Any US president would think long and hard about the power of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards to undo the tenuous progress achieved in Iraq, if Israel attacks Iran, says The Guardian (UK) in an editorial yesterday. Excerpts:
There is also Afghanistan and the Strait of Hormuz through which 90 percent of Gulf oil passes. And that is before you even get to Hezbollah’s long-range rockets. A ball of fire, the phrase of Mohamed El-Baradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, would not even begin to describe the fallout from an Israeli attack.
Efforts to persuade Iran to freeze its program of uranium enrichment are entering a dangerous new phase. Viewed from Tehran, the West is playing a classic game of good cop, bad cop. The good cop, the EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana, tells them that a package of incentives is still on the table if they halt enrichment. The bad cop, Israel, sends 100 fighter planes 870 miles into the eastern Mediterranean (the distance between Israel and Iran’s main enrichment plant at Natanz) for an exercise designed to show military readiness for a long-range attack.
Not only warplanes are deployed by Israel. Well-informed analysts are being dispatched to refine the warnings from Israeli ministers about Iran’s alleged covert nuclear bomb program. The refinements are these: That Syria was planning to supply Iran with spent nuclear fuel from Al-Kibar, the site Israel bombed in September; that discrepancies found in the amount of fissile material North Korea (Syria’s adviser in the construction of Al-Kibar) declared and the amount it could have produced, drastically alter intelligence calculations of how soon Iran could get enough material to make a nuclear bomb; that the point of no-return in Tehran’s bomb program is now 2010; and that, yes, there would be regional consequences to a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, but that these would be the lesser of two evils. Even if an Israeli PM was only 70 percent certain of the reliability of this intelligence, it would be enough to persuade him or her to press the button.
These claims are contentious, not least in Washington’s intelligence circles.
