Iran pursues diplomacy, Israel threatens military action

Adam Robertson

As the European Union resumes diplomatic talks with Iran, urging the United States to follow suit and stressing that the Iranians are ready for such negotiations, Israel is recommending ways to destroy Tehran’s nuclear installations.

"It is impossible perhaps to destroy the entire nuclear program but it would be possible to damage it in such a way that it would be set back years," Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in an interview with Germany's Focus magazine. "It's technically feasible. It would require 10 days and the launch of a thousand Tomahawk missiles," he said in the interview, due to be published on Monday.

Olmert also said that "nobody could exclude" military action against Iran, echoing a position long held by the U.S., which doesn’t want to negotiate with Tehran unless it suspends its uranium enrichment program, a demand Tehran refuses to meet despite being slapped with two sets of UN sanctions.

Olmert’s suggestion that a rain of missile could degrade Iran’s nuclear program came as the EU’s foreign police Javeir Solana ended two days of talks with Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani. After the talks, which have been described as constructive, Solana demanded Washington to open direct negotiations with Tehran, stressing that Iranian officials are ready for such unconditional talks.

"We have always said we are ready for talks if they have something new to say. We are fully prepared for talks without preconditions to reach a solution," Iran’s Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said earlier this month.

But Olmert’s threat of military action against Tehran could hinder Iran and the EU’s diplomatic efforts.

Iranian authorities, who insist that Tehran’s nuclear plans are strictly peaceful, immediately described Olmert's warning as empty “bravado.”

"If the United States and Israel commit such a mistake, they know better than anybody what the consequences will be for themselves,” said the head of Iran’s parliamentary foreign affairs commission, Alladin Borojerdy, according to the state-run news agency Isna.

Borojerdy added that the head of the UN nuclear watchdog "Muhammad El-Baradei has stated that Iran's nuclear science cannot be destroyed by missile strikes ... because the science is national."

The science indeed could not be destroyed. But Olmert’s recent warning raises fears that Israel and the United States are preparing plans for a military strike against Iran, a move that military experts say could be disastrous for a region already suffering from two U.S.-led initiated wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In a report, the Oxford Research Group suggested last month that pre-emptive air strikes, like those reportedly being considered by the U.S. and Israel, would harden Iranian attitudes and political resistance to outside pressure to stop uranium enrichment. "Armed attacks on Iran would very likely lead to the result they were meant to avoid -- the building of nuclear weapons within a few years,” said the report, backed by the former chief UN weapons inspector in Iraq, Hans Blix.

Another fact usually ignored by supporters of military action against Iran is that many of Tehran’s nuclear facilities are believed to be deep underground, in reinforced bunkers difficult to destroy with conventional weapons. Using thousands of missiles, as suggested by Olmert, could result in a high number of civilian casualties, as a surprise attack would inevitably catch many people unprotected, leading to the deaths of thousands of civilians in another conflict that could still be resolved through diplomacy.