Quote:

Netanyahu understands the gravity of the situation and is probably reluctant to order a strike as he knows what this will do to the western world.

Actually, he and Barack are the ones pushing for a strike...

Paul craig Roberts wrote on him : "It is a mystery why Israelis put Netanyahu in public office instead of in an insane asylum. "

Eo,

Thats just one pundits opinion of him. He isn't crazy and he is definitely not stupid. Israel is between a rock and a hard place. At some point they will become the cornered Badger. I personally think Obama wants to avoid this at all costs.

Quote:

Netanyahu understands the gravity of the situation and is probably reluctant to order a strike as he knows what this will do to the western world. They will exhaust all options to avoid it...until they cant.

If I was him this would be a black and white issue, no gray areas at all. The only reason they havent done anything yet is probably due to intel saying they dont have any viable warheads yet. When that threshold approaches you will see the rhetoric spike dramatically and probably a few final end game tactics such as mobilizations, alert levels, and troop call ups, etc. This will be Iran's final warning.

If Israel moves, the US will have no choice but to engage in protecting the Straits of Hormuz. This will mean active operations against installations and bases inside Iran and all along the Gulf region. I doubt Israel is capable of the ops tempo to pull that off and prosecute all the targets they will need to going after nuke infrastructure. I think it will be messy for quite some time, but ultimately Iran loses a lot of folks and materiel along with a vastly set back nuke program.

You think gas prices are high now? ;) I'd suggest laying in a small supply of gasoline storage for the lines and rationing we all will encounter.

Pilot nailed it!

- Sean

PS.
I left the first sentenance of his last comment out on purpose since I believe that the strike will happen after nov 6 and O will be re-elected.

Pilot,

I know, and you're right it's only his opinion (although he is well informed and doesn't often tell bs). But I know other well informed people that think like him.

Anyway, the point here is, it's Netanyahu that is promoting war. He is doing everything he can to get it (against a lot of Israelis will).
The only thing preventing him is the reluctancy of O to engage.

Eo-

Your wrong. It is Iran that is promoting war. An article from today.

http://news.yahoo.com/tumour-israel-soon....

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told an annual anti-Israel protest in Tehran on Friday that the Jewish state was a "cancerous tumour" that will soon be excised, drawing Western rebukes.
Washington said Ahmadinejad's statements were "reprehensible", while Paris viewed them as "outrageous."

This will go on forever...

Whatever, I have a question for Yonatan. Do you think Netanyahu's party has any chance of winning the coming elections?

As much as I don't think the US should take an active part in this mess, and as much as I agree that yes Netanyahu is pushing as hard as he can for this war there's no way the US would sit back and allow a Mexico that was a belligerent as Iran has been to acquire nuclear weapons. Given the situation I think Obama is doing the best thing for the US in saying that while we will give Israel missile cover we won't engage in offensive operations in Iran. If the tables were turned I doubt we'd be asking Israel to help us, and I very much doubt they would step in. If Israel feels the need to strike Iran I sure understand, but they have no business starting a war with some sort of assumption that we will also pile on.

beignet...not even close...who is constantly threatening to bomb iran, impose sanctions and calling for embargo's on Iran...get a grip dude...on another note

http://intellectualodditiesnetwork.com/s....

I was paid to be an internet shill for Israel

read it and weep

snip

My task? “To support Israel and counter anti-Israeli, anti-Semitic posters.” Fine with me. I had no opinions one way or another about Israel, and who likes anti-Semites and Nazis? Not me, anyway. But I didn’t know too much about the topic. “That’s OK,” she said. “You’ll pick it up as you go along. For the most part, at first, you will be doing what we call “meme-patrol.” This is pretty easy. Later if you show promise, we’ll train you for more complex arguments, where more in-depth knowledge is necessary.”

Quote:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told an annual anti-Israel protest in Tehran on Friday that the Jewish state was a "cancerous tumour" that will soon be excised, drawing Western rebukes.
Washington said Ahmadinejad's statements were "reprehensible", while Paris viewed them as "outrageous."

Would suggest you read what was actually said. The MSM is cherry-picking individual words and interchanging the words Zionism and Zionists with the word Israel. Read what was actually said.

This summarizes the point nicely:

http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/201....

http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-de....

Quote:

Hezbollah says its 'precision rockets' could kill tens of thousands of Israelis

Bull... unless he talks about chemical/biological weapons or a strike on Dimona... Israel's nuclear reactor. And any WMD attack on Israel will probably mean a nuclear strike on Lebanon and IMO there's no way they can destroy Dimona...

http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/what-abou....

Quote:

What about the day after?

Defense Minister Ehud Barak has suggested no more than 500 will be killed − but he hasn’t revealed the basis for that calculation.

Yeah because it's bull****. Like every warmongerer predictions always are.

