From Ian:
Caroline Glick: Watching Netanyahu in Tehran
Why Israeli Intelligence about the Iranian Nuclear Program Matters
Caroline Glick: Watching Netanyahu in Tehran
The Iranians now realize that Israel has been given a green light from the US to defeat its forces in Syria.Caroline Glick: Bibi's Iran Deal Bombshell Is a Strategic Game-Changer
And they are terrified. This is why they insisted that there were no Iranian forces killed in Sunday’s air strikes against Iranian targets in Syria.
Netanyahu’s critics have claimed that his presentation Monday, along with Trump’s anticipated announcement that the US is abandoning the nuclear deal increase the threat of war. But this is not necessarily the case. Indeed, in all likelihood, his presentation, together with the strikes against Iranian targets in Syria and the US’s support for Israel reduced the prospect of war.
Hemmed in by an empowered US-backed Israel, and an angry, rebellious Iranian public that just watched its humiliation on Israeli television, it is hard to see the scenario where the regime embarks on a war it is now convinced it will lose.
The only way to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power without a major war is to overthrow the regime. Netanyahu’s presentation advanced that goal in a profound way. Declarations of friendship to the Iranian people, like the IDF’s Persian love song, further empower the people of Iran to bring down the regime that oppresses them and endangers the entire world.
This then brings us to the fourth and final strategic point. Many Obama administration alumni are insisting that Netanyahu’s remarkable presentation on Monday night, and Trump’s now expected decision May 12 to exit Obama’s nuclear deal, will increase the likelihood of all-out war between Israel and Iran that is likely to deteriorate swiftly into a larger regional war.
While it would be foolhardy to dismiss the possibility of war, the fact is that the events of the past week or so have made war far less likely than it was before.
The more powerful Israel’s airstrikes have become, the more powerful its intelligence services are proven to be. And the stronger and more open Israel’s cooperation and coordination with Washington becomes, the less likely Iran will be to respond to the challenge by initiating a war.
The regime knows the restive and angry Iranian public will not accept a war against a U.S. backed-Israel in Syria and beyond that will cost billions of dollars Iran simply doesn’t have. War would end in a stunning defeat for Iran.
Moreover, if Iran responds to the challenge by activating its terrorist sleeper cells and ordering them to attack Israeli or Jewish targets abroad, such action would only subject the regime to still sharper scrutiny from the U.S. — and, presumably, significant swathes of the international community — and consequently weaken the regime still further.
In short, by seizing and exposing the contents of Iran’s nuclear arsenal, Israel has further destabilized and weakened the regime. Its powerful airstrikes against Iranian targets in Syria and its increasingly apparent operational cooperation with the U.S. have reduced the prospects for war.
And Israel has started running down the clock not to Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, but to the overthrow of the regime by the people of Iran.
Why Israeli Intelligence about the Iranian Nuclear Program Matters
After Benjamin Netanyahu made public the information from secret Iranian files pertaining to Tehran’s efforts to obtain atomic weapons, defenders of the 2015 nuclear deal rushed to claim that he had revealed nothing new. This claim is absurd, writes Matthew Kroenig, a scholar of nuclear proliferation:
For Iran to go nuclear, it must complete three steps: (1) enrich significant quantities of uranium to weapons-grade levels, (2) develop a functioning nuclear warhead, (3) and possess a ballistic missile or other means to deliver the device to an enemy. Step 1 is the most difficult technical hurdle and the subject of the most contentious debates about the Iran nuclear deal. But all of the revelations in Netanyahu’s presentation were about Step 2. . . .
Most importantly, Netanyahu claimed that illegal nuclear-weaponization work continues to the present day. He said that “today, in 2018, this work is carried out by SPND, an organization inside Iran’s Defense Ministry.” His presentation claimed that the name of the program for Step 2 changed in 2003, but that substantive work has continued under a new label with the same lead scientist and some of the same staff under the euphemism of “scientific-knowhow development.” If true, this would be a clear violation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action [or JCPOA, as the deal is officially known], which explicitly prohibits work on nuclear-warhead design in Section C, Part 16 and Annex 1, Part T. This is a subject that deserves further scrutiny and on which the international community should press Iran.
Next, these revelations show that the Iran nuclear deal was consummated under false pretenses. A condition of the deal [was] Iran’s coming clean about the possible military dimensions (PMD) of its nuclear program. Netanyahu’s presentation shows that Iran did not come clean, but lied about many aspects of the PMD of its program in its reporting to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 2015. . . .
















