"...The 'other arena' Netanyahu & Barak are eyeing is the Lebanese arena..."

Via Friday-Lunch-Club

"... Now that the Iranian genie has been squeezed back into the bottle, the senior official continued, noting that in any case the Obama administration has not given its blessing to an Israeli attack in Iran, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be left with the Palestinian nightmare that is teaching Israel a diplomatic lesson, and with U.S. President Barack Obama, who is continuing to pester him with this nonsense called "a permanent status agreement." And the greatest threat of all: Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and opposition leader Kadima MK Tzipi Livni are working to push him into the battlefield where war is being waged between the religious and the secular. If something huge and terrible doesn't happen in some other area, in the next elections the Likud will be depicted as the poodle of Shas and United Torah Judaism.

The other arena Netanyahu and his aide Defense Minister Ehud Barak are eyeing, continued the senior official, is the Lebanese arena. In a few days they will have a battle-hungry chief of staff after their own hearts. Incoming Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Yoav Galant proved in Operation Cast Lead that he is a real man's man .... The risk that an attack on Lebanon will elicit a missile attack on Israel does not deter real men like them, who would have shown the Iranians who the boss is here were it not for the Americans. (And indeed, a senior person in the defense establishment who knows Galant well agrees he is a warhorse chomping at the bit and defines this troika as "a fatal match." )

 

The senior official concluded the conversation with a prediction that this time an attack on Hezbollah will not end without a war with Syria. The way Damascus has been behaving since the start of the investigation of the assassination and up until the dissolution of the Lebanese government on the eve of the filing of the indictments shows the close connections between the Alawite minority regime and Shi'ite organization...."

Posted by G, Z, or B at 9:19 PM

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