What Happens After Israel Attacks Iran
For all their warnings about a strike on Iran, Israel’s leaders have been remarkably quiet about the longer-term fallout, writes Ehud Eiran in Foreign Policy.
And so there is a gap in Israel’s debate about Iran. Although Israeli experts focus heavily on the immediate implications of the “day after,” they neglect, with a few exceptions, the broader repercussions of an attack. Ironically, then, at the core of the elite, scientific calculations regarding an attack on Iran and its aftermath stands a certain kind of fatalism.
Writing in the National Post, Lawrence Solomon takes a look at Israel’s long-standing tactics for winning regional allies.
This increasingly successful Israeli approach — dubbed the periphery strategy — exploits an arsenal of Israeli assets that its new-found allies need: Israel’s military, its counterterrorism skills, its technology, and especially of late, its surprising wealth of hydrocarbons.
Why Obama Won’t Back a Strike on Iran
The US and Israel agree on the need to stop Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but not how to achieve that goal, writes Andrew Bast for The Daily Beast.
Anyone who tells you where the American public stands on striking Iran is blowing hot air. Polls this month from CNN and The Hill reached exactly opposite conclusions. Obama has built much of his foreign policy record on ending wars in the Middle East. To unleash a new one just months before a national election would, despite the hawkish harangues from his Republican opponents, stink all the way to the ballot boxes on the 6th of November.
Trevor Royle of The Herald of Scotland draws parallels between the Assad regime’s crackdown and the bloody events in Europe two decades ago.
It is not difficult to see why the recent bombardment of Homs is eerily similar to what happened in Sarajevo in 1992. The siege of the Bosnian capital was conducted by the Serb army using artillery, mortars, heavy machine guns and rockets, firing their ordnance into the city from the surrounding hills and killing indiscriminately.
More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.