Israel Might Not Wait To Prove The World Is Wrong On Iran

In the Middle East it is a race between distances and deadlines. While US President Barack Obama is engineering his Iran Policy and pushing for a grand peace settlement in the Middle East, Jordan King Abdullah II is talking about imminent peace or imminent war in the coming year and a half and Tel Aviv is on permanent drill to overcome distance-related obstacles in preparation for a possible attack on Iran.




Earlier this month, French weekly L'Express reported that IAF planes carried out maneuvers

3,800 kilometers away from home. More than 100 Israeli F-16 and F-15 fighters took part in the exercise over the British colony of Gibraltar, vindicating Israel's resilience to attack Iran if it continues with its widely believed to be weaponry nuclear program.

This exercise seemed to be an advancement after the secret raid last January on a weapons convoy in Sudan which was destined to Gaza. The London Times reported that the Israeli F16 bombers, protected by the F15s

"which were refueled in mid-air, flew around 2800 km (1,750 miles) from Israel to Sudan and back. The distance from Israel to Natanz, the uranium enrichment center in Iran, is 1450 km (900 miles) one way".

Another during-operation-test was how to apply advanced technology to paralyze communication networks and radar devices in the countries over which the F-15s and F-16s fly.

In a detailed study by Abdullah Toukan and Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, the two respectful researchers note that

"the IAF used this technology in the raid on the Syrian nuclear reactor in Dayr az-Zawr, in September 2007".

In addition, IAF reservists who operate the Arrow and Patriot missile defense systems are spending one day a week on duty, JPost reported.

If Israel, however, opted for a ballistic attack option it would take advantage of advancements it made in distance related areas, though it would be sacrificing part of the accuracy edge provided by its air force. Toukan, Cordesman study offers insightful details about Israel's capabilities which Haaretz summed up as follows:

The study lays bare Israel's missile program and points to three missile versions it has developed: Jericho I, II and III. The Jericho I has a 500-kilometer range, a 450-kilogram warhead, and can carry a 20-kiloton nuclear weapon. Jericho II has a 1,500-kilometer range, and entered service in 1990. It can carry a 1-megaton nuclear warhead. Jericho III is an intercontinental ballistic missile with a range of 4,800-6,500 kilometers, and can carry a multi-megaton nuclear warhead. The study says the latter was expected to enter service in 2008.

Alerting enough, these exercises are taking place amid high Israeli public approval of an air attack against Iranian nuclear plants. Not only two thirds of the Jewish country's population favor such an attack, but three fourths of them don't see US approval as a necessary precondition, a recent survey shows.

Hence, Washington have pushed and seems to have succeeded in convincing Israel to avoid any unilateral surprise attack against Iran's nuclear program. CIA director Leon Panetta made sure he hears this commitment first hand from Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, defense minister Ehud Barak and other top Israeli officials when he was dispatched on secret mission to Israel in early May .

The US administration fears that such a move would jeopardize its efforts to reach out to Iran and peacefully defuse the standoff over its nuclear program, which Israel sees as "an existential threat".
IDF Intelligence Chief Amos Yadlin repeated in front of the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee his warning that Iran is few steps away from obtaining "military nuclear capabilities", adding that the situation will become "critical" as next year kicks up.

Yet, Washington rejects to set deadlines and expiry dates for its diplomatic efforts as Tel Aviv insists, rather indicating that it won't let these efforts "string out forever" .

"We're not setting any deadline. And we're not interested in setting any kind of specific or even notional time-line," State Department Spokesman Ian Kelly insisted in response to media reports that "the administration and European allies have set a target for early October for determining whether engagement with Iran is making progress".

Nevertheless, addressing a rarely suspicious Israel of how reliable an ally the US is, President Barack Obama told the Newsweek magazine he doesn't

"take any options off the table with respect to Iran".

This is hardly an assurance. A couple of weeks earlier, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates stressed that targeting Iran's nuclear facilities would not be enough to remove the threat. "(It) will only buy us time and send the program deeper and more covert," he said. On the other hand, EU and US promised sanctions are not more assuring. Let alone the controversy over the effectiveness of sanctions, Israel's doubts that the international community will go forward with "crippling" ones were expressed in Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon words.

“If the world would just work together with determination and impose sanctions, then we may not need military action.”

"We may not".. he said

It is common knowledge, though, that the EU countries enjoy booming economic relations with Tehran for which it has little reasons to severe. Iran-Italy trade stood at 6.1 billion euros in 2008 compared to $2.7 billion in 2001. In a recent meeting between Fereydun Haqbin the caretaker of Iran’s embassy In Italy and a wide bouquet of industrialists, bankers, and managers of big firms, the two sides discussed ways to expand trade ties.

German companies trade with the amount of about 4 billion euros per year with Iran, while still enjoying subsidies from Chancellor Angela Merkel's cabinet.

Amid growing demand on energy, Iran is looking forward to play a future role in the European goals of energy diversification, a priority which topped its agenda in 2008. Germany, whose consumption of about 100 billion cubic meters of gas a year represents a fifth of the total in the European Union, received Iran's Oil Minister Gholamhossein Nozari in the first week of May. Nozari encouraged German commercial executives to invest in the Iranian energy sector and hinted that his country was intensifying plans on a so-called "Persian pipeline", which would transport gas from Iran to Europe. The Iranian minister expressed his countries readiness to cooperate on the Nabucco pipeline project, a 3,300km centerpiece pipeline in Europe’s energy policy to reduce imports from Russia by providing the region with gas from central Asia.

Iran's official Islamic Republic News Agency was very fast to report on what underscores its vantage point as the World's second reserve of natural gas. One of its report said German commercial mogul, pledged to pressure Merkel to ease trade restrictions on Iran in order to move toward bilateral deals in the energy sector.

In the meantime, Iran is expected to finalize a new version of its previous package of proposals to the six major powers and present it during the resumed talks with the 5+1 group over its nuclear program. In absence of deadlines, in Israel this would be dubbed as "buying time". In fact Thérèse Delpech, a leading nonproliferation expert at France's Atomic Energy Commission, uncovered part of this game last October at a Brookings Institution lecture.

"We [the Europeans] have negotiated during five years with the Iranians . . . and we came to the conclusion that they are not interested at all in negotiating, but . . . [only] in buying time for their military program" she said.

Notwithstanding, Israel's assurances that a none-coordinated attack on Iran is off the table, the got-it-alone mood in the country is growing. History suggests that Israel, in somehow similar situations, trusts none but itself. Even the very pragmatic notion that Iran, had it assembled the bomb, would refrain from attacking Israel, fearing an Israeli nuclear retaliation, doesn't sell.

Iran is more and more perceived to be in an apocalyptic mood. Princeton Professor Bernard Lewis offers a mind twisting argument on the matter:

For a group… whose main leader is [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad, the apocalyptic time has come. “Ma’adi,” the Muslim messiah is already here. The final battle has already begun. That is important for another reason, and that is concerning Iran’s nuclear weapon. The Soviet Union had weapons right through the cold war, but neither side used them because they were aware the other side would use them as well. It was called mutual assured destruction (MAD) which was the main deterrent of using the weapons. For most of the Iranian leadership, MAD would work as a deterrent. But for Ahmadinejad and his group, with their apocalyptic mindset, MAD is not a deterrent, but an inducement. They believe that the end of time has come and the sooner the better. So the good can go enjoy the delights of paradise and the wicked, meaning all of us here, can go to eternal damnation.”

Hence, would Israel wait to prove the world is wrong on Iran? Much of what is taking place suggests to the contrary.