Iran didn't start the Mideast nuclear arms race - Israel did. Nearly all the frightening forecasts of what life would be like with a nuclear Iran strike me as being hollow. I'm not worried about Iran nuking Israel - because the Iranians don't want to commit suicide. I'm not worried about Iran giving nukes to terror organizations that would nuke Israel - because Israel's second-strike capacity, with its estimated 200 nuclear bombs, would devastate the Islamic world and the Islamic world knows it. I'm not worried that Iran's "proxies," such as Hezbollah and Hamas, would feel free under an Iranian "nuclear…

With Netanyahu and Barak desperate to sell their case for an attack on Iran, they've been repeating the urban legend that Israel's 1981 bombing of Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor stopped Saddam's nuclear ambitions permanently. Since we are getting down to crunch time, I am reposting below an excerpt from my March 2 post, 'The myth of Osirak and the march to Iran.' Like all Israelis, I believed that the Air Force had knocked out Saddam's nuclear program for good in 1981, and that this had certainly proved a wise and brave decision. That was until 2007, when I was doing a story on Israel's attack on the Syrian reactor, and I interviewed Yiftah Shapir,…

This week the Israeli military/intellgence establishment, backed by the U.S., has come out forcefully against war, isolating Netanyahu. He needs the cabinet's support to attack, and there's no way he'll get it.       It's not often that the story out of Israel, and out of America's relationship with Israel, is good, but the story that's emerged over the last few days is much more than good, and given Israel's build-up toward war with Iran for the last five years at least, the story is so out of character that it's hard to absorb. But here it is - Israel is not going to attack Iran. Not before the November 6 presidential election,…

Israel's top-selling newspaper reports that Netanyahu hasn't convinced inner council to back war; his latest attempt to rig the game has only hurt him more.  Yedioth Ahronoth is reporting some very good and surprising news on the Iran front: Prime Minister Netanyahu doesn't have a majority in the inner council of his government for an attack. In the eight-minister "octet," an unofficial body sometimes called the "security cabinet" or "inner cabinet," it's tied 4-4, with PM Netanyahu, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz in favor of war, and Interior Minister Eli Yishai and ministers-of-whatever Moshe "Bugi" Ya'alon, Dan Meridor and Benny…

When Israel assassinated Hezbollah's Imad Mughniyeh and five Iranian nuclear scientists, it was picking a fight, and the payback - or part of it - was Wednesday's bus bombing.   It says something about Israeli society's fear of facing hard truths when the only public figure who dares to state the obvious about the Burgas attack is Dr. Uzi Arad, who used to be known as "Dr. Strangelove" before he fell out of grace with Netanyahu over Iran. While everybody else here either doesn't believe or is afraid to say that Israel's all-but-confirmed assassinations of five Iranian nuclear scientists and Hezbollah military chief Imad…

Nuclear talks fail; hot summer ahead. What's missing is courage. Even the New York Times is now reporting that what we've got with Iran is a "drift toward war." The nuclear talks in Moscow ended yesterday, the NYT wrote, with "little visible progress toward a compromise that would stop the drift toward war." The "little visible progress" was an agreement to at least give the appearance of keeping the talks alive by scheduling a much more limited, lower-level exchange between the Iranians and the world powers on July 3 in Istanbul. If you like the current Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, you'll love the current Iran nuclear negotiations. "Drift toward war" refers to a couple…