US Vice President Joe Biden when he met Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu Monday night, Jan. 13, refused to level with him on the detailed agreements which the Americans claimed were reached by the six powers and Iran in their talks earlier this week on the implementation of their first-stage Geneva accord.
This is reported by DEBKAfile’s Washington and Jerusalem sources. It was the first time US President Barack Obama personally vetoed a briefing to Israel on the content of the international nuclear negotiations he instigated – notwithstanding his private and public pledges to Netanyahu of “full transparency.”
This secretiveness has stirred concern and mistrust in Jerusalem on two grounds:
1. It denotes a sharp decline in the strategic relations between the Obama administration and the Netanyahu government and leaves Israel in the dark on an issue of vital concern to its security.
2. It is suspected that there is no implementation agreement at all and that the US President, Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov are repeating the performance they put on three months ago in Geneva. Then, they presented a very general framework of non-binding clauses reached between the six powers and Iran as a genuine, full-fledged, interim accord, when in reality it omitted the details on how and when Iran would dismantle the military side of its nuclear program, and inter alia neglected to address the critical issue of Iran’s nuclear-capable ballistic missiles.
Tehran itself has contradicted these assertions as “misleading,” referring specifically to the White House statement of Jan. 12 which said: “From Jan. 20, Iran will for the first time start eliminating its stockpile of higher level enriched uranium and dismantling some of the infrastructure that makes such enrichment possible.”
Three days later, on Tuesday, Jan 15. Iran’s lead negotiator, Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Aragchi, went on national television with a less than polite denial: “…different interpretations come out of a single document and that is natural,” he said. “But we had better try to have common interpretations, and that is why during the talks we paused a couple of times and continued with the participation of the higher levels.”
Homing in on the White House term “dismantling,” Aragchi countered: “We are aware of Mr. Obama’s problems in Congress, but ‘dismantling’ abuses the word after the recent deal.”
In the light of the conflicting versions coming out the White House and Tehran – and Joe Biden’s refusal to level with Netanyahu on the latest rounds of nuclear talks – Israel is left wondering what in fact US-led international nuclear diplomacy has achieved in the way of curbing Iran’s progress toward a bomb – if anything.
The coming DEBKA Weekly out next Friday, Jan. 17, will offer some pointed answers to those questions. We will also show how President Obama’s policies have opened the door for a major Iranian political offensive in the Middle East, which gives Tehran free rein to meddle profoundly in the affairs of Iraq and Lebanon in addition to Syria.
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The deception way or the highway!
IL will find a solution out of necessity.
Diversifying partnerships is more vital than ever.
ArnoldHarris Said:
Problems:
Israel has no real red lines
Israel no longer has the conventional ability to stop the Iranian project.
It’s inconceivable that Israel would nuke Iran to stop the project. Which may by now be the only way.
America may do all in it’s power to prevent and thwart an Israeli attack.
There may be secret installations we don’t know about.
There is a probability that Iran already has several nukes along with delivery systems.
Israel must balance any attack with possible blow-backPossible massive missile attacks on Israel from Hezboll afterwards both from Iran and other world powers like America, Russia, EU and China.
Potential missile attacks from Hezbollah and Hamas.
The potential loss of much of our air-force
The cost to Israel in economic terms could be as devastating as an actual Nuke attack by Iran and if Israel can not be assured of near 100% success the balance sheet might be too negative even to consider realistically such an attack.
In the end Iran will retain their intellectual property and as such could reconstitute in short order any damage to their program provided they have the funds to reinvest. Since their economy is oil and gas export based I would destroy to the extent possible their oil and gas fields, their rocket bases and military industrial production facilities, the Iranian navy and all retaliatory military capabilities. Dirty bomb as many key nuke sites as possible.
After the Attack Israel should unveil her Nuke capabilities and warn they will be used as needed against Iran or any future adversary giving automatic trigger targets.
If the government, the military, and the secret services of the State of Israel destroy Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities as soon as they have ascertained that the Iranian government has crossed the deadline for this previously announced by Netanyahu on repeated occasions, then there is no need to worry about secret agreements that Blacksnake may or may not have made with the Iranians.
And if you neglect to do that, than the day will come that the Iranians will mount a nuclear attack against Israel.
Any Jew who believes so much as a word of what Blacksnake and Kerry have to say about all this are not worth the trouble of discussing this with. They routinely lie to the people of the USA, so you can assume they have no ethics-based problem with lying to the Jews, whom they hold in contempt in any case.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Is there corroboration for this report?