Israel’s National Security Adviser, Yaakov Amidror, has embarked on a tour, meeting various European officials who are involved in the Iran nuclear negotiations. According to Ha’aretz, these talks have been described as “extremely sensitive” by a senior government official.
Amidror met [in Brussels] on Monday with Helga Schmid, who serves as the European Union's deputy secretary general for political affairs, under Catherine Ashton. On Tuesday, Amidror will continue to meet European officials in Brussels, before heading for Berlin on Wednesday. In Germany, Amidror is expected to meet with his German counterpart, Christoph Heusgen, and with Germany's representative in the talks with Iran, Hans-Dieter Lucas.
Two weeks ago, Amidror visited Moscow for a similar set of talks. He met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov…
A senior Israeli official ….indicated that Amidror hopes to find out much more about the first round of talks with Iran and will ask for an explanation of the negotiating team's strategy for the second round of negotiations.
The goal of the Amidror mission was described as bringing the Israelis up to date on the status of the talks. However, it is probable that the Israeli will explain his country’s position and attempt to pressure the Europeans to limit their concessions to Iran.
Israel is in continuous contact with the Americans concerning all aspects of the Iran negotiations. Since Israel has enormous political leverage with the Obama administration through the pro-Israel lobby, it has already become a de facto party to the talks. The meetings between Amidror and the Europeans will give the Israelis an opportunity to also directly influence the Europeans.
Although the Europeans are not beholden to the Israelis like the Americans, they are hardly unsympathetic or impervious to pressure from the Jewish state. Israel has been very successful in getting trade concessions, diplomatic support and help in prohibiting European activists from traveling to Palestine/Israel from the Europeans. I imagine that Amidror will pull out all the stops in order to influence the negotiations, especially on the enrichment issue.
According to David Ignatius in the Washington Post, a deal is already in the works in which Iran would cease enriching uranium to 20%, but maintain its right to enrich at lower levels. Ignatius claims that the Israelis are in on the deal and that the vehement protests by Netanyahu are “his expected role in this choreography.” At least this is what the Washington Post reporter was told by American officials.
The Israelis, however, continue to belittle the negotiations, threaten unilateral military force and declare they will not permit Iran to enrich uranium. These positions could put them on a collision course with the Obama administration. If this is all bluff, as Ignatius and others maintain, by continuing to play the game to the hilt, the Israelis assure that they will be humiliated when their duplicity is revealed. But playing along with the Americans does not appear to fit the image of Netanyahu or Barak who have often defied the international community and are not known for playing along.
The aggressive Israeli campaign to impose its will upon the Iranians continues. On Sunday, Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon appearing at a New York City pro-Israel conference declared that Israel would not permit Iran to enrich uranium. Then Monday, Defense Minister Ehud Barak said he had little faith in the ongoing negotiations, warned of the dangers of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons and indirectly threatened unilateral military action. A couple of weeks ago, Barak stated that Israel would attack Iran during the ongoing negotiations if it felt that it was appropriate to do so.
Maybe the Israelis are “expected” to play along with what Obama and the five other world powers decide about Iran, but it is far from clear that Netanyahu and Barak intend to meet this expectation.
Israel, sign NPT or STFU.
India also should STFU?
Yes.
Is India pushing for more sanctions and the bombing of an NPT signatory Dim?
I must have mussed that.
“On Sunday, Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon appearing at a New York City pro-Israel conference declared that Israel would not permit Iran to enrich uranium.”
Are Khrushchev’s shoes in a museum somewhere?
A senior Israeli official ….will ask for an explanation of the negotiating team’s strategy for the second round of negotiations.
no one owes them any explanation.
Aren’t we angry today?
we? if you’re angry just speak your mind. i’m merely expressing the truth as i see it.
The prospect of WWIII based on a false premise has that affect on people.
If you haven’t got an argument, you can always try that patronising tone – no doubt the same one that the Israeli bullyboys use with the Americans and Europeans. And with similar effect.
