Word: israelism
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Iran's latest missile test may have less to do with advancing its military capability than with getting a last word in on Monday's conversation between President Barack Obama and Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. After all, the weapon whose test-firing was announced Wednesday by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on the election campaign trail does not significantly extend the reach of others already in Iran's arsenal. Instead, it appears to have been a ballistic message, to Iranian voters as well as to the U.S. and its Mideast allies, that Iran isn't about to be intimidated into...
Iran insists its nuclear intentions are confined to generating electricity, but the concern of the U.S. and its allies is that the infrastructure of a civilian nuclear program - particularly uranium enrichment - puts a nuclear weapon within short-term reach should Iran decide to assemble one. (Israel and U.S. believe that Iran has not yet taken such a decision, and to do so it would have to expel the international inspectors that currently monitor its enrichment facility at Natanz. That's because the uranium already enriched there would have to be reprocessed to a far higher degree of enrichment to create...
...military to be likely to cause more problems than they'll solve - at best, they'd simply set back the Iranian program by a few years, at the price of potentially triggering a regional war that could imperil the interests of the U.S. and its allies, including Israel, for years to come. Winning Chinese and Russian support for harsher sanctions remains unlikely absent Iran taking actual steps towards nuclear weaponization, while an economic blockade could prompt a confrontation...
Obama on Monday didn't press Netanyahu to reverse his position on the two-state solution, but the Administration has begun pushing insistently for Israel to freeze settlement activity in the West Bank. That practical step toward the two-state destination will likely be the focus, for now, but the Administration is hoping to persuade Arab states to help by offering Israel fresh gestures of recognition in exchange for doing so. To that end, Obama will meet with Egypt's President, Hosni Mubarak, next week. And when the U.S. President meets Abbas, his focus will be both on relieving Israel...
However, such overtures remain stunted by a deep and familiar mistrust. On Wednesday, Iran reportedly test-fired a new advanced missile with a range of about 1,200 miles, far enough to strike Israel, southeastern Europe and American bases in the Middle East. Obama, for his part, said he was ready to pursue tighter international sanctions...