PRESS RELEASE
Drumbeat for Crippling Sanctions,
Military Attack Against Iran
April 21, 2010 (EIRNS)—A number of senior U.S. military and intelligence officials contacted over the past several days said they are convinced that Israel will launch a military attack on Iran before the November elections in the United States, unless there is a serious effort to prevent President Obama from supporting such an Armageddon-triggering attack.
On April 15, the World Jewish Congress (WJC) published full-page ads in the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, demanding harsh action against Iran. Before publication, WJC President Ron Lauder openly boasted that he had cleared the text in advance with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, a longtime close friend. The ad warns of Iran's "nuclear ambitions" and its "genocidal intentions" toward Israel. In a conference call on April 12, Efraim Sneh, a former deputy defense minister of Israel, warned that nothing short of paralyzing sanctions and a drive for regime change in Tehran would stop Israel from taking preventive action to knock out Iran's nuclear program.
Further contributing to the buildup for a military strike, on April 14, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, attempted to convince the Chinese, Russian, French, United Kingdom, and German delegations to agree to a Security Council escalation of sanctions against Iran. She proposed measures such as a total arms embargo, the right to seize Iranian ships suspected of carrying materials linked to its nuclear program, curtailing new foreign investment in Iran's energy sector, and measures against senior officers of the Revolutionary Guard and a network of Iranian companies and financial institutions. These are acts of war.
In another piece of folly brought to us by the U.S. Congress, 76 Senators and 333 Representatives have just sent a letter to President Obama, demanding that he impose "crippling sanctions" on Iran, with or without UN Security Council approval, and that he sign the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act, which would prohibit the government from doing business with any company, domestic or foreign, involved in Iran's oil industry. Publication of the letter was paid for by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
On the sanctions issue, Europe, and in particular Tony Blair's Great Britain, is heating up the situation just as wildly. China, however, is not going along, and Turkey's Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu just reminded the press corps in Washington, that sanctions kill children, too, just as they did in Iraq. In the wake of the first Iraq war, approximately one million people, many of them children, died as a result of the sanctions.
In a further escalation, Israel is accusing Syria of having delivered long-range Scud missiles to the Hezbollah in Lebanon—which the Syrian government denies. According to the New York Times, an unnamed Israeli official has argued that the Hezbollah's arsenal could deliver a counterstrike against Israel, in the event of an Israeli strike against Iran's nuclear facilities. Obama's own remarks of April 13, that the Mideast dispute is a "vital national security interest of the United States," which is seen as a far-reaching shift in U.S. foreign policy, could serve as the pretext for a so-called "breakaway ally scenario," where Israel would act seemingly without U.S. approval.