I do not see how Israel can have any influence in Europe apart from indirect influence through US politics.
that assumes israel is holding nothing against individual politicians. one does not know what kinds of threats are being made behind closed doors. reminds me of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.
Coupled with this diplomatic foray (coercion and intimidation), Israel appears to be ramping up its hasbara effort significantly:
link to current.com
This explains some of the new pro-Israeli posters on this forum recently.
My recommendation to everyone is to ignore their postings without bothering to respond, no matter how tempting, to prevent thread-jackings by the numerically increasing hoards.
Mohammad Javad Larijani, head of Iran’s Human Rights Council:
Marie Curie, Nobel acceptance speech, December, 1911 (a pre-Jabotinsky world):
“Although the Europeans are not beholden to the Israelis like the Americans”
I don’t know of any US ‘beholdness’ to Israel…I think he must be referring to the “domestic politics’ and the lobby within the US..but I wouldn’t put it as beholden to Israel…. accurately it’s a situtation where US politician bribee owes Israel first political bribor whatever they demand for Israel.
This may have appeared here before but I just saw it today:
Israel enters it’s End Game
link to counterpunch.org
Since 1967, Israel placed occupied Palestinian land, privately owned or otherwise, into various categories. One of these categories is ‘state-owned’, as in obtained by virtue of military occupation. For many years, the ‘state-owned’ occupied land was allotted to various purposes. Since 1990, however, the Israeli government refrained from establishing settlements, at lease formally. Now, according to the Israeli anti-settlement group, Peace Now, “instead of going to peace the government is announcing the establishment of three new settlements…this announcement is against the Israeli interest of achieving peace and a two states solution”
The fact that any country would talk to or even allow Israelis to enter their countries since everyone is aware that they, in violation of Geneva, claimed occupied land as their own and built on it , are outright criminals by International Law. Just goes to show you how Orwellian the Special Victims exception and aberration of Zionism, has made institutions and governments that would normally be required to recongize at least, if not forced to act in accordance with those laws.
Zionism is a curse on the world that effects the whole world, not just Jews, there is no other way to put it. It has nullified every law the nations created to prevent exactly what Israel has done.
I am not being overly dramatic when I say it has to be destroyed..exceptions to universal law like this cannot be allowed to stand in the world or those laws will be as meaningless to everyone as they are to Israel.
Ignatius’s report that the reactions of the Israelis are “choreographed” with the US is absurd. That is not how politics and international diplomacy works. Some US official was simply trying to spin Israel’s reaction to the Iran negotiations and the obedient Ignatius, scribe that he is, simply passed it along.
I think Israel is more isolated internationally today than any time in the last two decades. Amridor’s visit is a desperate attempt to influence events. They know that Obama has decided on a course in defiance of Israel’s demands and this is their effort to become more relevant and perhaps to gain information on potential differences among the parties that might be used to split the coalition.
One thing we can be sure is that Israel will be working hard to sabotage these talks. They have plenty of allies inside the US in the government, press and think tanks to put together some elaborate plans. I thought for some time that the removal of Dennis Ross from the Iran portfolio was a sign that Obama’s national security staff did so to protect our Iranian policy from sabotage within.
I wonder if US is feeding the media China stories as a way of pointedly ignoring Israel, the way a parent deliberately renders invisible an obstreperous child ’til it learns to control its tantrums.
do you mean the chen guangcheng fiasco? whatever. all i know is china is a huge concern of ours. huge. it’s just not in the news much. but anyone reading the congressional transcripts w/congress people questioning our military..china is always on the mind of both congress and our military leaders. it is long but it’s very revealing. MARCH 20, 2012
Transcript, Gen. John R. Allen, COMISAF, House Committee on Armed Services
link to isaf.nato.int
that’s just a warm up..
i found this trying to confirm some allegations made about iran in some nyt neocon hitpiece (it wasn’t there, they took words out of context never said) and as i was reading it i realized the concern over china, outweighed that of iran. the military just didn’t seem to be that concerned about iran. the china talk is peppered all the way thru.
china is pretty smart. they basically split their china investment between the war machine and investments. but the money for defense is funneled thru us, and we actually pay them back for it (with interest), the other investment, the stuff they get kudos for from afghans, that’s the other half. do we do the dirty work and they benefit. smart. they make a profit on both ends with no loss of life. it’s like we’re their mercenaries but we pay them to do that.
this NYT article about United Against Nuclear Iran — one of the groups Ross is involved with in the game of harrying Iran — shaking its fist at International Monetary Fund, seemed to present UANI as desperate and impotent.
