The Lekarev Report
In his visit yesterday to French President Nicolas Sarkozy and today to British premier Gordon Brown, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is delivering a warning; i.e., that Iran has already crossed the 'red line' in their development of a nuclear bomb. This follows his delivery of the same message to Russian president Vladimir Putin last week at the same time that Israel's defense minister Ehud Barak presented the updated intelligence on the advances Iran has made towards its goal of a nuclear weapon to American officials in Washington, including President Bush.
Olmert will be telling Sarkozy and Brown that the moment for diplomacy or even tough sanctions has passed. Now Iran must be stopped from going all the way to its goal by direct, military action.
There have been several hard-hitting statements in recent days that this view is not just Israel's. Sunday, Oct. 21, US vice president Cheney said: "Our country, and the entire international community, cannot stand by as a terror-supporting state fulfills its grandest ambitions.''
This past Friday, the incoming Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen said US forces are capable of operations against Iran's nuclear facilities or other targets. At his first news conference, he said: "I don't think we're stretched in that regard."
Olmert's sudden trip to Moscow last Thursday was prompted by intelligence on the hard words exchanged between Putin and Iran's supreme ruler Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Tehran Tuesday, Oct. 16. According to DEBKAfile's sources, the Russian leader warned the ayatollah that the latest development in Iran's nuclear program prevented him from protecting Tehran from international penalties any longer; the clerical regime's options were now reduced, he said, to halting its clandestine nuclear activities or else facing tough sanctions, or even military action. Putin's confrontation with the Ayatollah was diametrically opposite to his public statement that he had no knowledge of Iranian aspirations of a nuclear weapon.
Intelligence sources in Iran and Moscow report that Putin's stern warning to Khameni prompted him to brush off threats made by senior nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani Saturday, Oct. 20 and the Revolutionary Guards General Mahmoud Chaharbaghi. The two stated that Iran was ready to fire 11,000 rockets and mortars at enemy targets the minute after Iran comes under attack. The same sources say that to do so, Iran would have to recruit assistance from Syria, Hizballah, Hamas and pro-Tehran militias in Iraq; they couldn't do it alone.
DEBKAfile's US military sources said previously that if, as widely reported, Syria is in the process of building a small reactor capable of producing plutonium, Iran must certainly have acquired one of these reactors before Syria, and would then be in a more advanced stage of plutonium production at a secret underground location.
Source:The Lekarev Report
