military opportunity to shut without acting may turn out to be an act of restraint with catastrophic consequences, retort those in the better-strike-soon camp. It may turn out that Israel ought not to have trusted its security even to a president who has promised that the United States is “bound to Israel,” and that for his country Israel’s “security is sacrosanct.”

Is Netanyahu prepared to take the risk of inaction, or choose the gamble of intervention?

Ten weeks.