There is not a single substantive sentence in the article, just petulant remonstrances–
“Mommy loves me better than you,” Wallace was heard to mutter as he retrieved his binky.
i wonder how Amidror’s tour might impact my bet with cloak and dagger. tick tock tick tock.
Unfortunately, for the moment, I appear to be winning the bet, while rooting for you to win.
not sure i would altogether agree with that assessment, but i would have to read the exact wording of our bet. it seems to me the last round of talks set up or encouraged even more israeli top brass to speak up against an iran strike and that eases the pressure too. of course who knows what will happen in baghdad. and who knows how the israeli election cycle will impact all this either. lots of speculation about striking right after their election and right before the US election in november.
but our bet was just between these two sessions of negotiations. i’m still thinking it has not been ratcheted up anywhere near the fear level we were reading about earlier in the year.
My exact words were:
That has not happened yet, but there is still time.
I also added that McCain/Lieberman would scurry back from Syria to denounce this “betrayal” by Obama – which they did. Nutty Yahoo and crew have been proclaiming that anything less than total cessation of refining was unacceptable.
I had not expected the pronouncements by prominent Israelis of the ‘messianic’ Netanyahu – that was a surprise and it definitely cooled things down quite a bit with the rocket to war. However, I am not sure that this will stand for long, and Amidror’s trip is the beginning of a full-court press to sabotage the May talks. Obama placing those F-22 Raptors in the UAE did not go over well in Iran.
Obama is trying to balance between applying just enough rhetoric to appease Nutty Yahoo but not too much for the talks to collapse. Unfortunately he is not good at it and Nutty Yahoo does not want to back down. Netanyahu’s expected reelection will further stiffen his resolve.
i absolutely agree with that. i won’t hold you to the ‘well before’ part but we might be duking it over our definitions of sabotage tho. clearly if the talks are canceled, you won. but it has to be more than merely attempted sabotage. and there will be, assumably, an element of surprise. because while i think it is safe to assume we can predict the level of subterfuge wrt the willingness of the israelis and their US neocon cohorts (no hold bars) i don’t think we can reasonably predict how the iranians will react. although, that might not matter if the israelis&co can pressure obama and the other parties to walk away or whatever.
but, we’re almost half way thru and so far so good. as i mentioned in my article
i still think we’re safe at least until the talks in baghdad begin. then all hell might break loose.
and one more thing. i took some slack for my analysis (“We can all breathe a sigh of relief just a little bit longer.”) daniel commented i was ‘selling hides’, iow..i was suggesting it was a ‘done deal’. whereas i think pushing this down the road is a win/win wrt the iran/election/fear gambit. the longer time we have on our side the more time unpredictable naysayers on iran (like Diskin,and other regular people/both israelis and americans) can leak their overriding opinions (i don’t think most people want war) into the discourse. i will likely breathe a sigh of relief after the elections (unless it’s a romney win). pushing this war down the road, right now, is our best option. and hopefully we can push it away for good.
Okay, I want to weasel in a crisper definition of “sabotage”. I win if any of the following happen:
1. The talks get cancelled (as you said)
2. P5+1 said that the talks would be within the NPT definitions (i.e. some level of refinement < 5% was permissible). If they back away from that, then that counts as sabotage as well, since that will obviously have been due to Israeli pressure, and Iran will not agree to that. So, if the talks reach stalemate, I want that to be regarded as sabotaged, since that is not how the last talks were left at.
