Ottolenghi on Iran
Washington-based analyst Dr Emanuele Ottolenghi is visiting Australia and New Zealand briefing communities on the current situation with Iran.
Dr Emanuele Ottolenghi Allpix: Jack Hochfeld/JWire
Speaking to an audience of AIJAC and UIA supporters, the Italian-born Dr Ottolenghi countered the assumption underlying the question of whether a war with Iran can be avoided, observing that a war between Iran and Israel has, in fact, been ongoing since the Islamic Revolution in 1979. This has never reached the level of full-scale combat, however Israel and Iran have been fighting each other using clandestine warfare — such as Iran’s sponsorship of the Hezbollah and Hamas terror campaigns against Israel, as well as Israel’s covert sabotage of Iran’s nuclear program. As Dr
Barry Smorgon and Alex Linden
Ottolenghi noted, the question is not if a war can empirically be prevented, but whether a dramatic escalation can be prevented — i.e. whether we can avoid seeing Israel and Iran in direct armed conflict with each other.
Regarding Iran’s nuclear program, Dr Ottolenghi expressed support for the new tough sanctions regime and hope that these sanctions will succeed in preventing Iran from taking the final steps required to achieve nuclear weapons. He noted that unless the cost of going forward is particularly high for Iran, it is unlikely that the regime will abandon its weapons program, given how far it has already come. For this reason, he argued that the military option needed to be firmly on the table, in order to increase Iran’s perceived costs and thereby the likelihood that Iran would make meaningful concessions, hopefully making an actual military strike unnecessary.
Dr Ottolenghi’s visited Australia as a guest of the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council.
Given the long history of sanctions busting by Iran and previously by Iraq, anyone who believes that sanctions will stop the mullahcracy from bomb (and don’t forget missile) building is delusional. The Tehran tyrrants have adopted the “guns before butter” battle cry to “bombs before butter”. Typical of the brutes who hold sway in that region, they care as little for their people’s lives as they care for the lives of enemies. For the Shi’ites the triumph of their brand of Islam trumps everything and that entails exporting their revolution and returning to the past glory of Persia. Rational expectation are grounded in the arrogance of believing that all people are like ourselves. The messianic Shi’i who believe that the 12th imam will reappear are only too happy to have a conflagration to hasten the end of days. Anyone who thinks that rational dialogue can be pursued with a nation led by Ahmadinejad who went to a well and yelled down that it is now safe to come up to the 5(!!!) year old imam hidden there 13 centuries ago, is as crazy as the Iranian president. Open warfare cannot be avoided against people whose ideology is conquest by any means and thereby the “proof” of the superiority of their faith.
Obviously this is a minuscule view of Ottolenghi’s presentation. It is, however, very, very contradictory and hyperbolic, to put it in a minuscule way.