Asia Opinion

By Norman H. Olsen Christian Science Monitor, 28/04/09 Bibi’s policies may be misguided, but at least he doesn’t pretend to be a peacemaker. Such intellectual honesty could prove salutary. ...

With Washington apparently wavering, Olmert took the chance in his closing speech to the Herzliya delegates in late January 2007 to focus on the threat from Iran. He ramped up the rhetoric. ...

Israel’s failure in Lebanon, and the dismal performance of Bush’s Republican party in the mid-term Congressional elections in November 2006, put in doubt the ascendancy of the neocons for the first time. With the Democrats taking decisive control of the...

Iran and Hizbullah had good reason to fear that the assault on Lebanon-and whatever was supposed to follow it-had been planned well in advance. Nasrallah’s deputy, Sheikh Naim Qassem, certainly thought so. He told the an-Nahar daily that two days...

Had Hizbullah been beaten, what would this plan have required next? The answer, it seems, is an attack on Syria, with Israeli air strikes forcing Damascus into submission.105 According to reports in the Arab media during the early stages of...

On 24 May 2006, Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert, was invited to address a joint session of Congress. In his widely publicised speech, he claimed that Iran stood ‘on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons’, a development that would pose...

There was no debate in Israel about which country should be targeted after Iraq; it was taken for granted that Iran should be next. The question was simply one of how to isolate Tehran and neutralise its threat to Israel’s...

Israel classifies Iran as one of those ‘far’ threats-Iraq being another-that distinguish it from the ‘near’ ones: the Palestinians and neighbouring Arab states [Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon]…The closer their [Iraq and Iran’s] weapons of mass destruction programmes come to completion,...

Although the Bush Administration and the neocons had focused their early attention on the supposed threat posed by Iraq, there are strong grounds for suspecting that, though Israel was pleased to see the Iraqi regime overthrown, Iran was regarded as...

Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East By Jonathan Cook Pluto Press, London, 2008 In late January 2007, Israel and America’s political and security establishments descended on an exclusive seaside town just north of...