TTop Israeli Official Dismisses Concerns About Iranian Response To Military Attack
August 8, 2013
By Ben Armbruster
A senior Israeli security official this week dismissed concerns about an Iranian military response to a potential Israeli military strike on the Islamic Republic’s nuclear facilities, claiming that Israel would be able to withstand any counterattack.
Experts and some American lawmakers have said in recent weeks that the U.S. and its partners should hold off on piling more sanctions on Iran over its nuclear program and to reignite a diplomatic push to solve the stand off in the wake of the election of the relatively moderate Hassan Rouhani as the country’s new president.
But hawks in the U.S. and in Israel are calling for more pressure and increased sanctions anyway, arguing, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did during a meeting Wednesday with an American congressional delegation, that Rouhani is “a wolf in sheep’s clothing” who just “wants to talk and talk and talk” while Iran enriches uranium (Rouhani, for his part, said this week that he is “seriously determined” to solve the nuclear dispute).
While U.S. officials believe Iran has not made the decision to build a nuclear weapon, Netanyahu claimed during Wednesday’s meeting that “Iran’s work and quest towards the achievement of atomic weapons not only continues, it continues unabated — it’s actually accelerated.”
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