Quote:

“The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.” − Winston Churchill

http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/east-side-s....

Quote:

With his back against the wall, Nasrallah may seek to provoke a war with Israel

With Hezbollah's public standing in Lebanon on the decline, and its patron Bashar Assad poised to fall from power in Syria, the Shi'ite group may attempt to provoke the IDF into a confrontation.

If they do, Israel will go all the way IMO...

http://www.nowlebanon.com/NewsArticleDet....

Quote:

Turkey advises nationals not to travel to Lebanon

http://www.nowlebanon.com/NewsArticleDet....

Quote:

US warns nationals of risk of attacks in Lebanon

Thank you Landshark,I wanted to post this yesterday but since people only believe what they want, and every time make the same mistakes...

I believe someone asked in an earlier post (paraphrasing)"who gives a crap about that little pile of rocks?" (Isreal)

Sorry, this thread is so long, I can't find it but ivariably someone always asks why this area is so important.

Came across this today and I have searched posts since July 1st to see if anyone caught this. If they did, apologize, I missed it. But it seems to me, it makes Isreal extremely important and could be the reason why Isreal isn't going to wait any longer.

Quote:

New Natural Gas Wealth Means Historic Change for Israel

This unprecedented offshore bonanza expanded dramatically the following year when another field, Leviathan, almost double the size of Tamar, was discovered another 30 miles (48 kilometers) to the west. (A smaller field, Tanin, with an estimated 33.9 billion cubic meters (1.2 trillion cubic feet) in natural gas, was discovered nearby earlier this year.)With natural gas scheduled to begin flowing from Tamar next year, and from Leviathan about four years later, Israel is on the brink of a historic shift. Instead of being an energy-scarce nation amid Middle East oil giants, many of them hostile, Israel now faces a future as a fuel producer in its own right—likely as an exporter and supplier to some of its neighbors, a development that could dramatically alter the region's geopolitics.

Israel's foreign and domestic policy no longer will be intertwined with the question of securing adequate fuel supply. Now it will face a quite different challenge—managing the nation's newfound energy abundance.

"This is going to change the overall way of the economy of Israel," says Shaul Zemach, director general of Israel's Ministry of Energy and Water Resources. "It's like a domino—it's going to have a domino effect on all of the markets." Quite simply, he said, it's a "game changer."

more at the link http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/....

EO wrote..

Do you think Netanyahu's party has any chance of winning the coming elections?

Every poll indicates that they will win hands down. It's not even a question at this point.

Landshark, your article and feelings on this twist things around pretty nicely also. Any Jew that is not zionistic believes that the State of Israel is an abomination. They feel that we need to wait for the Moshiach (Messiah) to come and re-establish the state. To pretend that they are anywhere near meaningful numbers is ludicrous. Of course Iran wants the zionist state gone, that means no Israel. That means no Jews in Israel or whatever their dream world name for the place would be. It's anti Jewish regardless of the semantics you want to twist around.

Yonatan, why don't you just go ahead and admit you didn't even bother to read the article.

Quote:

Do you think Netanyahu's party has any chance of winning the coming elections?

Coming Election? You mean in 2013?

And yeah Yonatan is totally right, Bibi will win hands down. All the other parties are too disorganized.

And Israelis are afraid (thanks to the MSM propaganda 24/7) therefore, they will vote for a right wing party (Bibi).

http://www.haaretz.com/news/middle-east/....

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Egypt's Morsi to visit Iran in late August

Morsi will visit Iran to attend the Non-Aligned Movement summit; his visit to Tehran will be the first by an Egyptian head of state since the Islamic revolution.

http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-de....

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Israel, U.S. conduct joint naval exercises

The four-day exercise included use of live fire, and U.S. participants included guided-missile destroyers that would be used to help defend Israel against Iranian missiles.

http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/diplomania/....

Quote:

U.S. official: Israeli leaks are damaging efforts to halt Iran's nuclear program

Former chief of Israeli intelligence Amos Yadlin writes in the Washington Post that Obama must visit Jerusalem and convince the Knesset and the Israeli public that the U.S. is committed to preventing the Islamic Republic from developing a nuclear weapon.

http://www.timesofisrael.com/home-front-....

Quote:

Home Front committee head: Israel hasn’t learned lessons from Second Lebanon War

Ze’ev Bielski warns that bomb shelter situation is dire, millions don’t have gas masks and won’t have them in the near future

Duh.

I see a lot of Israelis demonstrating against war (majority of population). That's why I am wondering for bibi.

And Vitchilo, there are elections coming in September 4th, I posted it higher in the thread

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnew....

Quote:

And Vitchilo, there are elections coming in September 4th, I posted it higher in the thread

I know. But that was in May... before the political deal/chaos that ensued last month.

I think there's no election this year after that.