As I had stated, if the agreement that the P5+1 are looking for ends up emasculating Iran, there is no way that Iran will agree. I see no agreement which requires Iran to capitulate completely and completely stop refinement, but they have hinted that some flexibility is possible at the 20% refinement being outsourced. If the P5+1 suddenly takes a harder line than the one in the first talks, resulting in Iran walking away, then that is evidence of sabotage.
Agreed?
Okay, a few more predictions:
1. Romney will not be elected.
2. Israel will not bomb Iran
There is only one scenario in which war will erupt: a false-flag instigated by Israel against US assets (maybe the fleet in the gulf), which results in our attacking Iran.
Our only hope of preventing that is to have a lot of public discussions about that scenario to the extent that Israel is convinced that they won’t be able to pull it off without being the prime suspect.
oh, do you mean our bet runs thru the length of the 2nd talks and includes the outcome? not sure i would have made that bet. perhaps i wasn’t clear enough in my article but i meant i thought we bought some time til baghdad when i said We can all breathe a sigh of relief just a little bit longer. and ‘that’s just 5 weeks’. i didn’t mean to imply i could predict the outcome of the 2nd talks. if i thought the 2nd talks would be successful i would predict we were safe even longer than 5 weeks. ‘before’ means before. i waved the ‘well’ before but…do you mean you no longer predict “the prelude to the second talks” being sabotaged?
i don’t want to appear to be backing down on the bet. so let’s compromise on your number 2. if they back away from the NPT definitions before the talks begin we can count that as your win. hows that?
So, if the talks reach stalemate, I want that to be regarded as sabotaged, since that is not how the last talks were left at.
i think we need some other opinions wrt what the perceptions of our bet was because there was nothing we discussed in the previous thread that included the outcome of the baghdad negotiations. i certainly never went into a bet predicting the outcome of the 2nd round. but if you can gather enough support i will concede your point, bit only if it’s done prior to the talks. i know daniel agreed with you earlier. it’s all in black and white.
count down.
Fine. Its a bet I don’t want to win, so we can do that.
Its more likely that they will spring the new requirements at the talks rather than prior to it. If they spring new requirements before the talks, then I am bound to win since Iran will back away from the talks claiming bad faith.
exactly, and if they spring them at the talks iran may have some bargaining tools we are unfamiliar with. like for example springing they have the drone intel and can sell it to china. and when i say intel i mean the brains of it figured out, ways to intercept and codes etc. the iranians released this info about a week ago and of course the US said, they couldn’t have figured it out.
that might not seem like a biggie compared to the nuke thing, but since there is no intel they are working on a nuke..
also, is the the NPT definitions 5%?
so we’re back to the bet! crossing my fingers it will be smooth sailing. even a bumpy road i can handle. i would love it if israel was even MORE pissed after baghdad than they were after istambul.
oh, one more thing. remember when i reported how israel first demanded iran give up fordo? and then a month later By DAVID E. SANGER and STEVEN ERLANGER reported in the nyt obama made the same demand? (but they happened to forget to mention it had been israel’s demand all along?)
link to mondoweiss.net
this is a neocon trick, not naming their sources (denis ross?) and making claims up front to box in the administration. so, it has to be somewhat definitive not some wishywashy neocon claim.
No, there is no such requirement in the NPT beyond “for peaceful use”. I guess that would mean < 90% – required for making bombs. Most reactors use 3.5% and Iran refined some to 20% for use as medical isotopes. It was hinted that 3.5% – 5% was okay, but 20% is viewed as being just a hop away from 90%, and while the NPT should be okay with that, US/Israel are not.
So the potential agreement is that they may be allowed to keep a small amount of 20% for use in cancer treatment, and outsource through Turkey for future needs, and they can continue to make the < 5% for their reactors.
Iran has indicated that they may be okay with that – but Israel has been stomping around claiming that is unacceptable, and Iran must cease all refinement, including the 3.5%. If the P5+1 accept Israel's position, then the talks are DOA.
We are not out of the woods – not by a long shot.
