Word: nies
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Bush and Cheney. Even when the President does get behind an initiative, as he did with the recent Annapolis conference to restart the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, there is an ad hoc, unprepared quality to the effort - a transparent, last-minute rush to cobble together a legacy. What the NIE makes plain is that diplomacy, combined with the threat of international sanctions, has much greater potential when applied to the Iranians than it has ever had in solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. To be sure, dealing with the Iranians isn't easy. In 2000, President Bill Clinton tried to stage...
...NIE represented another promising opportunity missed. Imagine if the President had said, "This report means we don't want war. We want to talk, and everything - including lifting of the economic sanctions and our acknowledgment that you are a major regional power - is on the table so long as you put everything on the table too. That means not only your uranium-enrichment program but also your support for terrorist organizations." How could Iran have said no to that...
...Ephraim Halevy, ex-chief of Mossad and now an academic, tells TIME that what hasn't changed, is that the view - reiterated in the NIE - that Iran is "capable of producing a nuclear weapon." He adds, "You put that together with Iran's devious ways and evasive tactics with the U.N. atomic inspectors, and you have a very real threat." Dr. Ephraim Kam, Deputy Director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, concurs. "Even if it's true that Iran has shut down its military nuclear program, it can start it up at any time...
...Israeli intelligence officials plan to ask Washington for clarifications about the NIE report. "It has many inner contradictions," says one cabinet official involved in intelligence matters. Israeli officials don't want to disagree too openly or publicly with the Americans, but they also don't want world opinion to dismiss the threat of Iran's becoming a nuclear power. Foreign Minister Livni has instructed Israeli embassies to maintain a focus on the menace that she says Iran poses to Israel and the West...
...other U.S. officials acknowledge that the reversal in the NIE on Iran makes the challenge of selling the European piece of the U.S. missile shield, which expands on already existing missile-defense sites in Alaska and California, even tougher. The threat of the "mullahs' nukes" has been the mainstay of the case made by U.S. officials to justify the European missile-defense deployment. "Iran is pursuing the technology that could be used to produce nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles of increasing range that could deliver them," President Bush told a military audience October 23. "Today we have...