If there were elections on September 4, the knesset would have been dissolved by now.

Let Wiki explain :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_leg....

Quote:

On the eve of 7 May 2012, after weeks of deliberation and rumours, Netanyahu called for an early general national election and proposed September 4 as the election day, a notion which seemed inevitable. However, in a dramatic turn of events, that very night Netanyahu announced that he had forged a unity government with the Kadima Party, effectively retracting the earlier call for early elections. The next afternoon, Likud and Kadima signed a coalition agreement placing Kadima's 28 Knesset members in the government, with Mofaz appointed as Active Vice Premier (in case of Netanyahu's absence) and Minister Without Portfolio. This agreement bolstered the government to the widest government in Israel's history, with a coalition of 94 seats and an opposition of only 26.[59] But on July 17, Kadima voted to pull out of the coalition. The coalition did, however, still have a majority of seats even without Kadima. However, the reduced coalition was now divided between nationalist groups such as Yisrael Beiteinu and Haredi groups such as Shas, which are on opposite sides of the universal draft issue. This led some commentators to suggest that the coalition's complete breakup was imminent and that new elections would take place by January 2013.[61]

No election planned... yet.

Re the joint Israeli/US naval exercises:

Are these the same kind of exercises the world was treated to with the USS Liberty?

You know, the boat that the vaunted IDF could not sink despite air- and naval bombardment, finally rescued by a Soviet vessel, after much of its crew had been machine-gunned to death.

From a Belgian journalist... according to his NATO sources, Israel would strike Iran on August 20.

I hope his sources are wrong, but from I have read from him in the last few months on Syria, he's always been right.

Time to buy some oil....

Vitch: That's Monday.

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,....

Quote:

A senior Iranian commander says a possible Israeli airstrike against his country's nuclear facilities is "welcome" because it would give Iran a reason to retaliate and "get rid of" the Jewish state "forever."

The remarks by Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, head of the Revolutionary Guard's air force, were reported Saturday by the official IRNA news agency.

Hajizadeh says in the event of an Israeli strike, Iran's response would be "swift, decisive and destructive."

Vitch: That's Monday. : i KNOW... too late to buy oil then... shiat!

24hres warning + trusted journalist...+ all the propaganda lately...

And the US will have 4 aircraft carriers off Iran in a week...

Morsi is due to go to Iran on August 30, I think Bibi wants to kill that alliance/rapprochement before it's too late.

I think this is for real.

Vitch: It looks like the Belgian dude issued his warning on Tuesday: https://twitter.com/pierrepiccinin/statu....

Also, not sure how a "NATO" source would know... the only country I think that might imply would be Turkey....

Brave new world: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/world/....

Quote:

When President Obama announced last month that he was barring a Baghdad bank from any dealings with the American banking system, it was a rare acknowledgment of a delicate problem facing the administration in a country that American troops just left: for months, Iraq has been helping Iran skirt economic sanctions imposed on Tehran because of its nuclear program.

The little-known bank singled out by the United States, the Elaf Islamic Bank, is only part of a network of financial institutions and oil-smuggling operations that, according to current and former American and Iraqi government officials and experts on the Iraqi banking sector, has provided Iran with a crucial flow of dollars at a time when sanctions are squeezing its economy.

...

The accusations of high-level Iraqi government involvement in sanctions-busting have roiled Iraqi politics and invariably reflect on Mr. Maliki, since many Iraqi officials now say that he has taken effective control of the Iraqi central bank, which is nominally independent.

“We want to question the central bank and the banks that are involved,” Ali al-Sachri, a member of Parliament, said in an interview. Mr. Salih acknowledged the huge dollar transfers and said that they threatened the economic stability of Iraq by depleting the country’s foreign reserves. He said that “in order to prevent the economy from collapsing, we should put an end to this illegal flow of dollars outside Iraq.”

...

Several American and Iraqi banking and government officials also say that Iranian organizations have gained effective control over at least four Iraqi commercial banks through Iraqi intermediaries. That gives Iran direct access to the international financial system, supposedly denied to Tehran by the economic sanctions. Even as the United States has moved to tighten the vise against Iran this summer, the Maliki government has openly sought to enhance its already deep economic and political ties with Iran. Trade between Iraq and Iran, which fought a costly war from 1980 to 1988, has been growing rapidly ever since the American-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein, and it is now estimated to be as high as $11 billion a year. Among other openly acknowledged forms of trade, Iraq has contracts to buy large amounts of electrical power from Iran.

Just last week, an Iraqi delegation that includes the deputy prime minister and top officials from the ministries of finance and trade and the central bank met in Tehran with their Iranian counterparts for talks about further increasing economic ties.

An Iraqi government spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, said in a telephone interview that Iraq “is not intending to break any rules,” but added that “we also have good relations with Iran that we do not want to break.”