Generals Oppose Attack On Iran

Israeli Generals and Intelligence Officials Oppose Attack on Iran
http://www.campaigniran.org/casmii/index.php?q=node/10655
by Gareth Porter (source: Truthout.com)
Friday, August 13, 2010

Washington - Pro-Israeli journalist Jeffrey Goldberg's article in "The Atlantic" magazine was evidently aimed at showing why the Barack Obama administration should worry that it risks an attack by the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Iran in the coming months unless it takes a much more menacing line toward Iran's nuclear programme.

But the article provides new evidence that senior figures in the Israeli intelligence and military leadership oppose such a strike against Iran and believe that Netanyahu's apocalyptic rhetoric about an Iranian nuclear threat as an "existential threat" is unnecessary and self-defeating.

Although not reported by Goldberg, Israeli military and intelligence figures began to express their opposition to such rhetoric on Iran in the early 1990s, and Netanyahu acted to end such talk when he became prime minister in 1996.
The Goldberg article also reveals extreme Israeli sensitivity to any move by Obama to publicly demand that Israel desist from such a strike, reflecting the reality that the Israeli government could not go ahead with any strike without being assured of U.S. direct involvement in the war with Iran.

Goldberg argues that a likely scenario some months in the future is that Israeli officials will call their U.S. counterparts to inform them that Israeli planes are already on their way to bomb Iranian nuclear sites.

The Israelis would explain that they had "no choice", he writes, because "a nuclear Iran poses the gravest threat since Hitler to the physical survival of the Jewish people."

He claims the "consensus" among present and past Israeli leaders is that the chances are better than 50/50 that Israel "will launch a strike by next July", based on interviews with 40 such Israeli decision-makers.

Goldberg is best known for hewing to the neoconservative line in his reporting on Iraq, particularly in his insistence that that Saddam Hussein had extensive ties with al Qaeda.

Goldberg quotes an Israeli official familiar with Netanyahu's thinking as saying, "In World War II, the Jews had no power to stop Hitler from annihilating us. Six million were slaughtered. Today, six million Jews live in Israel, and someone is threatening them with annihilation."

In his interview with Goldberg for this article, however, Netanyahu does not argue that Iran might use nuclear weapons against Israel. Instead he argues that Hezbollah and Hamas would be able to "fire rockets and engage in other terror activities while enjoying a nuclear umbrella".

But Israel relies on conventional forces - not nuclear deterrence - against Hezbollah and Hamas, making that argument entirely specious.

Goldberg reports that other Israeli leaders, including defence minister Ehud Barack, acknowledge the real problem with the possibility of a nuclear Iran is that it would gradually erode Israel's ability to retain its most talented people.
But that problem is mostly self-inflicted. Goldberg concedes that Israeli generals with whom he talked "worry that talk of an 'existential threat' is itself a kind of existential threat to the Zionist project, which was meant to preclude such threats against the Jewish people."

A number of sources told Goldberg, moreover, that Gabi Ashkenazi, the Israeli army chief of staff, doubts "the usefulness of an attack".

Top Israeli intelligence officials and others responsible for policy toward Iran have long argued, in fact, that the kind of apocalyptic rhetoric that Netanyahu has embraced in recent years is self-defeating.

Security correspondent Ronen Bergman reported in Yediot Ahronot, Israel's most popular newspaper, in July 2009 that former chief of military intelligence Major General Aharon Zeevi Farkash said the Israeli public perception of the Iranian nuclear threat had been "distorted".

Farkash and other military intelligence and Mossad officials believe Iran's main motive for seeking a nuclear weapons capability was not to threaten Israel but to "deter U.S. intervention and efforts at regime change", according to Bergman.

The use of blatantly distorted rhetoric about Iran as a threat to Israel - and Israeli intelligence officials' disagreement with it - goes back to the early 1990s, when the Labour Party government in Israel began a campaign to portray Iran's missile and nuclear programmes as an "existential threat" to Israel, as Trita Parsi revealed in his 2007 book "Treacherous Alliance".

(Full article here)

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Zionists don't care what the Israeli Generals and Intelligence people say; they don't care about the Israeli people - they care only about their NWO agenda. They are much like the war-mongers in our own country; globalists who never fought a battle in their lives, armchair generals, ordering the cannon fodder to war.

I agree that the forces in support of a war with Iran care not what their own 'strategic thinkers' say - they have an agenda that regards the deaths of innocents as trivial. They're ruthless, and will attack no matter what, if it's in the plan, if it has been approved. Bilderberg gave their approval at this years meeting.

BILDERBERG MEETS IN SPAIN
Global Cabal Weakened, But Won’t Give Up NWO Dream
By James P. Tucker, Jr.
http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/bilderberg_meets_in_spain_225.html
...

BOMB IRAN

Sadly, Bilderberg remains committed to a U.S. attack on Iran on Israel’s behalf. But the cruel and clumsy attack on a flotilla bringing food and medicine to the besieged Palestinians in the Gaza Strip backfired, too (for more on this and subsequent attacks, see page 4). World outrage, including from many Jews, left Bilderberg gasping.

There is division within Bilderberg; most Americans want war, but some Europeans oppose air strikes. Many argue that Iran is not making nuclear weapons, while, they point out, Israel has had nuclear weapons since 1962. This was made public by the late Bilderberg luminary, George Ball, who was No. 2 man in the State Department under both presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.

“Iran is building nuclear weapons, which poses a threat, not only to Israel, but also to all of Europe and, potentially, to the United States,” said an American, but not to universal agreement.

“We’re not sure of that,” a European countered. “And you have a lot more dead boys than we do.”

“Israel may have to conduct a preemptive strike to protect itself from a nuclear Iran,” said an American, believed by the inside source to be Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency, but not positively identified.

“The term ‘preemptive strike’ was invented by Israel as a synonym for waging aggressive war in 1968,” the European countered. “Israel bombed Egypt in a surprise attack, wiping out the Egyptian air force on the ground. Israel was under no threat at all.”

The American walked away, shaking his head with a “where have I failed?” look.
...

(Full article)