Yeah, that has been the demand from both Israel and US – however, that is a complete non-starter. That amounts to total emasculation – which Iran cannot agree to. It was hinted that there may be a way, with cameras installed all over Fordo and the permission for the IAEA to do surprise spot inspections, that may be acceptable to the US as a trust-building step. This has not been confirmed.
If the US demands that Fordo has to be shut down, then I win.
yes of course you win if the US demands that Fordo has to be shut down. the iranians would never do that. that would be insane. but i don’t believe the veracity of that nyt article anyway.
The article of Ignatius is just sycophancy. I think that Israel has a choreographed part of “interlude with clowns”. Palestinian rights do not have much sway in the halls of power, but (a) an attack on Iran may result in an extremely humiliating debacle in Afghanistan without Iran doing much (b) sanction on Iran enacted by EU have a painful effect in EU itself, especially in the south of Euro zone, but Germany may feel it too.
Israeli hardliners believe that they can avert international pressure forever by dint of ironclad support from USA and neutralizing three main Muslim countries in the region: Egypt, Turkey and Iran. This issue was not about nukes but “attitude”.
True to her historical heritage (or mythical, if you will) Israel is resting its policies on thin reeds.
in many ways, the United Methodist debacle was a test of support Israel can expect from American mainstream Christians.
recent experience suggests to me that very many of the people in the pews in American mainstream churches do not have a clue what is going on — folks who read Mondoweiss have to recognize that they are a rare breed.
I participate in a few bible study groups at Methodist churches. Most of the participants are long-time members of Methodist congregations, and several are quite young — early to mid-30s. Among young and old alike, resistance is absolute to anything that disturbs a comfort zone that was created back in third grade in Vacation Bible School.
Mainstream Protestant Christians are in a bind–they’ve spent a few hundred years defending biblical literalism, and that includes yahweh as real estate broker: Jews have a god-given right to the land of Israel. “How do I know? The bible tells me so.”
A review of some of the petitions offered at the Methodist conference reinforces that view. It’s not just the Hagee nuts who are diehard defenders of Israel right or wrong.
The Methodists in the group I participate with are deeply committed to anti-intellectualism — I had a far more intellectually stimulating conversation with the stone mason who was working on my neighbor’s house than is possible to have with the minister who runs the bible study — the latter is enamored of discussions on ‘dream work’ and angels, and considers discussion of objective history of the land of Palestine to be apostasy; the mason is conversant with the latest findings on neuroscience, and can trace from 1913 the wars and treaties that turned the ME into the mess it is today. The minister has a pulpit and influences hundred of people; the mason repairs chimneys. This is truly frightening.
The New Yorker, current edition, has an article (by Laura Secor) about a visit to Iran, saying, for what this may be worth, that the regime is ever more oppressive and that even the current level of sanctions is biting quite hard. Music to Obama’s rather than to Netanyahu’s ears, I suppose.
Well AllenBee that is an interesting take. But I do not think so. Our shift to China policy is, I believe, an effort on the part of our State Department to redirect our policy in an important direction. Those professionals must realize what an insignificant pimple that Israel really is in bigger picture. Surely, China is more important in international affairs then is that tiny nuisance of country in the ME. I think what they are doing is a mistake, but China should take up more of our time than insignificant Israel (sure Israel has amassed 400 nuclear war heads but still their economy and importance in the world amounts to very little).
Excellent article by Philip Giraldi over at the American Conservative about Iran’s tactical strengths.
link to theamericanconservative.com
Hope Obama is listening to the military, unlike Cheney.
It appears this diplomatic mission was a success.
The European Union is today issuing formal demands that Iran immediately halt not only all civilian enrichment of uranium, but to also abandon all nuclear research and development, saying this would be a vital “confidence building” measure.”
link to gulf-times.com
I cannot for the life of me, understand why the EU fell for this crap. Iran-IAEA talks in Vienna are only a week away and the two weeks before the P5+1 talks in Baghdad, and the demands, seemingly far beyond what anyone expects Iran to be willing to do, only hurt the prospect of those talks.
Why do these reptiles always capitulate to these fascist war mongers?