By Phoebe Greenwood in Tel Aviv
Tom Donilon, the US president's top security aide, arrived in Tel Aviv on Saturday morning for three days of meetings with Israeli defence and security chiefs.
While Washington claims the visit is simply the latest in a series of "regular, high level consultations between the United States and Israel", it came just days after coordinated attacks launched against Israeli embassies across the world provoked outrage in Jerusalem, which claims with certainly that Iran is responsible.
Israel's option of launching a strike on Iranian nuclear facilities was expected to be the urgent topic of discussion during Mr Donilon's visit.
Hours before he arrived Iran's navy claimed its warships entered the Mediterranean to show its 'might' to regional countries.
In recent weeks, Israeli government officials have remained resolutely tight-lipped on their position on the Iranian threat but a string of high-ranking US officials have expressed the belief that Israel is preparing to act, with or without American support.
The rising tensions came as Foreign Secretary William Hague warned in Saturday's edition of The Daily Telegraph of the danger of a nuclear Cold War in the Middle East because of Iran's nuclear programme.
Mr Donilon's visit follows a trip by Mossad chief Tamir Pardo to Washington in December to discuss the possibility of military action against Iran, in which the security chief asked his counterparts in the CIA what the US reaction would be to an independent Israeli attack on Tehran.
In an interview with the New York Times late last year, Ehud Barak, Israel's minister of defence, suggested that an Israeli strike on Iran is all but inevitable.
General Uzi Eilam, a former director general of Israel's ministry of defence, revealed earlier this week that he may be "among the only ones [Israeli defence officials]" who does not think a strike is necessary.
He added that the perception of Iran's nuclear threat has, in his opinion, been overblown. "I don't accept that there has been an urgent deterioration [in attempts to prevent a nuclear Iran]," he said.
"I would be more reserved as far as ringing the big bell goes. But if a country like Iran is determined to develop a nuclear weapon, sooner or later they will get there. If a poor country like North Korea can do it, so can Iran. The question is: how soon can they get there?"
Iran remains adamant that its nuclear development is for peaceful purposes. It announced three significant advances this week, including the development of centrifuges capable of producing higher quality enriched uranium in a bigger quantities and more quickly that its old technology.
A letter written by Tehran expressing a willingness to discuss its nuclear activity was received with cautious optimism on Friday.
Victoria Nuland, the US State Department spokeswoman, said Washington and its allies were wary of "false starts" to a negotiation process.
"We've had negotiations that started and fizzled, or negotiations that ate up a lot of time and didn't go where they needed to go," Nuland said.
Israel is yet to react to the letter. Following the botched attempts to bomb Israeli embassy staff in Israel, Georgia and Thailand, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urged the international community to "draw a red line" under Tehran's efforts to promote terrorist activity.
"Iran is the biggest exporter of terror in the world. Iran's terror operations are now exposed for all to see," Mr Netanyahu told Knesset members.
Leon Panetta, the US defence secretary, has indicated in his clearest terms yet that Washington will act to prevent a nuclear Iran and will not tolerate it if Iran attempts to block the Straits of Hormuz, a naval trade route supplying one fifth of the world's oil.
"We, the United States, have all options on the table," he said.
"If you're a nation that wants to be part of the international family of nations, then join it... Join us in an effort to try to diplomatically reduce your efforts in terms of nuclear capability," Panetta said.
"So that pressure needs to continue, and Israel has been part of that. My hope is that Israel will be part of that international effort to keep the pressure on. That's the most effective way to isolate Iran and to keep the pressure on," he added.
Alain Juppe, the French foreign minister, said on Thursday that a two-day visit to Iran by top UN nuclear watchdog officials scheduled would help determine whether Tehran was serious about tackling international concerns.
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US-Israel crisis: Approaching nuclear talks with Iran disable sanctions, spark anti-Israel terror
Source: DEBKAfile
US President Barack Obama is convinced that the resumed international nuclear negotiations he has worked hard to set up will not only avert war but lay to rest once and for all the problem of Iran’s nuclear bomb program. He was led to this belief in secret back channel exchanges at the highest level between US and Turkish representatives and emissaries of the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei which paved the way for the formal talks.
Our Washington sources describe the White House mood as one of high optimism. They think they have the silver bullet for success: The US will match Iran’s concession on its nuclear weapon program with the staged whittling down of sanctions. They will drop to zero for a successful accord.
No confirmation of this assumption is to be found from any Iranian sources. However, Obama’s well-informed former senior adviser Dennis Ross was confident enough that talks were just around the corner to publish an article in the New York Times Thursday, Feb. 16 under the caption “Iran Is Ready to Talk.”
The furious response to the news in Jerusalem is in direct contrast to the rosy optimism in Washington and a measure of the gaping rift between the two administrations on the nuclear issue.
