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A Very Real Threat: Iran

[Guardian-UK] Jonathan Freedland - The notion of military action to prevent a nuclear Iran is under serious consideration in the White House - with Bush apparently leaning towards Dick Cheney's view that it may be necessary to use force before they leave office in January 2009. The flock of U.S. presidential candidates are all at pains not to rule out military action and so, strikingly, was David Miliband in his first interview as British foreign secretary. Nowhere is the Iranian peril assessed more closely than in Israel, which would, after all, be target number one for any Iranian bomb. The way Israel sees it, the combination of a nuclear bomb and an ideology that yearns for a world without the Jewish state adds up to the threat of annihilation. Several voices in Israel's military and political establishment speak of pursuing diplomacy and precisely targeted sanctions to the very end. They reckon that if the Iranian elite is denied international financial credit and the refined oil on which they rely, the regime could begin to crack under the strain. "Iran is not North Korea," one Israeli insider argued - there is a civil society and an elite which might pressure the leadership to drop the nuclear dream if it proved too costly.
2007-07-20 01:00:00
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