Iran’s Ali Khamenei closed the door on the direct nuclear talks offered by Vice President Joe Biden, arguing, Thursday, Feb. 7, that they “would solve nothing” because, "You are holding a gun against Iran.” debkafile: He was reacting both to the new sanctions the US imposed Wednesday and to President Barack Obama’s forthcoming visit to Israel to confer with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Iran and Syria. The US has cancelled the departure of a second aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf due to budget cutbacks.

Moscow has answered the US Patriots in Turkey with the top-line Eskandar missiles for Syria for which the West has no answer. This compounded the bad news coming from Pyongyang of North Korea’s first successful long-range three-stage missile test. To neither does Obama seem to have an answer.

The US is piling up military strength in the Persian Gulf against potential Iranian attempts to block the Gulf of Hormuz, or otherwise retaliate for the European oil embargo in force since July 1. As the Revolutionary Guards staged a missile exercise against “enemy air bases,” more than 40,000 US troops were massed on two strategic islands facing Iran. The drums of war came with curtains on nuclear diplomacy. Iran and six world powers met for the last time in Istanbul Tuesday. Oil topped $100 for the first time in three weeks.

Tehran can afford to brush off diplomatic efforts to rein in its nuclear program for two reasons: 1) It is so far advanced that unless stopped, Iran will by December have enough enriched uranium for seven or eight nuclear bombs as well as complete dirty bombs, and 2) It ...

Israel’s Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak have decided to stand back for Barack Obama to put his interim deal with Iran to the test, debkafile’s sources report. They are going along with it despite reservations after receiving assurances from the White House that Iranian violations would result in the immediate termination of negotiations and bring military action forward as the sole remaining option for stopping a nuclear Iran. Saturday, debkafile exclusively revealed the eight-point interim deal the US put before Iran.

Israel’s Defense Minister Ehud Barak warned Thursday 17, that a nuclear Iran would change the whole Middle East landscape and “we must do something to block” what he called “a catastrophe.” The impending agreement would permit Iran “to deceive the world” and continuing building a nuclear bomb. Western diplomatic sources disclose that Iran has moved this process forward by starting in mid-negotiations to instal new centrifuge cascades at Fordo to double or triple near-weapons grade enriched uranium production.

Iran has transferred nuclear weapon-making installations to secret Dasht e-Kavir (Great Salt Desert) sites, including nuclear-capable ballistic missile plants, debkafile reports. This prompted Israel’s Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s prediction that Iran is on the way to a capability for building a nuclear bomb in 60 days. To keep the desert installations out of sight, Tehran is bidding to stop IAEA inspections altogether after Parchin. Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak are fighting to keep Israel’s military option on the table against political rivals at home.

 

Israel is fed up with being kept in the dark, doesn’t trust American diplomatic maneuvers to stop a nuclear Iran and is getting ready to make its own decisions after the May 23 Baghdad talks between the P5-1 and Iran. That is the message coming from Binyamin ...

The rift over Iran between US President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu burst into the open Monday, April 16 when high-ranking Israeli officials close to Netanyahu directly accused the president of reneging on the US-Israeli understandings reached ahead of the Istanbul talks on April 14 between the six powers and Iran. The show biz in Istanbul and Baghdad on May 23, they charged, screened the real nuclear business the US and Iran were contracting in secret contacts through Paris and Vienna.

The only real action at the resumed nuclear negotiations between Iran and the six world powers in Istanbul Saturday, April 14, was played out on the sidelines. The Obama administration’s intense effort to put relations with Tehran on a new, more amicable footing was thrown back in its face by the head of the Iranian delegation, Saeed Jalili, who spurned an invitation from senior US delegate, Under Secretary for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman, to a bilateral meeting - after a humiliating runaround.