The other night Charlie Rose gathered a group of foreign-policy heads to debate Iran, all of whom had lately participated in a crisis-simulation exercise to try and determine likely outcomes of the set-to. One participant was the former under-secretary of State Nicholas Burns, who played Obama in the exercise. Another was Ehud Eiran, a research fellow at Harvard, who was "the observer on the Israeli team in the simulation." Eiran is a reserve major in the Israeli army and a former top adviser to Ehud Barak– who directed the Gaza slaughter.
An excerpt of Eiran’s comments is below. The good news is that Eiran felt that Israeli aggressive ideas are being ignored. But consider the mindset. We see how deeply twisted the Israeli mind has become due to militarism and we see that the Dahiya post above is not just a coincidence.
EIRAN: [I]n the game, Israel’s main effort was to lobby the United States and make sure that the negotiations are not a pretense to ongoing Iranian progress. So Israel — Israel tried to set specific benchmarks of what will be negotiated. But it felt that the Americans were not very attentive to its requests. As for the broader issue, Israel had a hard time outsourcing its defenses or allowing the U.S. veto on its right to defend itself. And this was the main point of contention between the Americans and the Israelis in the game…
BURNS: I’m not aware of any military solution to this problem that would fix the problem. And in fact, I think you would have to assume that the Iranians would hit back through Hezbollah, through Hamas, through Palestinian Islamic jihad. We risk a wider war. I frankly think this longer, careful containment strategy is the right thing for the United States.
CHARLIE ROSE: Does Israel think that, Ehud?
EHUD EIRAN: First of all, let me say that a potential aggressive Israeli posture can be part of the strategy in the sense that Israel plays the aggressive dog that has to be contained. So even just signaling the potential of an attack can be part of this broader strategy, which we offered this in the simulation. It wasn’t advanced.
Alas, neither Burns nor Gary Sick nor Graham Allison nor Rose himself stepped in after this to say, Like you did in Lebanon? Like you did in Gaza? Gee, that really worked. They seem to have put Eiran on ignore.
