Meridor: Thanks to sanctions, Iran is not rushing full speed to the bomb
In a wide-ranging interview, Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor talks to David Horowitz of the Times of Israel about Iran, as well as a settlement freeze, the peace process and the future of the peace treaty with Egypt.
“What is the bottom line?” Meridor asks rhetorically. “The sanctions are having an effect. One needs to continue with them and increase and accelerate them.” The firm message has to be, “You Iranians, you’re not going to get there, we are determined,” he says. “If this is the message that they read from the world, America and the rest, and if the price they are paying gets higher and higher every month, there is a chance — no guarantee — that it will have the effect that we want. Is it worth trying? Yes. Not staying as we are, but augmenting, getting more and more [sanctions].”
Colin Powell on the Bush Administration’s Iraq War Mistakes
Newsweek publishes excerpts from the former defense secretary’s new book, in which he looks back on his UN speech, Abu Ghraib and grave missteps made during the war.
When we went in, we had a plan, which the president approved. We would not break up and disband the Iraqi Army. We would use the reconstituted Army with purged leadership to help us secure and maintain order throughout the country. We would dissolve the Baath Party, the ruling political party, but we would not throw every party member out on the street. In Hussein’s day, if you wanted to be a government official, a teacher, cop, or postal worker, you had to belong to the party. We were planning to eliminate top party leaders from positions of authority. But lower-level officials and workers had the education, skills, and training needed to run the country. The plan the president had approved was not implemented.
Creating Syria Safe Zones Is a Dangerous Step Toward War
Writing in Bloomberg, Aaron David Miller outlines the pitfalls of a much-touted plan to stem the violence in Syria.
To have even a chance of [safe zones] working, the right conditions would have to be present. Those would include full Turkish buy- in and an international mandate legitimizing intervention, preferably a resolution of the UN Security Council. Most important would be a sustained military commitment to protect the zones and the corridors leading to them. This would require air patrols and thus the suppression of Syrian air defenses. It would also mean carrying out offensive air strikes against the regime’s forces, if the Syrians respond militarily, and ultimately securing Syria’s stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons to prevent their use against coalition troops.
In an article in the Iranian, Yuval Porat explains the methodology behind an Israeli poll that found overwhelming support for democracy among the Iranian people.
An analysis of the Iranian sample showed that alongside conservative values, such as conformity and tradition, Iranian society is characterized by strong support for pro-liberal values such as a belief in the importance of self-direction and benevolence. For example, 94% of the respondents identified with the sentence “freedom to choose what he does is important to him,” and 71% of the respondents identified with the sentence “being tolerant toward all kinds of people and groups is important to him.”
Jewish Ideas Daily reproduces three short stories for children by Isaac Bashevis Singer that were illustrated by Maurice Sendak.
After the publication of Where the Wild Things Are established Maurice Sendak as a force to be reckoned with in children’s literature, he had the opportunity to illustrate Isaac Bashevis Singer’s first children’s book, Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories. Sendak… cherished the collaboration, which not only garnered a 1967Newbery Honor, but more importantly in his eyes, “finally” earned him his parents’ respect.
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