By Jamal Kanj
This week the 5+1 are back negotiating the easing of economic sanctions against Iran and a new and unprecedented rigid inspection regimen, including daily nuclear reactor checks to verify compliance.
According to US State Department reports, the agreement calls for a six-month “reversible” 10-billion-dollar relief reducing the cost of sanction against Iran from approximately 100bn to $90bn dollars.
Leaked excerpts from the draft accord compel Iran to limit its enrichment to less than 20 per cent (19.75) purity and convert 20 per cent of its stockpile of enriched uranium into fuel rods, “rendering it unusable for the higher level enrichment necessary for nuclear weapons”.
Following the breakthrough, the US undersecretary of state for political affairs flew to Tel Aviv to brief Israeli officials on the impending agreement.
France’s Zionist lobbyists
Fearing an accord with Iran, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu called French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, urging him to delay the signing and giving him an opportunity to leach his US lobbyists to force the US government to back off.
Fabius, the son of a wealthy Jewish art dealer who converted to Catholicism, was a staunch Israeli advocate while serving as French prime minister in 1984-86 during Francois Mitterrand’s administration.
Netanyahu’s lobbying was combined with an 11th hour cajoling from long time Israeli Likud party subordinate Meyer Habib, a member of the French parliament, who warned Fabius that Netanyahu will attack Iran “if you don’t toughen your position”.
Succumbing to the Israeli prime minister’s blackmail, Fabius took the unusual step of using the French-Inter radio to criticize the very draft agreement he helped negotiate.
Mind you, this comes from a leader of the same Socialist party that introduced nuclear weapons to the Middle East in the mid-1950s, sending French engineers to build Israel’s first nuclear reactor. Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion claimed then the project was a colossal pumping station to desalinate seawater.
Israel is run by amoral political leaders who will do and say anything to get what they want. Recent resurfaced reports have revealed that Tzipi Livni – current chief peace negotiator and Israel’s justice minister – secured a rabbinical edict permitting her to “prostitute” during her service with the Israeli Mossad intelligence agency in Europe.
Israel’s real aim
Israel is not interested in verifiable measures to end Iran’s military nuclear ambitions, not even in the physical dismantlement of its nuclear programme. Israel would not stop short of eliminating Iran’s technological know-how, as it did by assassinating Iraqi scientists before and during the American occupation of Iraq.
Discussing the impending agreement with Iran, Israel’s minister of strategic affairs, Yuval Steinitz, declared: “We want an outcome more like Libya…”
Responding indirectly to Israeli concerns, the US secretary of state told NBC’s “Meet the Press” news programme on 17 November: “We are not blind, and I don’t think we are stupid.”
Fooled once, twice shy
It is, however, apparent that Netanyahu believes otherwise. He was caught on video in 2001 telling Israeli settlers: “I know what America is. America is a thing that can be easily moved, moved in the right direction.”
They “moved” America in 2003, persuading it to invade a country in order to destroy its non-existent “weapon of mass destruction”, a war that was paved with the blood of more than 4,000 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, before sending the US economy south.
Fearing a repeat of the Iraq blunder, two prominent policy experts from two different administrations, Democratic Zbigniew Brzezinski and Republican Brent Scowcroft, issued a joint statement early last week urging the US to seize the “historic opportunity… to achieve our non-proliferation goal”.
Brazened by the recent dismantling of Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile, Israel will not rest until it drags the US into another Middle Eastern quagmire.
A version of this article was first published by the Gulf Daily News newspaper. The version here is published by permission of Jamal Kanj.
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