Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel was hardly out of Israel’s door Tuesday, April 23, when a spate of awkward data came spilling out in Tel Aviv.
Iran has crossed the last red line Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu laid down before the UN Assembly last September, said the well-informed former military intelligence chief Amos Yadlin. None of the measures for halting Iran’s race for a nuclear bomb have worked, he said. For a while, Tehran was impressed by the Israeli prime minister’s warning, but then went back to uranium enrichment at top speed. By now, Iran has certainly gone past the limit set by Netanyahu.
Likud lawmaker Tzahi Hanegbi said Israel has no more than a month or two for stopping a nuclear Iran.
Ron Dermer, a senior Netanyahu adviser and Israel’s next ambassador to Washington, told a group of American Jewish leaders Sunday that the time for action against Iran’s capacity to build a bomb – which he termed an existential threat to Israel – must be counted in months.
Piling on the gloom, Brig. Gen Itay Brun reported that the Syrian army had started using chemical weapons against rebel forces, including Sarin and other paralyzing substances, without the world lifting a finger to stop it.
All the red lines had suddenly been knocked over by Iran’s rapid progress toward a nuclear weapon and by Bashar Assad who, backed by Tehran, mocked US President Barack Obama’s warning just a month ago that “proof of chemical weapons use would be a game changer.”
