Wednesday Iran Talking Points

from LobeLog: News and Views Relevant to U.S.-Iran relations for August 11th, 2010:

The Atlantic: Jeffrey Goldberg, in his long awaited cover story, claims that an Israeli unilateral attack on alleged Iranian nuclear facilities is inevitable if the United States and its allies fail to strike first. “I have come to believe that the administration knows it is a near-certainty that Israel will act against Iran soon if nothing or no one else stops the nuclear program; and Obama knows—as his aides, and others in the State and Defense departments made clear to me—that a nuclear-armed Iran is a serious threat to the interests of the United States, which include his dream of a world without nuclear weapons,” writes Goldberg. (I responded to Goldberg’s article yesterday.)

The Washington Note: Steve Clemons offers his thoughts on Jeffrey Goldberg’s prediction that, “the likelihood of Israel unilaterally bombing Iran to curtail a potential nuclear weapon breakout capacity is north of 50-50.” Clemons writes that, “…doubts about the sanity and rationality of Iran’s leadership may be driving Israel’s leaders to abandon pragmatic rationality and serious scrutiny of costs and benefits as well. Is this all real? Or are both sides puffing up, acting like ‘crazy Ivans’, as part of a military strategy that could be bluff, or could be devastatingly severe?”

Foreign Policy: Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett argue that Goldberg’s case for a U.S. attack on Iran is, “even flimsier than the case Goldberg helped make for invading Iraq in 2002.” Normalizing U.S.-Iran and Israel-Iran relations would profoundly benefit Israel and the United States, say the Leveretts.

The Los Angeles Times: Paul Richter and Alexandra Sandels report that Iran told Lebanese officials that it will make up for the potential cutoff of U.S. aid to the Lebanese military. Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA) and Rep. Nita M. Lowey (D-NY) decided to freeze military aid over concerns that such aid might be used against Israel.