The week in the Persian Wars

Persian War, the hurdler, by Persian Gulf out of the Chanteur II mare, Warning, born 1964. The story of his brave and arduous life and more pictures are at TVG Community.

So, where were we? On the 21st, Netanyahu and Barak said General Dempsey was "serving Iranian interests" by having the chutzpah to disagree with them. On the 22nd, the IAEA announced that the current round of talks with Iran over weapons inspection had failed after their team was barred from inspecting the military plant at Parchin, where Iranians are suspected of working on trigger explosives for the nuclear weapon. On the 24th, US intelligence repeated what it has been saying since 2007, that there is as yet no evidence that Iran has decided to build one.

There's lots more, but I am more and more of the opinion that what is mainly happening is elections—Iran's first of all (this week!), Israel's likely next, (they don't have to come till 2013, but Netanyahu knows his chances of winning are more likely to get worse than [jump]

More Rough Beast

Photograph by Elisa Rojas C. From LuxLikeVitriol, a collection of poems by Bogdan Ciochinaru.

Yesterday's reports on General Dempsey's warning to the Israeli government on any preemptive attack on Iran may have an echo in the IDF senior officer cohort, according to a new report from the UK Independent:

Almost the entire senior hierarchy of Israel's military and security establishment [jump]

What Rough Beast watch

From F.A. MacKenzie, "The War in the Caucasus"

Last time we ran across General Martin Dempsey of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he was emerging from talks with Israeli leaders in unusually uncommunicative mood, with no communiqués and no chitchat with the hungry waiting press, last 20 January.

Even more remarkable, no leak about what he said to the Israelis has appeared in either U.S. or Israeli news media, indicating that both sides have regarded what Dempsey said as extremely sensitive. 

[jump]

Mossad uncovers a secret

Updated 1/24

This is in the why isn't it breaking category: a story published by Haaretz on January 18 and picked up by Juan Cole a day or two later: it seems that Israeli intelligence services have come up with an estimate, to be published some time this week, that Iran has not yet decided whether to build a nuclear weapon.

That is, it's not news to everybody that Iran has not—so far—decided to build a nuclear weapon. National Intelligence Estimates [jump]