JERUSALEM (AP) — Officials are quietly conceding that new international sanctions targeting Iran's suspect nuclear program, while welcome, are further constraining Israel's ability to take military action — just as a window of opportunity is closing because Tehran is moving more of its installations underground.

The officials say that Israel must act by the summer if it wants to effectively attack Iran's program.

A key question in the debate is how much damage Israel, or anyone else, can inflict, and whether it would be worth the risk of a possible counterstrike.

Israel has been a leading voice in the international calls to curb Iran's nuclear program. Like the West, it believes the Iranians are moving toward nuclear weapons capability — a charge Tehran denies.

Almost the entire senior hierarchy of Israel's military and security establishment is worried about a premature attack on Iran and apprehensive about the possible repercussions, a former chief of the country's defence forces told The Independent yesterday.

Lt-Gen Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, who is close to Defence Minister Ehud Barak, said there had been little analysis of what happens the "day after" when the Tehran regime and its paramilitary allies retaliate. He warned that an assault may lead to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad benefiting from popular anger against foreign aggression.

General Lipkin-Shahak stressed that Iran with a nuclear arsenal would be a hugely destabilising factor in the region. But, he said: "It is quite clear that much if not all of the IDF [Israeli Defence Forces] leadership do not support military action at this point."

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/israels-military-leaders-warn-against-iran-attack-6298102.html

US President Barack Obama has said he does not think Israel has made a decision on whether to launch a pre-emptive strike on Iran's nuclear installations, a threat that has rattled the region.

Obama, seeking to reassure Americans over the alleged danger posed by Tehran's nuclear programme, said Washington was working "in lockstep" with Israel to bring Iran to heel.

"I don't think Israel has made a decision" to strike Iranian facilities, Obama said in a pre-Super Bowl interview with NBC on Sunday.

When asked if Washington would be consulted first should Israel move ahead with those plans, he said he could not go into specifics but added that the two allies had "closer intelligence and military consultations" than ever before.

"My number one priority continues to be the security of the United States. But also, the security of Israel. And we're going to make sure that we work in lockstep, as we proceed to try to solve this - hopefully diplomatically."

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/americas/2012/02/201225222448276649.html

From Robert Fisk...

...

As long as Syria can trade with Iraq, it can trade with Iran and, of course, it can trade with Lebanon. The Shia of Iran and the Shia majority in Iraq and the Shia leadership (though not majority) in Syria and the Shia (the largest community, but not a majority) in Lebanon will be on Assad's side, however reluctantly. That, I'm afraid, is the way the cookie crumbles. Crazed Gaddafi had real enemies with firepower and Nato. Assad's enemies have Kalashnikovs and no Nato.

Assad has Damascus and Aleppo, and those cities matter. His principal military units have not defected to the opposition.

The "good guys" also contain "bad guys" – a fact we forgot in Libya, even when the "good guys" murdered their defected army commander and tortured prisoners to death. Oh yes, and the Royal Navy was able to put into Benghazi. It cannot put into Tartous because the Russian Navy is still there.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-from-washington-this-looks-like-syrias-benghazi-moment-but-not-from-here-6612093.html

Iran is threatening to sue Google for removing the name of the body of water to the country's south from its online map.

Iran has always called the waterway the Persian Gulf, but neighbouring Arab countries call it the Arabian Gulf, or even just the Gulf.

Recently Google removed the name altogether from its online map.

Iran says it will lodge a complaint or could even sue Google if it does not "correct its mistake".

Iran's foreign ministry says historical evidence shows the water has always been Persian, and that Google's action is part of a foreign plot against Iran.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-05-18/iran-threatens-to-sue-google/4018678

Remember Burma and Myanmar? I think it's Myanmar again... You know what I mean... The US refused to call it Myanmar... Who knows, there is still a bit of confusion in the CIA ranks... Anyway since I was not even born, I remember the name of that gulf: the Persian Gulf...

Map of the region 1831... Persian Gulf is the Persian Gulf...

Robert Fisk would have been amused, if unsurprised, by the plethora of reactions, from the adulatory to the sharply critical, prompted by the news of his death, at the age of 74. As a journalist, commentator and author, in a five-decade career that focused overwhelmingly on the Middle East, Fisk expressed strong views about who was responsible for the region’s agonies, and provoked equally strong responses.

Even a partial list of his postings and assignments reads like the battle roll of the post-colonial wars he despised: post-revolution Lisbon, Belfast, Tehran, Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad, Algiers, Kabul, Sarajevo.

He was a vigorous opponent of the new-fangled concept of “embedded journalism”. Latterly, however, his own embedded reports on the continuing civil war in Syria, which tended to absolve the Assad regime of some of the worst crimes credited to it, provoked a backlash, even among his anti-imperialist acolytes.

The last three of Fisk’s journalistic decades, from 1989 onwards, were spent at the Independent, where he rapidly reinforced his reputation as one of Britain’s best-known foreign correspondents. He had by then won plaudits as a serious historian for his book In Time of War (1983), on the origins and consequences of Irish neutrality in the second world war. It was the subject of a thesis that had earned him a doctorate at Trinity College Dublin. Fisk had been posted to Northern Ireland in 1972 by the Times at the height of the Troubles, and would later take Irish citizenship.

The Irish book was followed by Pity the Nation (1990), a history of Lebanon at war. Cynical colleagues, and subeditors often exasperated by his voluminous prose, greeted the publication of the 700-page tome by dubbing it Pity the Reader.

Fisk’s reputation was well-established by late 1993, when he scored the first of three exclusive interviews with Osama bin Laden. It was an example of his dogged journalistic determination to get to the root of a story, even in those pre-9/11 days when an interview with the head of al-Qaida was not top of most foreign editors’ wishlists.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/nov/03/robert-fisk-obituary

Read from top.

Vale Robert... 

Sad news for all of us. We're lucky that Thierry Meyssan has come along parallel lines about the Middle East with the Voltaire Network. These days, views like those of Robert Fisk are not welcome on the Main Stream Media. Condolences to his family.

Note that this article by the Guardian is a disgrace.