| Submit your comments on this article |
| Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia |
| Stratfor: Two Leaks and the Deepening Iran Crisis |
| 2009-10-07 |
| Two major leaks occurred this weekend over the Iran matter. In the first, The New York Times published an article reporting that staff at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the U.N. nuclear oversight group, had produced an unreleased report saying that Iran was much more advanced in its nuclear program than the IAEA had thought previously. According to the report, Iran now has all the data needed to design a nuclear weapon. The New York Times article added that U.S. intelligence was re-examining the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of 2007, which had stated that Iran was not actively pursuing a nuclear weapon. The second leak occurred in the British paper The Sunday Times, which reported that the purpose of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's highly publicized secret visit to Moscow on Sept. 7 was to provide the Russians with a list of Russian scientists and engineers working on Iran's nuclear weapons program. |
| Posted by:Javing Angelet6048 |
| #5 Two conclusions can be drawn. First, the Israelis no longer need to add to their knowledge of Russian involvement; they know what they need to know. And second, the Israelis do not expect Iranian development to continue much longer; otherwise, maintaining the intelligence capability would take precedence over anything else. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2009-10-07 20:58 |
| #4 I read another article about an Iranian nuke scientist disappearing in Saudi during the Hajj, connecting it to the report on Qom. Defected or kidnapped? And by whom? Then I got this e-mail: Today, Israel is once again in grave danger. By Iran's nuclear threat, to be sure. The first threat is the real and growing possibility that the United Nations will shift the nuclear spotlight away from Iran and on to Israel in an effort to force Jerusalem to disclose and dismantle its alleged nuclear weapons and join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Israel does not openly acknowledge having atomic weapons. But the U.N. Security Council could pass a resolution forcing Israel to allow international inspectors in. If Israel refused to comply, she could be subject to diplomatic isolation, crippling economic sanctions, and even international enforcement (that is, a coalition of nations ready to go to war over the issue, just as the U.S. led a coalition in 2003 to force Iraq to comply with U.N. resolutions regarding weapons of mass destruction.) IAEA chief Mohammed ElBaradei publicly raised this as a serious possibility Monday, saying, "Israel is the number one threat to the Middle East given the nuclear arms it possesses." The Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens also had a must-read column in yesterday's paper explaining how this scenario could come to pass in the not-too-distant future. Keep in mind: President Obama is making global nuclear disarmament his top foreign policy priority. He just chaired a U.N. Security Council meeting to push this agenda. It is increasingly conceivable that he will try to force Israel to "play by the same rules" as everyone else and disarm unilaterally, even though Israel has never threatened to "annihilate" a neighbor. Such a resolution against Israel could be introduced into the U.N. by Russia. The coalition against Israel could be led by Russia and Iran. Should this happen, we could begin to see the prophecies of Ezekiel 38-39 come to pass in fairly short order. While it is too early to conclude that is what is happening now, it is not too early to intensify our prayers for the peace of Jerusalem, according to Psalm 122:6. |
| Posted by: Lumpy Elmoluck5091 2009-10-07 19:42 |
| #3 Maybe the Russians want us to smack Iran. Maybe they leaked their involvement to the Israelis through some back channel so nobody would suspect their motive. They get a much less dangerous neighbor. They get higher oil prices. They get us to do the dirty work. |
| Posted by: Ebbang Uluque6305 2009-10-07 19:02 |
| #2 And, of course, it has to be known all around that the spike in the price of oil that would follow war on iran would scupper not just obamacare, but the US economy as a whole. Oil price guarantees from soodia in return for smacking down iran, perhaps? |
| Posted by: M. Murcek 2009-10-07 16:11 |
| #1 When are our leaders going to realize that it is sucide to not take effective measures against toxic nations who are going through the long process of getting nukes? NKorea and Iran should have been shut down years ago. By shut down, I mean a military shut down, not a diplomatic one. Diplomacy works well with reasonable people. Boom-booms work much better with highly agressive fanatics. |
| Posted by: Richard of Oregon 2009-10-07 13:26 |