By Steve Hynd
A London Times piece today reports that two Israeli Saar class missile corvettes and a Dolphin class missile submarine - the latter capable of carrying nuke-tipped missiles - have passed through the Suez Canal in an exercise designed to further prove Israel's capability for a combined-arms strike on Iran.
The article was swiftly picked up by both the Israeli press and by US neocon news outlets in a very obvious show of the ongoing integrated Israeli attempt to push the threat of attack and hopefully pressure Iran to the negotiating table at a disadvantage. It's all about strategic ambiguity, as usual. And Iran's response, as usual, is rhetoric-laden defiance.
But the really interesting bit of the Times report - an obvious Israeli trial balloon - was this:
The exercises come at a time when Western diplomats are offering support for an Israeli strike on Iran in return for Israeli concessions on the formation of a Palestinian state.
If agreed it would make an Israeli strike on Iran realistic �within the year� said one British official.
Diplomats said that Israel had offered concessions on settlement policy, Palestinian land claims and issues with neighboring Arab states, to facilitate a possible strike on Iran.
�Israel has chosen to place the Iranian threat over its settlements,� said a senior European diplomat.
I don't know which Western or European diplomats the Times is talking to - and remember, the Times considers Israel both Western and part of Europe and has a history of being very circumspect about wording such attributions - but if the Israelis really think Europe and the US will easily trade settlements which are a known quantity in the regional political dynamic for an attack that would touch of a regional conflagration with unknowable consequences, they're smoking crack while formulating policy. It's got to be just more disinformation, possibly designed as a wedge issue between Iran and Arab states.
I think something's gotten munged in the story.
ReplyDeleteTwo Israeli missile class warships have sailed through the Suez Canal ten days after a submarine capable of launching a nuclear missile strike, in preparation for a possible attack on Iran�s nuclear facilities.
The thing that goes unstated in the article is that the sub was northbound in the canal, heading back to homebase after exercises in the Red Sea.
The reports this week of nuclear armed, German made, Dolphin-class submarines of the Israeli navy cavorting around the Mediterranean is a deeply sobering fact given that Israel is now estimated to be the fifth most powerful nuclear state in the world and the only nuclear state that holds an undeclared, secret nuclear arsenal of up to 400 warheads that is entirely uninspected. Israel has refused to sign the NPT, along with North Korea, Pakistan and India notwithstanding that nearly every other country in the world is a signatory - 189 states altogether open to inspection by the IAEA. But not Israel ..
ReplyDeleteIt would seem to be the tragic position that when the international community finally wakes up to the fact that a tiny state in the Mediterranean has the means to decimate and contaminate half the world including most of Europe, and all of the Gulf - it will be too late to take any action.