And indeed, putting nuclear diplomacy on Iran back on the table has already had untoward consequences, DEBKAfile reports, even before formal talks get started:
1. It has triggered am Iranian-instigated terror campaign against Israeli targets.
Official of Israel’s Counter-Terror Bureau, in a briefing to reporters Friday, Feb. 17, said Iran and its Lebanese proxy Hezbollah are plotting more attacks on Israeli and Jewish institutions overseas.
Travelling Israelis were advised to exercise extreme caution. The special alert for Israeli embassies and institutions declared after the last two of five bombing incidents in two months, one of which injured an Israeli woman in New Delhi, the other thwarted in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, remains in force.
The advisory was not based on specific intelligence about locations but on incoming warnings of Iranian plans to continue to seek out Israeli targets for widely-spaced attacks on different continents.
DEBKAfile’s counter-terror sources say that neither Israel nor any Western agency has identified the specific Iranian body orchestrating the five bombing and botched attacks in Azerbaijan, Georgia, Thailand, Argentina and India.
Their investigations appear to have ruled out the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence - which Washington added to its banned list Thursday, Feb. 16 for collaborating in the Syrian ruler’s crackdown on dissenters - as well as the notorious Al Qods Brigades. Both defer directly Ayatollah Khamenei, and are unlikely to have been authorized to engage in terror against Israel while he accepts diplomacy with the United States – especially not in India, one of Tehran’s most valued allies.
DEBKAfile’s sources believe that the bombing attacks are the work of Iranian radicals bent on derailing the Supreme Leader’s diplomatic cooperation with the US in case he is persuaded to give up Iran’s nuclear program. Therefore, the more progress achieved in the forthcoming negotiations, the harder these elements will fight it with an escalating spiral of terrorist attacks – and not just against Israeli targets.
As for sanctions, Ross presents them as a whip for the United States to force the Iranians back into serious negotiations if they try their old tactics of spinning out the process to buy time for their nuclear plans.
A timer was accordingly built into the toughest sanctions imposed in the last few weeks: They go into force in July. If the talks are going well by then, they will never be needed and stay on paper – or so it is hoped.
But this delaying mechanism has already made the sanctions self-defeating.
The governments Washington seek to harness to its oil embargo, as well as such opponents as India, China Russia, Turkey, South Korea and the Europeans, realize the Obama administration is not planning to stiffen sanctions but more likely to ease them in the coming months of negotiations with Iran until they disappear. So why play along with them?
The sanctions regime is therefore breaking up before the formal talks have even begun.
This accounts for Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s angry comment Wednesday, Feb. 16, after his talks with Cypriot leaders. He said sanctions imposed on Iran are important but so far “haven't worked. … the Iranian president's guided tour of centrifuges at Tehran research reactor on Wednesday was proof that sanctions have not properly crippled Iran's efforts to develop nuclear capabilities.”
Tehran knows this too and has anyway made it clear that sanctions will not make Iran give up its nuclear program. So if anything persuaded Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei to go along with Obama’s pursuit of diplomacy it was not sanctions, but the Israel’s willingness to resort to military action to pre-empt a nuclear Iran.
The US president for his part is pinning his hopes of averting a Middle East war with unpredictable consequences by engaging Iran in dialogue. Its advisers wave off the side-effects of a new wave of terror and the disabling of sanctions as calculated risks worth taking.
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Source: Jerusalem Post
By Bloomberg / Katarzyna Klimasinska
An Israeli attack on Iran would be “destabilizing,” the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, US Army General Martin Dempsey, said Saturday.
“It’s not prudent at this point to decide to attack Iran,” Dempsey said in an interview with CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS,” scheduled to be broadcast Sunday. The US government is confident the Israelis “understand out concerns,” he said, according to an e-mailed transcript.
Amid US concerns that Israel may initiate military action against Iran’s nuclear sites, the White House National Security Adviser Tom Donilon begins a two-day visit to Israel today to discuss Iran and other issues, such as the turmoil in Syria. Iran has been under United Nations investigation since 2003 over suspected nuclear weapons work.
“A strike at this time would be destabilizing and wouldn’t achieve their long-term objectives,” Dempsey said of the Israelis. “I wouldn’t suggest, sitting here today, that we’ve persuaded them that our view is the correct view and that they are acting in an ill-advised fashion.”
Dempsey said the economic sanctions imposed on Iran and international pressure are beginning to have an effect, without elaborating. The European Union agreed on Jan. 23 to ban any oil imports from Iran, and the US denied access to its financial system for any foreign bank that conducts business with the Central Bank of Iran.
'Iran is a rational actor'
“We are of the opinion that Iran is a rational actor,” Dempsey said. “We also know, or we believe we know, that the Iranian regime has not decided” to make a nuclear weapon, he said. Iran says its enrichment of uranium is for making power while Israel says it’s aimed at making weapons.
Defense Minister Ehud Barak on Saturday called for “tight, ratcheted up” sanctions against Iran to force the country to abandon its nuclear ambitions.
“I think there is consensus in most capitals of the world that Iran should not be allowed to turn into a nuclear military power,” Barak said at a press conference today in Tokyo at the end of a four-day visit.
